Cognitive Biases
A practical cognitive-bias site with clear definitions, learning paths, assessments, self-audits, and debiasing tools.
Learning Path
A path for the way repeated claims spread, harden, survive correction, and recruit social uptake long after the original evidence deserved it.
Work the pages in order, then loop back and compare which distortions happened earliest, which ones protected the first impression, and which ones interfered with later learning.
Next:
This is a deliberate sequence, not just a themed pile. Start at the top if the context is new to you.
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"). See also availability heuristic
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior
Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected. cf. misinformation effect, where the original memory is affected by incorrect information received later
The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of selection bias ). The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned
Where imagination is mistaken for a memory
The tendency to judge frequency, risk, or importance by how easily examples come to mind.
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things
The tendency to notice, seek, and remember evidence that supports the story you already prefer more readily than evidence that threatens it.
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