Action bias
The tendency for someone to act when faced with a problem even when inaction would be more effective, or to act when no evident problem exists.
DecisionBaseline
Index
Searchable bias index
This index stays broad on purpose. Use categories when you know what kind of judgment is failing, and patterns when you suspect the failure mode but not the exact label.
Additive bias
The tendency to solve problems through addition, even when subtraction is a better approach.
DecisionBaseline
Aesthetic–usability effect
The tendency to treat attractive things as more usable than they really are.
EstimationAssociation
Agent detection bias
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Ambiguity effect
The tendency to avoid options when their probabilities are unclear, even if the unclear option may not actually be worse than the familiar one.
DecisionAssociationForecasting & planningPersonal decisions
Anchoring effect
The tendency for the first salient number, frame, or option to pull later estimates toward itself even when it is arbitrary or weakly relevant.
EstimationBaselineForecasting & planningPersonal decisions
Anthropocentric thinking
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Anthropomorphism
The tendency to treat animals, objects, or abstractions as if they had human thoughts, feelings, or intentions.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Apophenia
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections or patterns between unrelated things.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Assumed similarity bias
The tendency to assume other people are more similar to oneself than they really are.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Attentional bias
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
RecallInertia
Attribute substitution
The tendency to answer a hard judgment question by unconsciously substituting an easier one.
EstimationAssociation
Authority bias
The tendency to give excess weight to the opinion of a high-status or authoritative source independent of whether the source has earned that weight on the specific issue.
DecisionAssociationTeams & managementMedia & politics
Automation bias
The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.
DecisionAssociation
Availability cascade
A belief becoming more plausible through repeated public repetition, social uptake, and feedback.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Availability heuristic
The tendency to judge frequency, risk, or importance by how easily examples come to mind.
EstimationAssociationMedia & politicsPersonal decisions
Backfire effect
The tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.
Opinion ReportingInertia
Ballot order effect
The tendency for candidates listed first on a ballot to gain a small voting advantage.
DecisionBaseline
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do things because many other people do the same.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Barnum effect
The tendency to accept vague, flattering, or generic descriptions as uniquely accurate of oneself.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Base-rate neglect
The tendency to underweight general prevalence information when vivid case-specific details are available.
EstimationBaselineResearch & evidenceForecasting & planning
Belief bias
The tendency to judge an argument as stronger when its conclusion seems believable and weaker when its conclusion seems unbelievable, even if the reasoning structure is unchanged.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeLearning & expertiseMedia & politics
Ben Franklin effect
The tendency to like or help someone more after already doing that person a favor.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Berkson's paradox
The tendency to draw misleading statistical conclusions from conditionally selected samples.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Bias blind spot
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.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Bizarreness effect
The tendency to remember bizarre or unusual material better than ordinary material.
RecallBaseline
Boundary extension
The tendency to remember a scene as having included more surrounding space than was actually shown.
RecallAssociation
Cheerleader effect
The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
DecisionBaseline
Childhood amnesia
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
RecallAssociation
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
RecallOutcome
Clustering illusion
The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Cognitive dissonance
The perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Common source bias
The tendency to combine or compare research studies from the same source, or from sources that use the same methodologies or data.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Compassion fade
The tendency to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.
DecisionAssociation
Compromise effect
The tendency for an option to seem better when it appears as a middle compromise.
DecisionBaseline
Confirmation bias
The tendency to notice, seek, and remember evidence that supports the story you already prefer more readily than evidence that threatens it.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeMedia & politicsResearch & evidence
Congruence bias
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Conjunction fallacy
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions.
EstimationAssociation
Conservatism bias
The tendency to insufficiently revise one's belief when presented with new evidence.
EstimationInertia
Regressive bias
The tendency to remember high values as lower and low values as higher, pulling estimates back toward the middle.
EstimationBaseline
Consistency bias
The tendency to remember past attitudes or behavior as more consistent with the present than they really were.
RecallAssociation
Context neglect bias
The tendency to neglect the human context of technological challenges.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Continued influence effect
Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected.
RecallInertia
Contrast effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus's perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
RecallAssociation
Courtesy bias
The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Cross-race effect
The tendency to distinguish faces of your own race more accurately than faces of other races.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Cryptomnesia
The tendency to mistake an old memory or borrowed idea for a new original thought.
RecallAssociation
Cue-dependent forgetting
The tendency for recall to weaken when the original context or cues are missing.
RecallAssociation
Curse of knowledge
The tendency for better-informed people to underestimate how hard the issue looks to less-informed people.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveLearning & expertiseTeams & management
Declinism
The predisposition to view the past favorably and the future unfavorably.
RecallOutcome
Decoy effect
The tendency for a dominated third option to shift preference toward a nearby target option.
DecisionBaseline
Default effect
The tendency to favor the preselected or default option simply because it is already positioned as the path of least resistance.
DecisionAssociationChoice architecturePersonal decisions
Defensive attribution hypothesis
The tendency to attribute more blame for a mishap to the person or persons involved if they are perceived as dissimilar to the person making that judgment.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Denomination effect
The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts rather than large amounts.
DecisionBaseline
Disposition effect
The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
DecisionBaseline
Distinction bias
The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
DecisionBaseline
Domain neglect
The tendency to ignore relevant domain knowledge when reasoning across unfamiliar fields.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Doubling-back aversion
The tendency to resist restarting or retracing steps even when doing so would save time or effort.
DecisionInertia
Dread aversion
Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.
DecisionAssociation
Dunning-Kruger effect
The tendency for low skill or shallow understanding to produce overestimation of one's own competence, while higher-skill people may underestimate how unusual their competence really is.
EstimationBaselineLearning & expertiseTeams & management
Duration neglect
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.
RecallAssociation
Effort justification
The tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Egocentric bias
The tendency to remember the past in self-serving ways and overweight one's own perspective.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Embodiment bias
Biases in attribution of meaning and perceived properties to objects or events based on the physical capacities and properties of the body, such as sex and temperament.
Causal AttributionOutcome
End-of-history illusion
The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.
Opinion ReportingInertia
Endowment effect
The tendency to value something more highly once it is already owned, possessed, or treated as part of the current arrangement.
DecisionInertiaPersonal decisionsMarkets & valuation
Euphoric recall
The tendency of people to remember past experiences favorably while overlooking bad experiences associated with them.
RecallOutcome
Exaggerated expectation
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.
EstimationOutcome
Experimenter's bias
The tendency for researchers' expectations to shape what data they notice, trust, publish, or discount.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Extension neglect
The tendency to judge outcomes without giving enough weight to sample size or quantity.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Extrinsic incentives bias
An exception to the fundamental attribution error, where people view others as having extrinsic motivations, while viewing themselves as having intrinsic motivations.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Fading affect bias
A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with pleasant ones.
RecallAssociation
False consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate how many other people share one's own beliefs, preferences, habits, or reactions.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
False memory
The tendency to mistake imagination, suggestion, or reconstruction for an actual memory.
RecallAssociation
False priors
Initial beliefs and knowledge which interfere with the unbiased evaluation of factual evidence and lead to incorrect conclusions.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
False uniqueness bias
The tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Fluency heuristic
The tendency to treat ideas or options that feel easier to process as better or truer.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Form function attribution bias
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Framing effect
The tendency for the same underlying information to produce different judgments depending on how the options or outcomes are described.
DecisionAssociationMedia & politicsPersonal decisions
Frequency illusion
The tendency to notice something once and then feel as if it is suddenly everywhere.
RecallBaseline
Functional fixedness
A tendency limiting a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
DecisionInertia
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to explain other people's behavior too quickly in terms of character while underweighting situational pressures and constraints.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveTeams & managementMedia & politics
G. I. Joe fallacy
The tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Gambler's fallacy
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.
EstimationBaseline
Gender bias
A widespread set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Gender differences in eyewitness memory
The tendency for witnesses to remember more detail about someone of the same gender under some conditions.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Generation effect
The tendency to remember self-generated information better than information supplied by others.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Google effect
The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
RecallAssociation
Group attribution error
The tendency to project one member's traits or a group decision onto the whole group.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Groupshift
The tendency for decisions to be more risk-seeking or risk-averse than the group as a whole, if the group is already biased in that direction.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Groupthink
The tendency for groups to protect harmony or momentum at the cost of critical evaluation and dissent.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociationTeams & managementPolitics & institutions
Halo effect
The tendency for one salient positive or negative impression to spill over into unrelated judgments about a person, product, or institution.
Opinion ReportingAssociationTeams & managementPersonal decisions
Hard–easy effect
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks.
EstimationBaseline
Hedonic recall bias
The tendency for current satisfaction to distort how positively or negatively past experience is remembered.
EstimationOutcome
Hindsight bias
The tendency after an outcome is known, to see it as having been more obvious or predictable than it actually was beforehand.
RecallOutcomePostmortems & learningForecasting & planning
Hostile attribution bias
The tendency to read ambiguous behavior as hostile, threatening, or intentionally disrespectful even when the evidence is underdetermined.
Causal AttributionOutcomeConflict & dialogueTeams & management
Hot-cold empathy gap
The tendency to underestimate the influence of visceral drives on one's attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.
EstimationAssociation
Hot-hand fallacy
The belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
EstimationBaseline
Humor effect
The tendency to remember humorous material more easily than comparable non-humorous material.
RecallAssociation
Hyperbolic discounting
The tendency to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger later ones, even against one's longer-term interests.
DecisionAssociation
Illusion of asymmetric insight
The tendency to think one understands others better than they understand oneself.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Illusion of control
The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Illusion of explanatory depth
The tendency to believe you understand how something works more deeply than you actually do, especially until you are forced to explain the mechanism step by step.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociationLearning & expertisePublic reasoning
Illusion of learning
A false belief that if you understand something you learned and acquired a knowledge about it.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Illusion of transparency
The tendency to overestimate how visible one's thoughts, feelings, or intentions are to others.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Illusion of validity
The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
EstimationOutcome
Illusory correlation
Inaccurately seeing a relationship between two events related by coincidence.
Causal AttributionHypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Illusory superiority
The tendency to overestimate one's desirable qualities, and underestimate undesirable qualities, relative to other people.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Illusory truth effect
The 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.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Impact bias
The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
EstimationOutcome
Implicit association
The tendency for response speed to reflect how strongly ideas are linked in memory.
RecallAssociation
Implicit bias
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.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Impostor Syndrome
The tendency to doubt one's competence and fear being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of ability.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Information bias
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Ingroup bias
The tendency to favor, trust, defend, or positively interpret people and claims associated with one's own group more readily than comparable outsiders.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
Insensitivity to sample size
The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples and overread sparse data.
EstimationBaseline
Intentionality bias
The tendency to judge human action to be intentional rather than accidental.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Interoceptive bias
The tendency for hunger, fatigue, pain, or other bodily states to distort judgment.
EstimationBaseline
Just-world fallacy
The tendency to assume that people usually get what they deserve, which encourages reinterpretation of suffering, injustice, or bad luck as somehow earned.
Causal AttributionOutcomeMedia & politicsConflict & dialogue
Lag effect
The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session.
RecallAssociation
Law of the instrument
An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Less-is-better effect
The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
DecisionBaseline
Leveling and sharpening
The tendency for memories to lose some details while exaggerating others as they are retold over time.
RecallAssociation
Levels-of-processing effect
The tendency for deeper, more meaningful encoding to produce stronger memory than shallow encoding.
RecallAssociation
List-length effect
A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.
RecallBaseline
Loss aversion
The tendency for losses or giving something up to feel worse than equivalent gains feel good.
DecisionAssociationPersonal decisionsForecasting & planning
Memory inhibition
Being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items.
RecallAssociation
Mere exposure effect
The tendency to like, trust, or feel more comfortable with something simply because it has become familiar.
DecisionInertiaMedia & politicsPersonal decisions
Misinformation effect
Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
RecallAssociation
Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis
The tendency to interpret learning effort as a sign of poor learning rather than durable learning.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Modality effect
The tendency for the last items in a list to be remembered better when heard than when read.
RecallAssociation
Money illusion
The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
DecisionBaseline
Mood-congruent memory bias
The improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
RecallAssociation
Moral credential
The tendency to treat a prior good deed as permission for later worse behavior.
Opinion ReportingAssociation
Moral luck
The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Motivated reasoning
The tendency to use reasoning as a defense lawyer for desired conclusions rather than as an impartial search for what is most likely true.
Hypothesis AssessmentSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsPersonal decisions
Motonormativity
The tendency to treat motor vehicle use as normal while discounting harms that would stand out in other contexts.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Naïve cynicism
The tendency to expect more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Naïve realism
The tendency to see one's own view as plain reality and disagreement as ignorance, bias, or irrationality.
Opinion ReportingSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsConflict & dialogue
Negativity bias
The tendency to give bad news, threats, criticism, and losses more psychological weight than equally sized positives.
Opinion ReportingRecallAssociationBaselineMedia & politicsTeams & management
Neglect of probability
The tendency to ignore or drastically underuse probability information when making decisions under uncertainty.
DecisionAssociationRisk judgmentPublic policy
Next-in-line effect
The tendency to remember less of the person who spoke just before one's own turn.
RecallAssociation
Non-adaptive choice switching
The tendency to avoid a previously optimal choice after a bad outcome, even when the situation is unchanged.
DecisionAssociation
Normalcy bias
The tendency to assume that things will keep functioning more or less normally, which leads people to underprepare for unprecedented or fast-moving disruption.
DecisionBaselineRisk judgmentPublic policy
Not invented here
An aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Objectivity illusion
The phenomena where people tend to believe that they are more objective and unbiased than others.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Observer-expectancy effect
The tendency for a researcher's expectations to unconsciously shape procedures, observations, or interpretations.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Omission bias
The tendency to judge harmful inaction as more acceptable, or less blameworthy, than equally harmful action.
Opinion ReportingInertiaPersonal decisionsPublic policy
Optimism bias
The tendency to overestimate favorable outcomes and underestimate the probability or impact of unfavorable ones, especially for oneself or one's own plans.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveForecasting & planningPersonal decisions
Ostrich effect
The tendency to avoid acknowledgment of an obviously bad situation to avoid the bad feelings that may come with acknowledgment of the situation.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Outcome bias
The tendency to judge a decision mainly by its result rather than by the quality of the reasoning behind it.
EstimationOutcomePostmortems & learningTeams & management
Outgroup favoritism
The tendency for some disadvantaged groups to evaluate outside groups more favorably than their own.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Outgroup homogeneity bias
The tendency to see members of other groups as more alike than members of one's own group.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Overconfidence effect
The tendency to be more certain about judgments, forecasts, or abilities than the evidence warrants.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeForecasting & planningTeams & management
Pareidolia
The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, faces, or messages in vague or random stimuli.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Part-list cueing effect
The tendency for seeing some items from a list to make the remaining items harder to recall.
RecallAssociation
Peak–end rule
The tendency to remember an experience mainly by its peak moment and its ending.
RecallAssociation
Perky effect
The Perky effect, where real images can influence imagined images, or be misremembered as imagined rather than real.
RecallAssociation
Persistence
The tendency for traumatic memories to recur unwantedly after the event is over.
RecallAssociation
Pessimism bias
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Phantom effect
The tendency for unavailable but mentally present options to influence current choices.
DecisionBaseline
Picture superiority effect
The tendency to remember pictured information better than the same information presented only as words.
RecallAssociation
Placement bias
The tendency to remember oneself as above average at strengths and below average at weaknesses.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Plan continuation bias
Failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different from anticipated.
DecisionInertia
Planning fallacy
The tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task.
EstimationOutcome
Plant blindness
The tendency to ignore plants in their environment and a failure to recognize and appreciate the utility of plants to life on earth.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Positivity effect
Older adults' tendency to favor good over bad information in their memories.
RecallAssociation
Present bias
The tendency to give disproportionate weight to immediate costs and payoffs relative to later ones, even when the later consequences are larger.
DecisionOutcomePersonal decisionsForecasting & planning
Prevention bias
The tendency to overvalue prevention spending relative to equally effective detection or response.
DecisionAssociation
Primacy effect
The tendency to remember items at the beginning of a sequence especially well.
RecallBaseline
Pro-innovation bias
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.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Probability matching
Sub-optimal matching of the probability of choices with the probability of reward in a stochastic context.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Processing difficulty effect
The tendency to remember information better when processing it required more effort or thought.
RecallAssociation
Projection bias
The tendency to overestimate how much your future preferences, values, and reactions will resemble whatever you feel strongly right now.
DecisionBaselinePersonal decisionsForecasting & planning
Proportionality bias
Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Pseudocertainty effect
The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is good but risk-seeking choices if it is bad.
DecisionAssociation
Puritanical bias
The tendency to explain wrongdoing as personal moral failure rather than as partly shaped by social conditions.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Pygmalion effect
The phenomenon whereby others' expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Quantification bias
The tendency to ascribe more weight to measured/quantified metrics than to unquantifiable values.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Reactance
The tendency to push back against a perceived attempt to limit one's freedom of choice, sometimes by moving toward the very option one was being steered away from.
DecisionOutcomePersonal decisionsConflict & persuasion
Reactive devaluation
Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Recency effect
A form of serial position effect where an item at the end of a list is easier to recall.
RecallBaseline
Recency illusion
The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent.
RecallOutcome
Reminiscence bump
The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.
RecallAssociation
Repetition blindness
Unexpected difficulty in remembering more than one instance of a visual sequence.
RecallAssociation
Restraint bias
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
EstimationOutcome
Rhyme as reason effect
The tendency to treat rhyming statements as more truthful or convincing.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Risk compensation
The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
DecisionAssociation
Rosy retrospection
The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
RecallOutcome
Salience bias
The tendency to focus on striking or emotional information and neglect less vivid but relevant information.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Saying is believing effect
Communicating a socially tuned message to an audience can lead to a bias of identifying the tuned message as one's own thoughts.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Scope neglect
The tendency to respond weakly to scale, treating small and large harms or benefits as if the difference barely matters.
DecisionBaseline
Selection bias
Which 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.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Selective perception
The tendency for expectations or prior beliefs to shape what one notices or perceives.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Self-relevance effect
The tendency to remember information better when it is connected to oneself.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Self-serving bias
The tendency to take disproportionate credit for successes while locating failures in bad luck, unfair circumstances, or other people.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveTeams & managementConflict & dialogue
Semmelweis reflex
The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.
DecisionInertia
Serial position effect
The tendency to remember items at the beginning and end of a sequence better than those in the middle.
RecallBaseline
Sexual overperception bias
The tendency to overestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself, and sexual underperception bias, the tendency to underestimate it.
EstimationOutcome
Shared information bias
The tendency for groups to spend too much time discussing shared information and too little on unique information.
DecisionInertia
Social comparison bias
The tendency when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who do not compete with one's own particular strengths.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Social cryptomnesia
The tendency for societies to remember that change happened while forgetting who caused it and how.
RecallAssociation
Social desirability bias
The tendency to over-report socially approved attitudes or behaviors and under-report the ones likely to invite embarrassment, judgment, or sanction.
Opinion ReportingOutcomeSurveys & interviewsTeams & management
Source confusion
Episodic memories are confused with other information, creating distorted memories.
RecallAssociation
Spacing effect
The tendency to remember information better when exposure is spaced out over time.
RecallAssociation
Spotlight effect
The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice, remember, or care about one's appearance, mistakes, or behavior.
EstimationSelf-PerspectivePersonal decisionsConflict & dialogue
Status quo bias
The tendency to prefer the current option, default, or inherited arrangement simply because it is the current option, default, or inherited arrangement.
DecisionInertiaPersonal decisionsTeams & management
Stereotype memory bias
The tendency for memory or judgment to drift toward familiar social stereotypes.
RecallInertia
Stereotyping
The tendency to assign group-based traits to an individual without enough individual evidence.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Subadditivity effect
The tendency to estimate that the likelihood of a remembered event is less than the sum of its mutually exclusive components.
EstimationHypothesis AssessmentAssociationBaseline
Subjective validation
The tendency to treat a claim as true because it fits one's beliefs, hopes, or personal experience.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Suffix effect
Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.
RecallAssociation
Suggestibility
The tendency to absorb suggested details and later misremember them as one's own memory.
RecallAssociation
Sunk cost effect
The tendency to keep investing in a losing path because of what has already been spent, even when the forward-looking case has weakened.
DecisionInertiaPersonal decisionsTeams & management
Surrogation
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.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Survivorship bias
The tendency to learn from the visible winners while overlooking the invisible failures that dropped out of view.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeResearch & evidenceForecasting & planning
System justification
The tendency to defend, rationalize, and bolster the current social or institutional order.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Systematic bias
Judgement that arises when targets of differentiating judgement become subject to effects of regression that are not equivalent.
EstimationBaseline
Tachypsychia
The tendency for time to feel slowed down or sped up during intense stress or arousal.
EstimationAssociation
Teleological bias
The tendency to engage in overgeneralized ascriptions of purpose to entities and events that did not arise from goal-directed action, design, or selection based on functional effects.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Telescoping effect
The tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
RecallAssociation
Testing effect
The fact that one more easily recall information one has read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.
RecallAssociation
Third-person effect
The tendency to believe that mass-communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Time-saving bias
The tendency to misjudge how much time is saved by speed changes, especially at low versus high speeds.
EstimationAssociation
Tip of the tongue
The tendency to partly retrieve a memory while remaining unable to pull up the needed word or item.
RecallAssociation
Trait ascription bias
The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Travis syndrome
The tendency to overestimate the importance, uniqueness, or permanence of the present moment.
EstimationAssociation
Truth bias
People's inclination towards believing, to some degree, the communication of another person, regardless of whether or not that person is actually lying or being untruthful.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Turkey illusion
Absence of expectation of sudden trend breaks in continuous developments.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Ultimate attribution error
The tendency to explain whole outgroups in dispositional terms while excusing ingroup members more situationally.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Unit bias
The tendency to treat a standard unit or serving as the right amount to consume.
EstimationBaseline
Value selection bias
The tendency to rely on existing numerical data when reasoning in an unfamiliar context, even if calculation or numerical manipulation is required.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Verbatim effect
The tendency to remember the gist of what was said better than the exact wording.
RecallAssociation
Von Restorff effect
The tendency to remember an item better when it stands out from its surroundings.
RecallBaseline
Weber–Fechner law
Difficulty in perceiving and comparing small differences in large quantities.
EstimationBaseline
Well travelled road effect
The tendency to underestimate the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
DecisionInertia
Women are wonderful effect
The tendency to associate more good attributes with women than with men.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Worse-than-average effect
The tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Zeigarnik effect
The tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
RecallAssociation
Zero-risk bias
The preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
DecisionAssociation
Zero-sum bias
The tendency to see situations as zero-sum even when gains for one need not mean losses for another.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective