‘Good' Biases: Does doxastic irrationality benefit both individuals and groups?

We ask whether reasoning strategies leading to doxastic irrationality that have benefits for individual agents are also beneficial to groups of agents. We consider the overconfidence bias, the intergroup bias, and the optimism bias. In these three cases, the biases are said to contribute to the agents subjective wellbeing or good functioning, to the fulfilment of their goals, and to the quality of their interpersonal interactions. But it is unclear what effects such biases have on the agents’ social group and on society at large. The question about social benefits is often neglected in the literature because research in this area is characterised by methodological individualism. We hope that our analysis will serve to bring the social dimension of cognition to the fore, and contribute to a better understanding of when, how, and to what extent doxastic irrationality pays off.