Is General-Purpose AI Reasoning Sensitive to Data-Induced Cognitive Biases? Dynamic Benchmarking on Typical Software Engineering Dilemmas

Abstract: Human cognitive biases in software engineering can lead to costly errors. While general-purpose AI (GPAI) systems may help mitigate these biases due to their non-human nature, their training on human-generated data raises a critical question: Do GPAI systems themselves exhibit cognitive biases? To investigate this, we present the first dynamic benchmarking framework to evaluate data-induced cognitive biases in GPAI within software engineering workflows. Starting with a seed set of 16 hand-crafted realistic tasks, each featuring one of 8 cognitive biases (e.g., anchoring, framing) and corresponding unbiased variants, we test whether bias-inducing linguistic cues unrelated to task logic can lead GPAI systems from correct to incorrect conclusions. To scale the benchmark and ensure realism, we develop an on-demand augmentation pipeline relying on GPAI systems to generate task variants that preserve bias-inducing cues while varying surface details. This pipeline ensures correctness (88--99% on average, according to human evaluation), promotes diversity, and controls reasoning complexity by leveraging Prolog-based reasoning and LLM-as-a-judge validation. It also verifies that the embedded biases are both harmful and undetectable by logic-based, unbiased reasoners. We evaluate leading GPAI systems (GPT, LLaMA, DeepSeek) and find a consistent tendency to rely on shallow linguistic heuristics over deep reasoning. All systems exhibit cognitive biases (ranging from 5.9% to 35% across types), with bias sensitivity increasing sharply with task complexity (up to 49%), highlighting critical risks in real-world software engineering deployments.