Apophenia
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections or patterns between unrelated things.
Causal AttributionOutcome
Pattern
Outcome
The result of an event bends how the process, evidence, memory, or explanation is interpreted afterward.
62 biases
Biases with this pattern
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Assumed similarity bias
The tendency to assume other people are more similar to oneself than they really are.
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Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do things because many other people do the same.
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Barnum effect
The tendency to accept vague, flattering, or generic descriptions as uniquely accurate of oneself.
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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.
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Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
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Clustering illusion
The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data.
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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.
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Context neglect bias
The tendency to neglect the human context of technological challenges.
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Courtesy bias
The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.
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Declinism
The predisposition to view the past favorably and the future unfavorably.
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Domain neglect
The tendency to ignore relevant domain knowledge when reasoning across unfamiliar fields.
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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.
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Euphoric recall
The tendency of people to remember past experiences favorably while overlooking bad experiences associated with them.
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Exaggerated expectation
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.
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Extension neglect
The tendency to judge outcomes without giving enough weight to sample size or quantity.
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Form function attribution bias
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot.
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G. I. Joe fallacy
The tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it.
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Gender bias
A widespread set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender.
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Group attribution error
The tendency to project one member's traits or a group decision onto the whole group.
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Hedonic recall bias
The tendency for current satisfaction to distort how positively or negatively past experience is remembered.
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Hindsight bias
The tendency after an outcome is known, to see it as having been more obvious or predictable than it actually was beforehand.
RecallOutcomePostmortems & learningForecasting & planning
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.
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Illusion of learning
A false belief that if you understand something you learned and acquired a knowledge about it.
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Illusion of validity
The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
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Illusory correlation
Inaccurately seeing a relationship between two events related by coincidence.
Causal AttributionHypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Impact bias
The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
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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.
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Information bias
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
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Intentionality bias
The tendency to judge human action to be intentional rather than accidental.
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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
Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis
The tendency to interpret learning effort as a sign of poor learning rather than durable learning.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Moral luck
The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Motonormativity
The tendency to treat motor vehicle use as normal while discounting harms that would stand out in other contexts.
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Observer-expectancy effect
The tendency for a researcher's expectations to unconsciously shape procedures, observations, or interpretations.
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Outcome bias
The tendency to judge a decision mainly by its result rather than by the quality of the reasoning behind it.
EstimationOutcomePostmortems & learningTeams & management
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
Planning fallacy
The tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task.
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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.
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Present bias
The tendency to give disproportionate weight to immediate costs and payoffs relative to later ones, even when the later consequences are larger.
DecisionOutcomePersonal decisionsForecasting & planning
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.
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Proportionality bias
Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.
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Puritanical bias
The tendency to explain wrongdoing as personal moral failure rather than as partly shaped by social conditions.
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Reactance
The tendency to push back against a perceived attempt to limit one's freedom of choice, sometimes by moving toward the very option one was being steered away from.
DecisionOutcomePersonal decisionsConflict & persuasion
Recency illusion
The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent.
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Restraint bias
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
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Rosy retrospection
The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
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Sexual overperception bias
The tendency to overestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself, and sexual underperception bias, the tendency to underestimate it.
EstimationOutcome
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
Subjective validation
The tendency to treat a claim as true because it fits one's beliefs, hopes, or personal experience.
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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.
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Survivorship bias
The tendency to learn from the visible winners while overlooking the invisible failures that dropped out of view.
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcomeResearch & evidenceForecasting & planning
System justification
The tendency to defend, rationalize, and bolster the current social or institutional order.
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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.
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Turkey illusion
Absence of expectation of sudden trend breaks in continuous developments.
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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.
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Women are wonderful effect
The tendency to associate more good attributes with women than with men.
Opinion ReportingOutcome