How cognitive biases can distort environmental statistics: introducing the rough estimation task

The purpose of this study was to develop a novel behavioural method to explore cognitive biases. The task, called the Rough Estimation Task, simply involves presenting participants with a list of words that can be in one of three categories: appetitive words (e.g. alcohol, food, etc.), neutral related words (e.g. musical instruments) and neutral unrelated words. Participants read the words and are then asked to state estimates for the percentage of words in each category. Individual differences in the propensity to overestimate the proportion of appetitive stimuli (alcohol-related or food-related words) in a word list were associated with behavioural measures (i.e. alcohol consumption, hazardous drinking, BMI, external eating and restrained eating, respectively), thereby providing evidence for the validity of the task. The task was also found to be associated with an eye-tracking attentional bias measure. The Rough Estimation Task is motivated in relation to intuitions with regard to both the behaviour of interest and the theory of cognitive biases in substance use.