2010.05.17 Cognitive Bias
I've noticed a few lists of these lately, and I thought I'd note them down to aid in my own memorization. Because, really, you have to wade through them here on the intertubes. It's handy to know what you're looking to avoid, both in what you read and what you find yourself expressing.
SOCIAL BIASES
Forer effect / Barnum effect
Giving highly "accurate" description that are supposedly specific, but are in actuality vague and general.
Ingroup bias
Preferential treatment to others perceived to be members of the same group.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Engaging in behaviours that elicit results which will confirm existing ideas.
Halo effect
Tendency for positive or negative traits in one aspect to affect people's perceptions of other aspects.
Ultimate attribution error
Making an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
False consensus effect
Overestimating the degree to which others agree.
Self-serving bias / Behavioural confirmation effect
Claiming more responsibility for successes than failures. Also, interpreting ambiguous information in a beneficial manner.
Notational bias
Cultural bias in which the notational conventions of recording data biases the appearance of the data.
Egocentric bias
Claiming more responsibility for themselves for the results of joint action than an objective observer would.
Just-world phenomenon
Belief that the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve".
System justification effect / Status Quo bias
Tendency to defend and bolster the status quo, even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.
Dunning-Kruger / Superiority bias
Overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities relative to other people.
Illusion of asymmetric insight
People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers knowledge of them.
Herd instinct
Tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviours of the majority.
Illusion of transparency
People overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Fundamental attribution error / Actor-observer bias
The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behaviour.
Projection bias
The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.
Outgroup homogeneity bias
Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
Trait ascription bias
The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behaviour and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
MEMORY BIASES
Suggestibility
A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Reminiscence bump
The effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods.
Cryptomnesia / False memory
A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, or the confusion of true memories with false memories.
Consistency bias
Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.
Rosy retrospection
The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Self-serving bias
Perceiving oneself responsible for desirable outcomes but not responsible for undesirable ones.
Egocentric bias
Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, differently than it actually was.
Hindsight bias
Filtering memory of past events through present knowledge, so that those events look more predictable than they actually were; also known as the "I-knew-it-all-along effect".
DECISION-MAKING BIASES
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.
Base rate fallacy
Ignoring available statistical data in favour of particulars.
Bias blind spot
The tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.
Contrast effect
The enhancement or diminishing of a measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.
Déformation professionnelle
the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one's own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
Denomination effect
The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts rather than large amounts.
Distinction bias
the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Endowment effect - Loss aversion
The fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willin gto pay to acquire it.
Experimenter's bias or Expectation bias
The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to desbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.
Focusing effect
Predictoni bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Framing
Using an approach or description of the situation or issue that is too narrow. Also framing effect - drawing different conclusions based on how data is presented.
Hyperbolic discounting
The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control
The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
Impact bias
The tendency for people to overestimate the length or intensity of the impact of future emotional states.
Information bias
The tendency to value in object more than others in the same category as a result of an extraordinarity of that object that does not in itself change the value.
Interloper effect / Consultation paradox
the tendency to value third party consultation as objective, confirming, and without motive. Also consultation paradox, the conclusion that solutions proposed by existing personnel within an organization are less likely to receive support than from those recruited for that purpose.
Irrational escalation
The tendency to make irrational decisions based upon rational decisions in the past or to justify actions already taken.
Mere exposure effect
The tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
Money illusion
The tendency of people to concentrate on the nominal value of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
Moral credential effect
The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Need for Closure
The need to reach a verdict in important matters; to have an answer and to escape the feeling of doubt and uncertainty. Personal context might increase this bias.
Negativity bias
Phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
Neglect of probability
The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Normalcy bias
The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Not Invented Here
The tendency to ignore that a product or solution already exists because its source is seen as an "enemy" or as "inferior".
Omission bias
The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions or inactions.
Outcome bias
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.
Planning fallacy
The tendency to underestimate task completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization
The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
Pseudocertainty effect
The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Reactance
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.
Restraint bias
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Selective perception
The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex
The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts an estblished paradigm.
Status quo bias
The tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect
The tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Wishful thinking
The formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.
Zero-risk bias
Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
PROBABILITY/BELIEF BIASES
Ambiguity effect
The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Anchoring effect
The tendency to rely too heavily on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Attention bias
The tendency to neglect relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association. They may focus on one or two possibilities, while ignoring the rest.
Authority bias
The tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.
Availability cascade
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse. "Repeat something long enough and you will believe it."
Availability heuristic
Estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
Belief bias
An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
Capability bias
The tendency to believe that the closer average performance is to a target, the tighter the distribution of the data set.
Clustering illusion
The tendency to see paterns where actually none exist.
Conjunction fallacy
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
Disposition effect
The tendency to sell assets that have increased in value but hold assets that have decreased in value.
Disregard of regression toward the mean
The tendency to expect extreme performance to continue.
Gambler's fallacy
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.
Hawthorne effect
The tendency to perform or perceive differently when one thinks they are being observed.
Illusory correlation
Beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.
Last illusion
The belief that someone must know what is going on.
Neglect of prior base rates effect
The tendency to neglect known odds when reevaluating odds in light of weak evidence.
Observe-exptectancy effect
When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it.
Optimism bias
The tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.
Ostrich effect
Ignoring an obvious negative situation.
Outcome bias
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.
Overconfidence effect
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.
Pareidolia
A vague and random stimulus is perceived a significant - such as seeing images in clouds or other objects, or hearing hidden messages on music played backwards.
Positive outcome bias
The tendency to overestimate the probability of good things happening.
Primacy effect
The tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.
Recency effect / Peak-end rule
The tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.
Selection bias
A distortion of evidence or data that arises from the way that the data are collected.
Stereotyping
Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Subadditivity effect
The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
Survivorship bias
The tendency to concentrate on the people or things that "survived" some process and ignoring those that didn't, or arguing that a strategy is effective given the winners, while ignoring the large amount of losers.
Telescoping effect
The effect that recent events appear to have occurred more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy
The fallacy of selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data is collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis fairly. Refers to the concept of firing shots at a target, drawing a circle around the best group, and declaring that to be the target.
Well travelled road effect
Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and over-estimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.