Anthropocentric thinking
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Category
Opinion Reporting
Biases here distort what people say they believe, prefer, remember preferring, or think they observed.
25 biases
Biases in this category
Use these side by side before deciding which label best fits the judgment failure you are seeing.
Anthropomorphism
The tendency to treat animals, objects, or abstractions as if they had human thoughts, feelings, or intentions.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Backfire effect
The tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.
Opinion ReportingInertia
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do things because many other people do the same.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Ben Franklin effect
The tendency to like or help someone more after already doing that person a favor.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
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
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
End-of-history illusion
The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.
Opinion ReportingInertia
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
Illusion of asymmetric insight
The tendency to think one understands others better than they understand oneself.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Illusion of learning
A false belief that if you understand something you learned and acquired a knowledge about it.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Illusory superiority
The tendency to overestimate one's desirable qualities, and underestimate undesirable qualities, relative to other people.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Impostor Syndrome
The tendency to doubt one's competence and fear being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of ability.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis
The tendency to interpret learning effort as a sign of poor learning rather than durable learning.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
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
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
Omission bias
The tendency to judge harmful inaction as more acceptable, or less blameworthy, than equally harmful action.
Opinion ReportingInertiaPersonal decisionsPublic policy
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
Stereotyping
The tendency to assign group-based traits to an individual without enough individual evidence.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Third-person effect
The tendency to believe that mass-communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
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
Women are wonderful effect
The tendency to associate more good attributes with women than with men.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
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