Apophenia
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections 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
Where an individual assumes that others have more traits in common with them than those others actually do
Causal AttributionOutcome
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Barnum effect
This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests
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 misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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 (that is, seeing phantom patterns)
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
Context neglect bias
The tendency to neglect the human context of technological challenges
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Declinism
The predisposition to view the past favorably ( rosy retrospection ) and the future unfavorably
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Domain neglect
Bias, the tendency to neglect relevant domain knowledge while solving interdisciplinary problems
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Causal AttributionOutcome
Euphoric recall
The tendency of people to remember past experiences favorably while overlooking bad experiences associated with them
RecallOutcome
Exaggerated expectation
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen
EstimationOutcome
Extension neglect
When the quantity of the sample size is not sufficiently taken into consideration when assessing the outcome, relevance or judgement
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Form function attribution bias
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot
Causal AttributionOutcome
G. I. Joe fallacy
The tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it
Causal AttributionOutcome
Gender bias
A widespread set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender. For example, the assumption that women are less suited to jobs requiring high intellectual ability. [ failed verification ] Or the assumption that people or animals are male in the absence of any indicators of gender
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Group attribution error
The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise
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Hedonic recall bias
The tendency for people who are satisfied with their wage to overestimate how much they earn, and conversely, for people who are unsatisfied with their wage to underestimate it
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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
Causal AttributionOutcome
Illusion of learning
A false belief that if you understand something you learned and acquired a knowledge about it
Opinion ReportingOutcome
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
EstimationOutcome
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. Many researchers suggest that unconscious bias occurs automatically as the brain makes quick judgments based on past experiences and background
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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
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Perceiving effort as a poor 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 assumption that motor vehicle use is an unremarkable social norm, causing people to discount harms caused by motor vehicle use compared to similar harms caused by other behaviors
Causal AttributionOutcome
Observer-expectancy effect
When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect )
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Outcome bias
The tendency to judge the quality of a decision mainly by how things turned out rather than by the quality of the reasoning under the uncertainty that existed at the time.
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
A tendency to perceive a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the Moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
Planning fallacy
The tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task
EstimationOutcome
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
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
Causal AttributionOutcome
Proportionality bias
Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories
Causal AttributionOutcome
Puritanical bias
The tendency to attribute cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing by an individual to a moral deficiency or lack of self-control rather than taking into account the impact of broader societal determinants
Causal AttributionOutcome
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. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is, in fact, long-established (see also frequency illusion ). Also recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. A memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event", such as the final lawyer's closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate
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Restraint bias
The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation
EstimationOutcome
Rosy retrospection
The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was
RecallOutcome
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
Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual
Opinion ReportingOutcome
Subjective validation
Where statements are perceived as true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences. (Compare confirmation bias .)
Hypothesis AssessmentOutcome
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
Causal AttributionOutcome
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 and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest
Causal AttributionOutcome
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
A tendency to associate more good attributes with women than with men
Opinion ReportingOutcome