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Cognitive Biases - Beliefs
Understanding the Types of Cognitive Biases of Beliefs, Judgments and Decision-Making
111
Psychology
Undergraduate 1
06/06/2021

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Term
Agent detection
Definition
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Term
Ambiguity effect
Definition
The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.[11]
Term
Anchoring or focalism
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 acquired on that subject).[12][13]
Term
Anthropocentric thinking
Definition
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.[14]
Term
Anthropomorphism or
Definition
The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.[15] The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception,[16] a type of objectification.
Term
Attentional bias
Definition
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.[17]
Term
Attribute substitution
Definition
Occurs when a judgment has to be made (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead a more easily calculated heuristic attribute is substituted. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system.
Term
Automation bias
Definition
The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.[18]
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.[19]
Term
Backfire effect
Definition
The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.[20] Note: the existence of this bias as a widespread phenomenon has been disputed in empirical studies.
Term
Base rate fallacy or
Definition
The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.[21]
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.[22]
Term
Berkson's paradox
Definition
The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.[23]
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).[13]
Term
Compassion fade
Definition
The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.[24]
Term
Confirmation bias
Definition
The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[25]
Term
Congruence bias
Definition
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[13]
Term
Conjunction fallacy
Definition
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions. For example, subjects in one experiment perceived the probability of a woman being both a bank teller and a feminist as more likely than the probability of her being a bank teller.[26]
Term
Conservatism bias
Definition
The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[5][27][28]
Term
Continued influence effect
Definition
The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.[29] cf. Backfire effect
Term
Contrast effect
Definition
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus' perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[30]
Term
Curse of knowledge
Definition
When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[31]
Term
Declinism
Definition
The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.[32]
Term
Decoy effect
Definition
Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.[33]
Term
Default effect
Definition
When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.[34]
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).[35]
Term
Disposition effect
Definition
The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
Term
Distinction bias
Definition
The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[36]
Term
Dread aversion
Definition
Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.[37][1]
Term
Dunning–Kruger effect
Definition
The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.[38]
Term
Duration neglect
Definition
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.[39]
Term
Empathy gap
Definition
The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.[40]
Term
End-of-history illusion
Definition
The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.[41]
Term
Endowment effect
Definition
The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[42]
Term
Exaggerated expectation
Definition
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.[5]
Term
Experimenter's or
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.[43]
Term
Forer effect or
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.[44]
Term
Form function attribution bias
Definition
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot.[45]
Term
Framing effect
Definition
Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
Term
Frequency illusion or
Definition
The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of selection bias).[46] The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.[47] [48] It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned.[49]
Term
Functional fixedness
Definition
Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.[50]
Term
Gambler's fallacy
Definition
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises 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."[51]
Term
Gender bias
Definition
A widely held[52] set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender. For example, the assumption that women are less suited to jobs requiring high intellectual ability.[53] Or the assumption that people or animals are male in the absence of any indicators of gender.[54]
Term
Hard–easy effect
Definition
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks[5][55][56][57]
Term
Hindsight bias
Definition
Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[58] at the time those events happened.
Term
Hot-hand fallacy
Definition
The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event 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.[59] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
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 product.[60]
Term
Illicit transference
Definition
Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Term
Illusion of control
Definition
The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[61]
Term
Illusion of validity
Definition
Overestimating the accuracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.[62]
Term
Illusory correlation
Definition
Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[63][64]
Term
Illusory truth effect
Definition
A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Term
Impact bias
Definition
The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[65]
Term
Implicit association
Definition
The speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.
Term
Information bias
Definition
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[66]
Term
Insensitivity to sample size
Definition
The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Term
Interoceptive bias
Definition
The tendency for sensory input about the body itself to affect one's judgement about external, unrelated circumstances. (As for example, in parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.) [67][68][69][70]
Term
Irrational escalation or
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
Law of the instrument
Definition
An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
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 perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.[71] (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.[72]
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.[73]
Term
Moral credential effect
Definition
Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.
Term
Neglect of probability
Definition
The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[74]
Term
Non-adaptive choice switching[75]
Definition
After experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, the tendency to avoid the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again, even though the choice was optimal. Also known as "once bitten, twice shy" or "hot stove effect".
Term
Normalcy bias
Definition
The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
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 (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).[76]
Term
Optimism bias
Definition
The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[77][78]
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.[5][79][80][81]
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
Plan continuation bias
Definition
Failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different than anticipated.[82]
Term
Planning fallacy
Definition
The tendency to underestimate one's own task-completion times.[65]
Term
Present bias
Definition
The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments.[83]
Term
Plant blindness
Definition
The tendency to ignore plants in their environment and a failure to recognize and appreciate the utility of plants to life on earth.[84]
Term
Probability matching
Definition
Sub-optimal matching of the probability of choices with the probability of reward in a stochastic context.
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
Projection bias
Definition
The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.[85][86][87]
Term
Proportionality bias
Definition
Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.[88][89]
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.[90]
Term
Recency illusion
Definition
The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is, in fact, long-established (see also frequency illusion). Also Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. A memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event",[91] such as the final lawyer's closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate.
Term
Systematic bias
Definition
Judgement that arises when targets of differentiating judgement become subject to effects of regression that are not equivalent.[92]
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.
Term
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect
Definition
The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Term
Salience bias
Definition
The tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards.
Term
Scope neglect or
Definition
The tendency to be insensitive to the size of a problem when evaluating it. For example, being willing to pay as much to save 2,000 children or 20,000 children
Term
Selection bias
Definition
Happens when the members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population.
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
Status quo bias
Definition
The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[93][94]
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 the probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.[95]
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
Surrogation
Definition
Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
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
System justification
Definition
The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
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
Parkinson's law of triviality
Definition
The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.[96]
Term
Unconscious bias
Definition
Also known as implicit biases, are the underlying attitudes and stereotypes that people unconsciously attribute to another person or group of people that affect how they understand and engage with them. Many researchers suggest that unconscious bias occurs automatically as the brain makes quick judgments based on past experiences and background.[97]
Term
Unit bias
Definition
The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.[98]
Term
Weber–Fechner law
Definition
Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Term
Well travelled road effect
Definition
Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Term
Women are wonderful effect
Definition
A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
Term
Zero-risk bias
Definition
Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Term
Zero-sum bias
Definition
A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).
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