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List of Cognitive Biases - Decision-making, belief, and beha
Wikipedia's List of Cognitive Biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
93
Psychology
Post-Graduate
05/16/2015
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Term
Ambiguity effect
 Definition
The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".[8]
Term
Anchoring orfocalism
 Definition
The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information that we acquire on that subject)[9][10]
Term
Attentional bias
 Definition
The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts.[11]
Term
Automation bias
 Definition
The tendency to excessively depend on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.[12]
Term
Availability heuristic
 Definition
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.[13]
Term
Availability cascade
 Definition
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").[14]
Term
Backfire effect
 Definition
When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.[15]
Term
Bandwagon effect
 Definition
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.[16]
Term
Base rate fallacyor base rate neglect
 Definition
The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).[17]
Term
Belief bias
 Definition
An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[18]
Term
Bias blind spot
 Definition
The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[19]
Term
Cheerleader effect
 Definition
The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.[20]
Term
Choice-supportive bias
 Definition
The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.[21]
Term
Clustering illusion
 Definition
The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[10]
Term
Confirmation bias
 Definition
The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[22]
Term
Congruence bias
 Definition
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[10]
Term
Conjunction fallacy
 Definition
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[23]
Term
Conservatism orregressive bias
 Definition
A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.[24][25][26][unreliable source?]
Term
Conservatism (Bayesian)
 Definition
The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[24][27][28]
Term
Contrast effect
 Definition
The enhancement or reduction of a certain perception's stimuli when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[29]
Term
Curse of knowledge
 Definition
When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[30]
Term
Decoy effect
 Definition
Preferences for either option A or B changes in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is similar to option B but in no way better.
Term
Denomination effect
 Definition
The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g. coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bills).[31]
Term
Distinction bias
 Definition
The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[32]
Term
Dunning-Kruger effect
 Definition
The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their ability.[33]
Term
Duration neglect
 Definition
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value
Term
Empathy gap
 Definition
The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
Term
Endowment effect
 Definition
The fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[34]
Term
Essentialism
 Definition
Categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.[dubious – discuss][35]
Term
Exaggeratedexpectation
 Definition
Based on the estimates, real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[unreliable source?][24][36]
Term
Experimenter'sor expectation bias
 Definition
The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[37]
Term
Focusing effect
 Definition
The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.[38]
Term
Forer effect orBarnum effect
 Definition
The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.
Term
Framing effect
 Definition
Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
Term
Frequency illusion
 Definition
The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[39] Colloquially, this illusion is known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.[40]
Term
Functional fixedness
 Definition
Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
Term
Gambler's fallacy
 Definition
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."
Term
Hard–easy effect
 Definition
Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough[24][41][42][43]
Term
Hindsight bias
 Definition
Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[44] at the time those events happened.
Term
Hostile media effect
 Definition
The tendency to see a media report as being biased, owing to one's own strong partisan views.
Term
Hot-hand fallacy
 Definition
The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Term
Hyperbolic discounting
 Definition
Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.[45] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency.
Term
Identifiable victim effect
 Definition
The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.[46]
Term
IKEA effect
 Definition
The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.
Term
Illusion of control
 Definition
The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[47]
Term
Illusion of validity
 Definition
Belief that furtherly acquired information generates additional relevant data for predictions, even when it evidently does not.[48]
Term
Illusory correlation
 Definition
Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[49][50]
Term
Impact bias
 Definition
The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[51]
Term
Information bias
 Definition
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[52]
Term
Insensitivity to sample size
 Definition
The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples
Term
Irrational escalation
 Definition
The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Term
Less-is-better effect
 Definition
The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly
Term
Loss aversion
 Definition
"the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it".[53] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Term
Mere exposure effect
 Definition
The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[54]
Term
Money illusion
 Definition
The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[55]
Term
Moral credential effect
 Definition
The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Term
Negativity effect
 Definition
The tendency of people, when evaluating the causes of the behaviors of a person they dislike, to attribute their positive behaviors to the environment and their negative behaviors to the person's inherent nature.
Term
Negativity bias
 Definition
Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.[56]
Term
Neglect of probability
 Definition
The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[57]
Term
Normalcy bias
 Definition
The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Term
Not invented here
 Definition
Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
Term
Observer-expectancy effect
 Definition
When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Term
Omission bias
 Definition
The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).[58]
Term
Optimism bias
 Definition
The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[59][60]
Term
Ostrich effect
 Definition
Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Term
Outcome bias
 Definition
The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Term
Overconfidence effect
 Definition
Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[24][61][62][63]
Term
Pareidolia
 Definition
A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Term
Pessimism bias
 Definition
The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Term
Planning fallacy
 Definition
The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.[51]
Term
Post-purchase rationalization
 Definition
The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
Term
Pro-innovation bias
 Definition
The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Term
Pseudocertainty effect
 Definition
The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[64]
Term
Reactance
 Definition
The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Term
Reactive devaluation
 Definition
Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
Term
Recency illusion
 Definition
The illusion that a word or language usage is a recent innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
Term
Restraint bias
 Definition
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Term
Rhyme as reason effect
 Definition
Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense's use of the phrase "If the gloves don't fit, then you must acquit."
Term
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect
 Definition
The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Term
Selective perception
 Definition
The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Term
Semmelweis reflex
 Definition
The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[28]
Term
Social comparison bias
 Definition
The tendency, when making hiring decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.[65]
Term
Social desirability bias
 Definition
The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in one self and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[66]
Term
Status quo bias
 Definition
The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[67][68]
Term
Stereotyping
 Definition
Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Term
Subadditivity effect
 Definition
The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.[69]
Term
Subjective validation
 Definition
Perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
Term
Survivorship bias
 Definition
Concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their lack of visibility.
Term
Time-saving bias
 Definition
Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Term
Unit bias
 Definition
The tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item. Strong effects on the consumption of food in particular.[70]
Term
Well travelled road effect
 Definition
Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Term
Zero-risk bias
 Definition
Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Term
Zero-sum heuristic
 Definition
Intuitively judging a situation to be zero-sum (i.e., that gains and losses are correlated). Derives from the zero-sum game in game theory, where wins and losses sum to zero.[71][72] The frequency with which this bias occurs may be related to the social dominance orientation personality factor.
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