Apophenia
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections or patterns between unrelated things.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Category
Causal Attribution
These biases bend explanations about why events happened and who or what caused them.
35 biases
Biases in this category
Use these side by side before deciding which label best fits the judgment failure you are seeing.
Assumed similarity bias
The tendency to assume other people are more similar to oneself than they really are.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Context neglect bias
The tendency to neglect the human context of technological challenges.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Domain neglect
The tendency to ignore relevant domain knowledge when reasoning across unfamiliar fields.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Experimenter's bias
The tendency for researchers' expectations to shape what data they notice, trust, publish, or discount.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
False uniqueness bias
The tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Form function attribution bias
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Group attribution error
The tendency to project one member's traits or a group decision onto the whole group.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Illusion of control
The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Illusory correlation
Inaccurately seeing a relationship between two events related by coincidence.
Causal AttributionHypothesis 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
Intentionality bias
The tendency to judge human action to be intentional rather than accidental.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Motonormativity
The tendency to treat motor vehicle use as normal while discounting harms that would stand out in other contexts.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Objectivity illusion
The phenomena where people tend to believe that they are more objective and unbiased than others.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
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
Outgroup favoritism
The tendency for some disadvantaged groups to evaluate outside groups more favorably than their own.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
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
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
Proportionality bias
Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Selective perception
The tendency for expectations or prior beliefs to shape what one notices or perceives.
Causal AttributionSelf-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
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
System justification
The tendency to defend, rationalize, and bolster the current social or institutional order.
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
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