Aesthetic–usability effect
The tendency to treat attractive things as more usable than they really are.
EstimationAssociation
Pattern
Association
The mind overweights resemblance, vividness, proximity, or intuitive linkage.
83 biases
Biases with this pattern
This is the cross-cutting layer that helps the site feel more like a real reference and less like a flat list.
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
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
Boundary extension
The tendency to remember a scene as having included more surrounding space than was actually shown.
RecallAssociation
Childhood amnesia
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
RecallAssociation
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
Conjunction fallacy
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions.
EstimationAssociation
Consistency bias
The tendency to remember past attitudes or behavior as more consistent with the present than they really were.
RecallAssociation
Contrast effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus's perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
RecallAssociation
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
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
Dread aversion
Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.
DecisionAssociation
Duration neglect
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.
RecallAssociation
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 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
Fluency heuristic
The tendency to treat ideas or options that feel easier to process as better or truer.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
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
Google effect
The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
RecallAssociation
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
Hot-cold empathy gap
The tendency to underestimate the influence of visceral drives on one's attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.
EstimationAssociation
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 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 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 association
The tendency for response speed to reflect how strongly ideas are linked in memory.
RecallAssociation
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
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
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
Misinformation effect
Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
RecallAssociation
Modality effect
The tendency for the last items in a list to be remembered better when heard than when read.
RecallAssociation
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
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
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
Picture superiority effect
The tendency to remember pictured information better than the same information presented only as words.
RecallAssociation
Positivity effect
Older adults' tendency to favor good over bad information in their memories.
RecallAssociation
Prevention bias
The tendency to overvalue prevention spending relative to equally effective detection or response.
DecisionAssociation
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
Pseudocertainty effect
The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is good but risk-seeking choices if it is bad.
DecisionAssociation
Quantification bias
The tendency to ascribe more weight to measured/quantified metrics than to unquantifiable values.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociation
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
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
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
Social cryptomnesia
The tendency for societies to remember that change happened while forgetting who caused it and how.
RecallAssociation
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
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
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
Tachypsychia
The tendency for time to feel slowed down or sped up during intense stress or arousal.
EstimationAssociation
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
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
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
Verbatim effect
The tendency to remember the gist of what was said better than the exact wording.
RecallAssociation
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