Anthropocentric thinking
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Pattern
Self-Perspective
The bias intensifies when ego, identity, ownership, or asymmetry between self and others enters the picture.
45 biases
Biases with this pattern
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Anthropomorphism
The tendency to treat animals, objects, or abstractions as if they had human thoughts, feelings, or intentions.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
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
Cross-race effect
The tendency to distinguish faces of your own race more accurately than faces of other races.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Curse of knowledge
The tendency for better-informed people to underestimate how hard the issue looks to less-informed people.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveLearning & expertiseTeams & management
Defensive attribution hypothesis
The tendency to attribute more blame for a mishap to the person or persons involved if they are perceived as dissimilar to the person making that judgment.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Effort justification
The tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Egocentric bias
The tendency to remember the past in self-serving ways and overweight one's own perspective.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Experimenter's bias
The tendency for researchers' expectations to shape what data they notice, trust, publish, or discount.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Extrinsic incentives bias
An exception to the fundamental attribution error, where people view others as having extrinsic motivations, while viewing themselves as having intrinsic motivations.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
False consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate how many other people share one's own beliefs, preferences, habits, or reactions.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
False uniqueness bias
The tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to explain other people's behavior too quickly in terms of character while underweighting situational pressures and constraints.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveTeams & managementMedia & politics
Gender differences in eyewitness memory
The tendency for witnesses to remember more detail about someone of the same gender under some conditions.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Generation effect
The tendency to remember self-generated information better than information supplied by others.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Illusion of asymmetric insight
The tendency to think one understands others better than they understand oneself.
Opinion ReportingSelf-Perspective
Illusion of transparency
The tendency to overestimate how visible one's thoughts, feelings, or intentions are to others.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
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
Ingroup bias
The tendency to favor, trust, defend, or positively interpret people and claims associated with one's own group more readily than comparable outsiders.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
Law of the instrument
An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Motivated reasoning
The tendency to use reasoning as a defense lawyer for desired conclusions rather than as an impartial search for what is most likely true.
Hypothesis AssessmentSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsPersonal decisions
Naïve cynicism
The tendency to expect more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
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
Not invented here
An aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Objectivity illusion
The phenomena where people tend to believe that they are more objective and unbiased than others.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Optimism bias
The tendency to overestimate favorable outcomes and underestimate the probability or impact of unfavorable ones, especially for oneself or one's own plans.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveForecasting & planningPersonal decisions
Ostrich effect
The tendency to avoid acknowledgment of an obviously bad situation to avoid the bad feelings that may come with acknowledgment of the situation.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Outgroup favoritism
The tendency for some disadvantaged groups to evaluate outside groups more favorably than their own.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Outgroup homogeneity bias
The tendency to see members of other groups as more alike than members of one's own group.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Pessimism bias
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
Placement bias
The tendency to remember oneself as above average at strengths and below average at weaknesses.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Pygmalion effect
The phenomenon whereby others' expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Reactive devaluation
Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Selective perception
The tendency for expectations or prior beliefs to shape what one notices or perceives.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Self-relevance effect
The tendency to remember information better when it is connected to oneself.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Self-serving bias
The tendency to take disproportionate credit for successes while locating failures in bad luck, unfair circumstances, or other people.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveTeams & managementConflict & dialogue
Social comparison bias
The tendency when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who do not compete with one's own particular strengths.
DecisionSelf-Perspective
Spotlight effect
The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice, remember, or care about one's appearance, mistakes, or behavior.
EstimationSelf-PerspectivePersonal decisionsConflict & dialogue
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
Ultimate attribution error
The tendency to explain whole outgroups in dispositional terms while excusing ingroup members more situationally.
Causal AttributionSelf-Perspective
Worse-than-average effect
The tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.
EstimationSelf-Perspective
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