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The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Cause:
One possible explanation of the effect is that people have a rule of thumb (heuristic) to avoid options where information is missing.
Example:
As an example, consider a bucket containing 30 balls. The balls are either red, black or white. Ten of the balls are red, and the remaining 20 are either black or white, with all combinations of black and white being equally likely. In option X, drawing a red ball wins a person $100, and in option Y, drawing a black ball wins them $100. Despite the fact that there could possibly be twice as many black balls as red balls, people tend not to want to take the opposing risk that there may be fewer than 10 black balls. The "ambiguity" behind option Y means that people tend to favor option X, even when the probability is the same.
A more realistic example is the risk aversion seen in the stock market. |
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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). The focusing effect (or focusing illusion) is a cognitive bias that occurs when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome. Influencing factors include: mood (IMO energy from mood meter [+], experience (knowledge, expertise and experience [-]), personality (agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness [+], extroversion [-]). cognitive ability (cog ab [-] but contested) and specificity of the anchor (spec [+]. It is apparently hard to avoid this bias even when the subjects are aware of it.
Causes:
According to the anchoring-and-adjusting theory, once an anchor is set, people adjust away from it to get to their final answer; however, they adjust insufficiently, resulting in their final guess being closer to the anchor than it would be otherwise. However, there are two criticisms to this theory: adjustments depend on the reasonableness of the anchor and the theory does not consider subliminal anchors.
Selective accessibility proposes that when given an anchor, a judge will evaluate the hypothesis that the anchor is a suitable answer. Assuming it is not, the judge moves on to another guess, but not before accessing all the relevant attributes of the anchor itself. Then, when evaluating the new answer, the judge looks for ways in which it is similar to the anchor, resulting in the anchoring effect.
According to the attitude change theory, providing an anchor changes someone's attitudes to be more favorable to the particular attributes of that anchor, biasing future answers to have similar characteristics as the anchor.
Example:
An example of the power of anchoring has been conducted during the Strategic Negotiation Process Workshops. During the workshop, a group of participants is divided into two sections: buyers and sellers. Each side receives identical information about the other party before going into a one-on-one negotiation. Following this exercise, both sides debrief about their experiences. The results show that where the participants anchor the negotiation had a significant effect on their success.
Participants read an initial price for a beach house, then gave the price they thought it was worth. They received either a general, seemingly nonspecific anchor (e.g. $800,000) or a more precise and specific anchor (e.g. $799,800). Participants with a general anchor adjusted their estimate more than those given a precise anchor ($751,867 vs $784,671). The authors propose that this effect comes from difference in scale; in other words, the anchor affects not only the starting value, but also the starting scale. When given a general anchor of $20, people will adjust in large increments ($19, $21, etc.), but when given a more specific anchor like $19.85, people will adjust on a lower scale ($19.75, $19.95, etc.). Thus, a more specific initial price will tend to result in a final price closer to the initial one. |
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| The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions. |
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The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts.
Examples:
The most commonly studied type of decision for attentional bias, is one in which there are two conditions (A and B), which can be present (P) or not present (N). This leaves four possible combination outcomes: both are present (AP/BP), both are not present (AN/BN), only A is present (AP/BN), only B is present (AN/BP). People with attentional bias would be accepting and overemphasizing the data from the present/present (top-left) cell, because an unbiased person would counter this logic and consider data from the present/absent cell from "Does God answer prayers?" experiment. |
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| The tendency to excessively depend on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions. |
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| 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. |
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| 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"). |
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| When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs. |
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| The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior. |
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| Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect |
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| The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case). |
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| An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion. |
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| 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. |
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| The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation. |
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| The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were. |
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| The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns). |
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| The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. |
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| The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses. |
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| The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones. |
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| The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence. |
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