Cognitive vulnerabilities of the practitioner-analyst

The reasons for failures and failures in applied analytics have their own scientific name - cognitive vulnerabilities of the practice-analyst.

Moreover, we are not referring here to cases of fundamental inferiority of thought, incapabilities to applied analysis and science, cognitive deficit, or lack of training in applied analysis. This paper is about the failures of analytic practitioners at the already serious level.

There are no perfect practitioners-analysts, everyone makes mistakes and gets into difficult ambiguous situations (at least once in his life), all the more in conditions of acutely intensive and chronic work overload. And it is absolutely necessary for a practitioner-analyst to know and understand such situations.

The actualization and implementation ("shooting out", triggering) of cognitive vulnerabilities produces an essential part of the total volume of applied analytics defects (French - "défauts dans l'analytique"; English - "analytics defects"), which, in their turn, like a snowball generates defects in state management and public policy, military management, intelligence communities, business processes, etc.

Vulnerability in information security is generally understood as a weakness or a defect in the system that can create conditions for hasty attack from the outside and [unauthorized] disclosure or loss of information; in fact, it is a hole in the organization protection, some vulnerabilities are called exploits [2, p. 264].

Vulnerability in applied analytics is the presence of weaknesses ("gaps in defense", "holes in logic", etc.), its susceptibility to defects, dysfunctions, failures, negative trends in it (represented by the practice-analyst and the process he builds).

According to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), cognitive vulnerabilities can be managed, they can be operated (providing them as the basis for information-psychological special operations, including the enemy disinformation operations), "inoculations" and "antidotes" can be developed and used against the enemy manipulating the cognitive vulnerabilities [3].

Cognitive vulnerabilities (in the established understanding) are exposures and/or tendencies to defects in thinking: significant cognitive distortions, erroneous beliefs, cognitive biases (biases), or stereotyped patterns of thinking that create the basis for a person's predisposition to cognitive failures and lead to distortions and dysfunctions of thought processes.

Ignoring the problem of cognitive vulnerabilities in applied analytics and applying simplistic schematizations in understanding and interpreting such vulnerabilities, in developing solutions to mitigate this problem (atténuation des biais de cognitive vulnerabilities and cognitive distortions; franc. - "atténuation des biais cognitifs"; English - "cognitive bias mitigation") - all this entails defects in organization and realization of professional training and professional development in applied analytics, defects in organization of applied analytical works. A full-fledged theory of deviantology of applied analytics is needed. But first of all it is necessary to formulate, to build necessary taxonomies.

Among the sources (forms) of thinking defects and corresponding cognitive vulnerabilities, the following are distinguished (the list is not exhaustive, it is not strictly classified or ranged, it is simply enumerated):

• HARKing (a term introduced by Norbert Kerr [4]) - a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily present unexpected results as if they had been predicted, and to "post hoc" working hypotheses and present them as allegedly a priori;
• heuristic "take-the-best heuristic" trap; heuristics are from the Greek εὑἀἀἀἀἀἀἀἀἀἀ. Greek εὑρίσκω - "seeking out", "discovering", i.e. a thinking device capable of generating errors) is a cognitive distortion determined by unreasonable use of a simplified decision-making method in the presence of alternative options, realized by selecting the option on the basis of one parameter ("signal"), subjectively unreasonably and disproportionately perceived as more preferable, ignoring other parameters, subjectively arbitrarily perceived as less preferable (less desirable);
• availability heuristic - a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily evaluate as more likely that which is easier to understand and better remember, to the exclusion of other viable alternatives;
• representativeness heuristic trap - cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily assign (classify) something to a class based on only a few attributes, without taking into account the weighting characteristics of these attributes;
• heuristic survivorship bias trap - a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily focus on objects that have "survived" some markedly negative process, ignoring those objects that have not "survived" it, due to their inaccessibility ("invisibility")
• player's bias (the "sunk cost" or "retrospective cost" trap) is a cognitive distortion determined by excessive and unreasonable influence of taking into account the costs already incurred (made) previously in this area (but no longer relevant to future decisions), on designing and making future decisions involving new expenditures
• confirmation bias is a cognitive distortion caused by the tendency to arbitrarily preferentially employ (in seeking and interpreting data and decisions) in ways that confirm or support prior subjective biases or value orientations, and biased analytic search and selection and selective presentation of "useful" results that support the biases, while ignoring those that do not;
• anchoring bias is a cognitive distortion caused by the tendency to arbitrarily exaggerate the importance of previously perceived quantitative and/or qualitative data (as a particular reference point or "anchor"), even if it does not relate to the value being assessed, to the detriment of objectivity in perceiving the values being assessed;
• salience bias - a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily focus on the elements that are visually more salient, ignoring those that are unremarkable;
• sampling bias (or selection bias) is a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily select elements of a statistical sample that are not entirely random and, as a consequence, to operate on unrepresentative samples;
• hindsight bias - cognitive distortion caused by the tendency to arbitrarily exaggerate your previous decisions as more effective than they really were;
• illusion of control" effect - cognitive distortion determined by inclinations to arbitrarily, illusorily exaggerate one's abilities and opportunities to really control processes, chains of events, actors, cause-and-effect and other relations, to exert significant influence on them;
• frequency illusion effect - cognitive distortion determined by selective visual "picking out" (noticing) each instance of an object (or similar case) with an arbitrary illusory formation of an opinion about the high frequency of its occurrence;
• the "well-travelled road effect" - cognitive distortion determined by inclinations to estimate incorrectly the duration and difficulty/ease of going through less familiar routes (algorithms), a priori rejecting them in favor of going through habitual, known routes (algorithms), erroneously exaggerating their ease, efficiency and low cost
• the bandwagon effect is a cognitive distortion determined by tendencies to sub-missionally follow the dominant group opinion, dominant models of behavior, or "fashion". in opinion on a range of issues;
• framing effects - cognitive distortion determined by unreasonable exaggeration of the importance of the form of data presentation for their perception;
• halo effect - cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily ascribe spurious (unverified) abilities to a person on the basis of only observable other abilities;
• attributional bias (also known as attribution defect or fundamental attribution error) is a cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily overemphasize personal explanations of human behavior, while underestimating the significance of situational influences on that behavior;
• false dilemma effect (otherwise known as "false dichotomy", "false binary") - cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to arbitrarily falsely limit the number of available options, unreasonably simplifying choices by excluding viable alternatives and building inferences on the resulting false assumptions.
• The effect of overgeneralizing (overgeneralizing);
• anthropomorphism, anthropoformization - cognitive distortion determined by the tendency to characterize animals, man-made or natural objects or abstract concepts as having human traits, emotions and intentions, to humanize them in an arbitrary, illusory way;
• irrational escalation (irrational escalation of commitment) - cognitive distortion, determined by irrational refusal to reconsider the course (the given trace of actions, the realized algorithm of actions) and aspiration to go further according to the previous decisions and actions in the presence of evident data about defects of such decisions and actions, and about negative consequences of continuation of their realization;
• cognitive dissonance - cognitive distortion, determined by disbalance and failure of thinking due to the cognitively insurmountable (or difficult-to-resolve) conflict (mismatch) of the perceived picture (what happened or what is happening) with expectations, habitual assumptions and attitudes
• cognitive splitting (also called "all-or-nothing thinking", "black-and-white thinking", "polarized thinking"; English. - "splitting", "black-and-white thinking", "thinking in extremes", "all-or-nothing thinking") - cognitive distortion, determined by tendencies to think only extremes (predominantly only extremes), as a consequence - cognitive inability to integrate the dichotomy of different opposite qualities into a holistic realistic one;
• apophenia - cognitive distortion determined by tendencies to contrivedly see patterns and connections in random and unrelated data, including: - illusory correlation - cognitive distortion determined by propensities to arbitrarily, contrivedly make connections between, in reality, unrelated data, processes, subjects, objects, to build contrived cause-and-effect relationships and other correlations; - illusory clustering. - "illusory clustering" - cognitive distortion, determined by the tendency to arbitrarily, contrivedly exaggerate the importance of small series or clusters in large samples of random data.

It should be noted that the depth of cognitive vulnerability classification by level (degree of detail) may vary (including being very high) depending on the task at hand, but there may always be an unmarked position or even a group of positions of such cognitive vulnerabilities. In this case, we did not face the task of fully cataloguing them. Therefore, we are not talking about any exhaustive completeness of the above list. It was necessary to mark only the most significant cognitive vulnerabilities (inclinations, susceptibilities to defects in applied analytics), which give an aggregate significant contribution of the number and variety of defects to their total volume in applied analytics.

An essential feature of cognitive vulnerabilities is their resilience, rigidity to their elimination. Many of them are very difficult to "weed out" from an already practicing analyst by retraining him or her from flawed approaches and practices.

• Source: vvesti.com/obshchestvo/skola-prikladnoj-analitiki-kognitivnye-uazvimosti-praktika-analitika
• Via www.deepl.com/translator