Agent detection bias
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Category
Hypothesis Assessment
Biases in this cluster distort how evidence is interpreted, how rival explanations are tested, and how claims are evaluated.
36 biases
Biases in this category
Use these side by side before deciding which label best fits the judgment failure you are seeing.
Availability cascade
A belief becoming more plausible through repeated public repetition, social uptake, and feedback.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Barnum effect
The tendency to accept vague, flattering, or generic descriptions as uniquely accurate of oneself.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
Berkson's paradox
The tendency to draw misleading statistical conclusions from conditionally selected samples.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
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
Extension neglect
The tendency to judge outcomes without giving enough weight to sample size or quantity.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
False priors
Initial beliefs and knowledge which interfere with the unbiased evaluation of factual evidence and lead to incorrect conclusions.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Fluency heuristic
The tendency to treat ideas or options that feel easier to process as better or truer.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Gender bias
A widespread set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
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
Illusory correlation
Inaccurately seeing a relationship between two events related by coincidence.
Causal AttributionHypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
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
Information bias
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
Observer-expectancy effect
The tendency for a researcher's expectations to unconsciously shape procedures, observations, or interpretations.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
Probability matching
Sub-optimal matching of the probability of choices with the probability of reward in a stochastic context.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Quantification bias
The tendency to ascribe more weight to measured/quantified metrics than to unquantifiable values.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
Rhyme as reason effect
The tendency to treat rhyming statements as more truthful or convincing.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
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
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
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
Survivorship bias
The tendency to learn from the visible winners while overlooking the invisible failures that dropped out of view.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeResearch & evidenceForecasting & planning
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
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