Cognitive biases in cyber fraud practices: the heuristic potential of M. Norton's theory

The concept of cognitive biases, introduced in 1972 by D. Kahneman and A. Tversky and identifying the cause of erroneous decisions in human economic behavior, has become one of the explanatory models in describing the practices of modern cyber fraud. However, the growing scale and negative consequences of cyber fraud actualize the need to expand the interpretations of this phenomenon in the context of various disciplines, primarily sociology, which allows us to overcome the narrowly individual approach that links cognitive distortions only with the mental characteristics of human thinking and to set the vector of analysis of their socio-cultural determination. The article examines the heuristic prospects of using the concepts of cognitive sociology (in particular, M. Norton’s theory) as an interpretative model for the analysis of cognitive distortions in cyber fraud practices. This approach allows us to give a broad interpretation of this phenomenon as a necessary attribute of the general process of socio-cultural semiosis, to explain the manipulative nature of specific semiotic contours that determine the choice of a certain type of human action and the activation of specific cognitive distortions, to understand how certain cognitive distortions influence such a choice in a situation of cyber fraud, to show the conjugation of cognitive mechanisms and the socio-cultural environment in the process of forming networks of meanings in the “semiosis of cyber fraud”. The theoretical provisions of Norton's concept are examined using specific examples of such cognitive distortions as the authority effect, the trust effect, and the confirmation bias.