# CognitiveBiasOntology - Report

A cognitive bias is, by definition, a "systematic and universally occurring tendencies, inclinations, or dispositions that skew or distort information processes in ways that make their outcome inaccurate, suboptimal or simply wrong." (Korteling and Toet, 2020).

This project's aim was to develop an ontology to semantically represent some of the different varieties and forms that a cognitive bias can present itself as. We based our view of these biases on the Cognitive Bias Codex, a handy visualization of the 188 cognitive biases listed by [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases).

![The cognitive bias codex, courtesy of John Manoogian III](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg)

Out of the 20 clusters of biases in the codex, each describing a specific category in which the biases act, we focused our efforts in describing two of these, serving as the base of the ontology developed as a result of the project. The chosen clusters are:

#### Bizarre, funny, visually striking, or anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things.

* Bizarreness effect
* Humor effect
* Von Restorff effect
* Picture superiority effect
* Self-relevance effect
* Negativity bias

#### We notice when something has changed.

* Anchoring
* Conservatism
* Contrast effect
* Distinction effect
* Focusing effect
* Framing effect
* Money illusion
* Weber-Fechner law

Find a development report of the project [here](https://evan-docs.gitbook.io/kre-final-project-report-documentation/).

The present ontology is the result of the 2023 Knowledge Representation and Extraction course held by professor Aldo Gangemi at the University of Bologna.
