Final answer:
Humans tend to fill gaps in information with their existing knowledge, a cognitive bias. Confirmation bias and the availability heuristic influence the processing of new information, while tribal thinking and the bandwagon fallacy align us with groups holding similar beliefs.
Step-by-step explanation:
When humans encounter information lacking context or meaning, they tend to: Fill in gaps with existing knowledge. This is a manifestation of cognitive biases, which are patterns of thought that influence how we process and interpret new information. Among the cognitive biases, confirmation bias is prevalent; it is the propensity to search for and favor information that validates our pre-existing beliefs. Also, the availability heuristic leads us to evaluate information based on the most readily recalled instances, often resulting in judgments that might not align with statistical probabilities. Furthermore, we tend to align with groups sharing our values, a behavior explained by tribal thinking and the bandwagon fallacy, the latter implying that the popularity of an idea contributes to its perceived validity. For example, when making predictions about complex situations like political outcomes or future values of investments, people might substitute sophisticated analyses with simpler personal feelings through a mechanism called the 'substitution heuristic'.
Moreover, biases such as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where individuals overestimate their knowledge in areas where they have little expertise, and the gambler's fallacy, where people expect a reversal of a random event based on its past frequency, show the broad spectrum of cognitive biases that affect our judgment and decision-making processes.