On the epistemic costs of implicit bias

The Central Intelligence Agency’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Heuer 1999) provides concise and practical summaries of recent work in cognitive psychology using real-world examples intended to help CIA agents perform their daily activities more effectively. Its 12th chapter—‘‘Biases in Estimating Probabilities’’—describes a number of widely-discussed findings from the heuristics and biases tradition. The chapter points out that among the errors that a well-trained CIA agent should aim to avoid are mistakes arising from what is commonly referred to as the ‘‘base-rate fallacy.’’ Here is an example: