Cognitive Biases in Requirements Engineering: Towards Understanding Their Relevance from a Communication Perspective

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Cognitive biases are often described as "deviations"or "errors"in rationality, interfering with problem-solving and decision-making. In one of the foundational articles by Tversky and Kahneman cognitive biases are defined as: "heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations"[1]. In medical [2] , managerial [3] , and Software Engineering (SE) [4] areas, for instance, the impact of such "heuristics or errors"is assessed in the literature, often focused on presenting mitigation or "debiasing"strategies.