cognitive-biases - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "cognitive-biases"

Total concepts: 217

Concepts

Impostor Syndrome - A psychological pattern where individuals doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of their competence.
IKEA Effect - Placing disproportionately high value on things we partially created ourselves.
Catastrophizing - A cognitive distortion involving irrational thoughts that something is far worse than it actually is.
Escalation of Commitment - The tendency to continue investing in a decision or course of action despite evidence that it's failing, due to prior investment of time, money, or effort.
Von Restorff Effect - A memory bias where distinctive or unusual items in a group are better remembered than common items, due to their isolation from surrounding elements.
Post-Hoc Rationalization - The tendency to construct logical-sounding explanations for decisions, behaviors, or beliefs after the fact, when the actual reasons were often emotional, unconscious, or irrational.
Mood-Congruent Memory - The tendency to recall memories that match one's current emotional state.
Time-Saving Bias - The tendency to misestimate the time saved when increasing speed, typically overestimating savings at low speeds and underestimating at high speeds.
Decoy Effect - Adding an inferior option makes another option more attractive by comparison.
Identifiable Victim Effect - The tendency to offer greater help to specific, identifiable individuals than to large, anonymous groups of people.
Bandwagon Effect - The tendency to adopt behaviors or beliefs because many others do.
Continued Influence Effect - The tendency for misinformation to continue influencing thinking and decision-making even after it has been corrected.
Reference Class Forecasting - An estimation method that bases predictions on actual outcomes of similar past projects rather than the specifics of the current plan.
Sunk Cost Fallacy - Continuing investments due to past costs that cannot be recovered.
Naive Realism - The belief that we see reality objectively while others are biased.
Student Syndrome - The tendency to delay starting work until the last possible moment before a deadline, even when given extra buffer time.
Action Bias - The tendency to favor action over inaction, even when doing nothing would produce better outcomes.
Magical Thinking - The belief that unrelated actions, thoughts, or words can influence outcomes through supernatural or mystical means.
Stereotype Threat - A situational predicament where people feel at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group, which can impair their performance.
Base Rate - The underlying probability of an event before considering specific evidence or conditions.
Motivating Uncertainty Effect - Psychological phenomenon where uncertainty about receiving a reward increases motivation and engagement more than guaranteed rewards.
Physiognomy - The pseudoscientific practice of judging character or personality from facial features and physical appearance.
Thin-Slicing - The ability to make accurate judgments about people or situations based on very limited information.
Illusion of Validity - The tendency to be overconfident in predictions based on observed patterns, even when the patterns have limited predictive power.
Conformity Bias - The tendency to align one's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors with the group, even when the group is obviously wrong.
Illusory Truth Effect - The tendency to believe information is true after repeated exposure.
Primacy Effect - The cognitive tendency to better remember and give more weight to information presented at the beginning of a sequence.
Anchoring - The cognitive bias where people rely heavily on the first piece of information they encounter.
Ambiguity Effect - The tendency to prefer options with known probabilities over options with unknown probabilities.
Hindsight Bias - The tendency to see past events as having been predictable.
Frequency Illusion - A cognitive bias where something you've recently noticed suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency afterward.
Inside View vs Outside View - Kahneman's distinction between planning based on project-specific details versus using base rates from similar past situations.
Perception of Reality - Our subjective experience of the world is shaped by cognitive processes, biases, and mental filters rather than being an objective reflection of what exists.
ELIZA Effect - The tendency to unconsciously attribute human-like understanding and emotions to computer programs.
Belief Perseverance - Maintaining beliefs despite encountering contradictory evidence.
Omission Bias - Judging harmful actions as worse than equally harmful inactions.
Gambler's Fallacy - The mistaken belief that past random events affect future probabilities.
Conjunction Fallacy - The formal fallacy of assuming that a conjunction of two events is more probable than either event alone.
Neglect of Probability - The tendency to disregard probability when making decisions under uncertainty, focusing instead on the magnitude of outcomes regardless of their likelihood.
Denomination Effect - A cognitive bias where people are less likely to spend larger denominations of currency than their equivalent value in smaller denominations.
Memory Bias - Cognitive biases that systematically distort how memories are encoded, stored, and recalled, leading to inaccurate or altered recollections.
Proportionality Bias - The tendency to assume that big events must have big causes, leading to the rejection of simple explanations for significant outcomes.
Automation Complacency - Reduced vigilance and monitoring when relying on automated systems, leading to failure to detect errors or malfunctions.
Actor-Observer Bias - The tendency to attribute our own actions to situational factors while attributing others' actions to their character or personality traits.
Selection Bias - Distortion in analysis caused by non-random sampling or systematic exclusion of data.
Endowment Effect - Overvaluing things simply because we own them.
Messenger Effect - The tendency to judge the validity of information based on characteristics of who delivers it rather than the information itself.
Social Desirability Bias - Tendency to give responses that are socially acceptable or viewed favorably by others, rather than truthful answers.
First Impressions - The rapid, often lasting judgments we form about people, products, and experiences within the first moments of encounter.
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias - Perceiving outgroup members as more similar to each other than ingroup members.
Automation Bias - Over-reliance on automated systems and a tendency to trust their outputs uncritically.
Illusion of Control - Believing we can control or influence outcomes that we actually cannot.
Wishful Thinking - Forming beliefs and making decisions based on what is pleasing to imagine rather than on evidence or rationality.
Reactance - A psychological phenomenon where people resist or oppose rules, regulations, or persuasion attempts perceived as threatening their freedom or autonomy.
Benjamin Franklin Effect - The psychological phenomenon where doing someone a favor makes you more likely to like them and help them again.
Ostrich Effect - The tendency to avoid or ignore negative information, hoping that it will go away if not acknowledged.
Mulder Effect - The tendency to believe extraordinary claims without sufficient evidence, named after the X-Files character.
Illusion of Transparency - The tendency to overestimate how well our internal mental states, emotions, and thoughts are apparent to others.
Outcome Bias - Judging decisions by their outcomes rather than the quality of the decision-making process.
Uniqueness Bias - The tendency to believe that oneself or one's situation is more special or unique than it actually is.
Placebo Effect - A beneficial effect produced by a treatment or belief that cannot be attributed to the treatment itself, demonstrating that expectations and constructed meanings can produce real physiological and psychological outcomes.
Belief System Defenses - The subconscious or conscious creation of narratives to protect our beliefs and self-image.
All-or-Nothing Thinking - Cognitive distortion of seeing situations in extreme black-and-white terms without recognizing middle ground.
Serial Position Effect - The tendency to better recall items at the beginning (primacy) and end (recency) of a sequence while having poorer recall of items in the middle.
Present Bias - The tendency to disproportionately prefer immediate rewards over larger future rewards.
Attribute Substitution - A cognitive process where when faced with a difficult question, people unconsciously substitute an easier question and answer that instead.
Mere Exposure Effect - The tendency to develop preferences for things simply because we are familiar with them.
Cashless Effect - The tendency to spend more money when paying with cards or digital payments compared to using physical cash.
Contrast Effect - The cognitive bias where the perception of something is enhanced or diminished by comparison to a recently observed contrasting stimulus.
Subadditivity Effect - The tendency to judge the probability of an event as less than the sum of its parts, or to estimate that the parts of a category are greater than the whole.
Nostalgia Effect - The tendency to prefer past choices, experiences, or products based on nostalgic feelings rather than objective evaluation.
Affective Forecasting - Predicting how future events will make us feel, a process prone to systematic errors.
Pseudocertainty Effect - A cognitive bias where risk preferences change based on whether outcomes are framed as gains or as avoided losses.
Not Invented Here Syndrome - The tendency to reject external solutions in favor of internally-developed alternatives, even when better options already exist.
Psychological Essentialism - The cognitive bias of believing that certain categories of things have an underlying essence that makes them what they are and determines their observable characteristics.
Vividness Bias - The cognitive tendency to judge vivid, emotionally striking, or easily imagined information as more likely, more important, or more true than pallid or abstract information.
Availability Cascade - A self-reinforcing cycle where a belief gains credibility simply because it is repeated and widely discussed.
Salience Bias - The tendency to focus on and give disproportionate weight to information that is prominent, emotionally striking, or easily noticeable.
Availability Heuristic - Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind.
Novelty Bias - Disproportionate attraction to new information over established knowledge.
Scarcity Mindset - The belief that resources are fundamentally limited, leading to competitive and fear-driven behavior.
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight - The cognitive bias where people perceive their knowledge of others to exceed others' knowledge of them, and believe their group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand them.
Just World Hypothesis - The belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive bias where novices overestimate and experts underestimate their abilities.
Regret Aversion - The tendency to avoid taking actions that might lead to feelings of regret, even when those actions would be objectively beneficial.
Priming - A cognitive phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, often without conscious awareness.
Law of the Instrument - The tendency to over-rely on familiar tools and approaches, seeing every problem through the lens of one's expertise.
False Uniqueness Effect - The tendency to underestimate how common one's abilities, positive behaviors, or desirable traits are in the general population.
Narrative Fallacy - The tendency to create overly coherent stories from random or complex events.
Barnum Effect - Accepting vague, general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to oneself.
Less-is-Better Effect - The tendency to prefer a smaller, complete set over a larger set that includes inferior items when evaluating options separately.
Compromise Effect - The tendency for consumers to prefer middle options when presented with a set of choices ranging from low to high on key attributes.
One True Proposition Affliction - Cognitive trap of believing there is only one correct answer or truth about complex matters, ignoring nuance and context.
Introspection Illusion - The cognitive bias where people wrongly believe they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states while treating others' introspections as unreliable.
Defensive Attribution - A cognitive bias where people assign more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome's severity increases, and less blame when they identify with the victim.
Bias Blind Spot - The cognitive bias of recognizing biases in others while failing to see them in oneself.
Fundamental Attribution Error - Overemphasizing personality and underemphasizing situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
Effort Justification - A cognitive bias where people value outcomes more when they required significant effort to achieve.
Hot-Hand Fallacy - Believing that a person who has experienced success has a greater chance of further success.
Motivated Reasoning - The tendency to process information in ways that support conclusions we want to reach, rather than conclusions supported by evidence.
Backfire Effect - The phenomenon where correcting misinformation can paradoxically strengthen the original false belief.
Rosy Retrospection - Remembering past events more positively than they actually were.
Base Rate Neglect - The tendency to ignore general statistical information in favor of specific case details when making judgments.
Einstellung Effect - The tendency to apply familiar solutions even when better alternatives exist.
Cognitive Dissonance - The mental discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs or behaving inconsistently with beliefs.
Worse-Than-Average Effect - A cognitive bias where people underestimate their abilities relative to others on difficult or rare tasks, believing themselves to be below average.
Pareidolia - The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, particularly faces, in random or ambiguous visual stimuli like clouds, shadows, or textured surfaces.
Nirvana Fallacy - A logical fallacy that occurs when someone rejects a realistic, useful but imperfect solution by comparing it unfavorably to an idealized, perfect solution that does not or cannot exist.
Projection Bias - The tendency to assume that others share our current preferences, beliefs, and mental states, or that our future selves will have the same preferences as our present selves.
Cryptomnesia - A memory bias where a person mistakenly believes a thought or idea is their own original creation, when it was actually previously encountered and forgotten.
Illusory Correlation - Perceiving a relationship between variables when none exists.
Bystander Effect - A social psychological phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency when other people are present - the more bystanders, the less likely any will help.
Belief Bias - The tendency to judge the validity of an argument based on whether the conclusion is believable rather than on whether it logically follows from the premises.
Authority Bias - The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure.
Fluency Illusion - The mistaken belief that familiarity with material equals mastery, caused by confusing recognition ease with learning.
Reciprocity Bias - The cognitive tendency to feel obligated to return favors, even when disproportionate.
Bounded Awareness - The systematic failure to notice, seek out, or use information that is relevant and accessible but falls outside our focus of attention.
Zero-Risk Bias - Preferring to eliminate a small risk entirely over a greater reduction of a larger risk.
Moral Licensing - A psychological phenomenon where doing something good gives people unconscious permission to subsequently do something bad or unethical.
Naive Allocation - Cognitive bias where people divide resources equally among available options regardless of their differing merits or characteristics.
Look-Elsewhere Effect - Statistical phenomenon where random fluctuations appear significant when examining many possibilities or locations in data.
Coordination Neglect - The tendency to underestimate the time and effort required for coordination when planning multi-person projects.
Response Bias - The tendency to respond to questions or surveys in ways that are influenced by factors other than the actual content being asked about.
Duration Neglect - The psychological tendency to disregard or underweight the duration of an experience when evaluating it retrospectively, focusing instead on peak moments and endings.
Normalcy Bias - The tendency to underestimate the likelihood and impact of disasters or significant changes, assuming things will continue as they always have.
Clustering Illusion - Seeing patterns in random data, such as 'hot streaks' in random sequences.
Take-the-Best Heuristic - A fast and frugal decision-making strategy that bases judgments on only the single most important differentiating cue between options.
Shared Information Bias - The tendency for group members to spend more time discussing information everyone already knows, while neglecting unique information held by individual members.
Restraint Bias - The tendency to overestimate one's ability to control impulsive behaviors and resist temptation.
Group Attribution Error - Assuming group decisions reflect group members individual attitudes.
Apophenia - The tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns, or causation between unrelated things.
Unconscious Bias Training - Educational programs designed to help people recognize and reduce implicit biases.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) - Anxiety that others are having rewarding experiences you're missing.
Framing Effect - How the presentation of information affects decision-making.
Scope Insensitivity - The cognitive bias where people's valuations are relatively insensitive to the scope or scale of a problem, failing to value outcomes proportionally to their size.
Victimization Gap - The tendency to perceive oneself as more victimized than one actually is, or more than others perceive.
Fighting Recency Bias - Strategies to counteract the tendency to overweight recent information in decisions.
Misinformation Effect - A memory phenomenon where exposure to misleading information after an event alters a person's memory of that event.
Groupthink - A psychological phenomenon where the desire for harmony and conformity in a group leads to irrational or dysfunctional decision-making.
Confirmation Bias - The tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs.
Money Illusion - The tendency to think of currency in nominal terms (face value) rather than real terms (purchasing power), ignoring inflation when evaluating financial situations.
Source Confusion - The tendency to misattribute the origin of a memory, confusing where, when, or from whom information was originally learned.
Bizarreness Effect - The memory phenomenon where bizarre, unusual, or strange material is better remembered than common material, especially when mixed with ordinary information.
Scully Effect - The tendency to dismiss or ignore important discoveries because they seem mundane or boring.
Scarcity - The psychological principle that limited availability increases perceived value.
False Memory - Memories of events that never occurred or significantly distorted recollections of actual events, often experienced with high confidence.
Self-Serving Bias - Attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
Affect Heuristic - Making judgments based on current emotions rather than objective analysis.
Social Proof - The psychological tendency to follow the actions and choices of others.
Planning Fallacy Mitigation - Strategies and techniques to combat the tendency to underestimate time, costs, and complexity in planning.
Halo Effect - A cognitive bias where positive impressions in one area influence perceptions in unrelated areas.
Impact Bias - The tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotional reactions to events.
Noble Edge Effect - Consumer preference bias where people favor companies that demonstrate genuine social responsibility and ethical practices.
In-Group Bias - Favoring members of one's own group over outsiders.
Confabulation - The production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories without the conscious intention to deceive.
Single-Action Bias - The tendency to take one action in response to a risk or problem and feel satisfied that the issue has been addressed, even when multiple actions are needed.
Small Sample Fallacy - The error of drawing strong conclusions from insufficient data.
Category Size Bias - The tendency to believe that outcomes belonging to a larger category are more likely than those in smaller categories.
Certainty Effect - The tendency to overweight outcomes that are certain compared to outcomes that are merely probable.
Survivorship Bias - Focusing on successful examples while ignoring failures that didn't survive.
System 1 - Fast, automatic, intuitive thinking that operates effortlessly and unconsciously.
Functional Fixedness - A cognitive limitation that makes it difficult to see objects being used in non-traditional ways beyond their designed purpose.
Curse of Knowledge - The cognitive bias where experts assume others share their knowledge, making it hard to explain things simply.
Extrinsic Incentive Bias - The tendency to believe that others are more motivated by external rewards like money and status than they actually are.
Trait Ascription Bias - Cognitive bias where people view themselves as more variable in behavior and personality than others, whom they see as more predictable.
Negativity Bias - The tendency to give more weight to negative experiences than positive ones of equal intensity.
Failure Attribution - The explanations people create for why failures occurred, affecting learning and future behavior.
Planning Fallacy - The tendency to underestimate time, costs, and risks while overestimating benefits.
Suggestibility - The tendency to accept and incorporate information, ideas, or suggestions from others into one's own memory, beliefs, or behavior.
Optimism Bias - The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate negative ones.
Representativeness Heuristic - Judging probability by similarity to prototypes rather than by actual statistical likelihood.
Distinction Bias - The tendency to view options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Cheerleader Effect - A cognitive bias where people appear more attractive when seen in a group than when viewed individually.
Fading Affect Bias - The psychological phenomenon where emotional intensity associated with negative memories fades faster than that of positive memories over time.
False Consensus Effect - The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, values, and behaviors.
Loss Aversion - The pain of losing is psychologically stronger than the pleasure of gaining.
Google Effect - The tendency to forget information that can be easily found online, treating the internet as an external memory source.
Naive Cynicism - The tendency to expect others to be more self-interested and cynical than they actually are, assuming negative motives when neutral or positive ones may apply.
Spotlight Effect - Overestimating how much others notice our appearance or behavior.
Perceptual Set - How expectations, experiences, and context influence what we perceive.
Attentional Bias - The tendency to pay more attention to emotionally dominant stimuli in one's environment while neglecting other relevant information.
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy - A logical fallacy where differences in data are ignored while similarities are overemphasized, like shooting a barn and then drawing targets around the bullet holes.
Pessimism Bias - The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes and underestimate the probability of positive events.
Peak-End Rule - We judge experiences based on their most intense moment and how they end, not their average.
Social Loafing - The tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group than when working alone, as individual contributions become less identifiable.
Observer-Expectancy Effect - A cognitive bias where a researcher's expectations unconsciously influence the participants or outcomes of an experiment.
Coherence Bias - The tendency to construct consistent narratives even when reality is more complex.
Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon - The frustrating experience of knowing you know something but being temporarily unable to retrieve it from memory.
Focusing Effect - The cognitive bias that causes people to place too much importance on one aspect of an event or decision, distorting predictions about future happiness or outcomes.
Past Performance Fallacy - The principle that historical results and past successes do not guarantee or reliably predict future outcomes.
Recency Bias - The tendency to overweight recent information in decision-making.
Better-Than-Average Effect - The cognitive bias where people overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to others, believing themselves to be above average on desirable traits.
Risk Compensation - The tendency for people to adjust their behavior in response to perceived risk, often taking more risks when they feel protected by safety measures.
Reactive Devaluation - The tendency to devalue proposals, ideas, or concessions simply because they originate from an adversary or someone perceived as having opposing interests.
Disposition Effect - The tendency to sell winning investments too early while holding onto losing investments for too long.
Pluralistic Ignorance - A social phenomenon where individuals privately disagree with a norm but assume most others accept it, leading to collective conformity to beliefs no one actually holds.
Overconfidence Effect - A cognitive bias where people's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments.
Conservatism Bias - The tendency to insufficiently revise beliefs when presented with new evidence.
Insensitivity to Sample Size - The cognitive bias where people fail to adequately account for sample size when assessing the reliability of statistical information, treating small and large samples as equally informative.
Leveling and Sharpening - A memory distortion process where details are lost through simplification while certain elements become exaggerated over time.
Pro-aging Trance - The psychological state of accepting aging and death as inevitable and even meaningful, framed by some as a rationalization of mortality.
System Justification - The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo and existing social arrangements.
Picture Superiority Effect - The phenomenon where pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than words alone, giving visual information privileged access to memory.
Overjustification Effect - The phenomenon where external rewards decrease intrinsic motivation to perform an activity that was previously enjoyed for its own sake.
Bottom-Dollar Effect - The tendency to experience greater pain and dissatisfaction from purchases that deplete our budget or remaining funds.
Status Quo Bias - Preference for the current state of affairs over change.
Declinism - The belief that society or institutions are in decline compared to the past.
AI Anthropomorphism - The attribution of human characteristics, emotions, and intentions to artificial intelligence systems.
Telescoping Effect - Cognitive bias where recent events seem more distant and distant events seem more recent than they actually are.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth - Cognitive bias where people believe they understand complex systems and phenomena better than they actually do.
Debiasing - Strategies and techniques designed to reduce or eliminate the impact of cognitive biases on judgment and decision-making.
Hard-Easy Effect - A cognitive bias causing overconfidence in performance on difficult tasks and underconfidence on easy ones.
Flashbulb Memory - A vivid, emotionally charged memory of a significant event that feels exceptionally accurate and detailed, yet research shows is just as prone to distortion and inaccuracy as ordinary memories.
Selective Perception - The tendency to filter information based on expectations, beliefs, and prior experiences, perceiving what we expect or want to perceive while filtering out contradictory information.
Cross-Race Effect - The tendency to more easily recognize faces of one's own racial group compared to faces of other racial groups.
Unit Bias - The tendency to want to complete a standardized unit of something regardless of actual quantity, often leading to overconsumption when units are larger.
Next-in-Line Effect - A memory phenomenon where people have reduced recall for what someone says immediately before their own turn to speak, due to anxiety and rehearsal focus.

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