Cognitive Bias Flashcards
Observer Expectancy effect
When a researcher’s cognitive bias causes them to:
- unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment.
- confirmation bias leads interpreting results incorrectly because of the tendency to look for information that conforms to their hypothesis, and overlook information that argues against it.
Solution: Double-blind experimental design helps to control for this effect.
AKA: experimenter-expectancy effect, expectancy bias, observer effect, or experimenter effect
Subject Expectancy effect
When a research subject or a patient expects a given result and unconsciously effects the outcome, or reports the expected result.
Solution: Double-blind methodology is used to eliminate the effect.
Example:
- Pacebo
- The Horse that Could Do Math: The Unintentional Clever Hans Hoax
Fundamental Cognitive Error
We underestimate how much our beliefs and theories contribute to our observations and judgements, and we don’t realize how many other ways they could have been interpreted.
False Memory
Having a memory of something that didn’t happen or a distorted memory of events.
Naïve Realism
Believing that the world is just as it appears to us through the process of our senses.
Confirmation bias
Tendency for people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypothesis.
… and overlook information that argues against it.
Illusory superiority
A cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others.
Lake Wobegon, “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Positive: Our belief in our wonderfulness gives us confidence.
Negative: Can to lead to ineffective relationships, poor decision making and ultimate failure in our leadership and our business. Can be seen as arrogant or a “know it all”.
Solution:
- Get feedback regularly. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Pay attention to both positive and negative feedback.
- Work harder and prepare more effectively.
Dunning-Kruger effect
Cognitive bias which manifests in one of two ways:
Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate - an error about the self
Skilled individuals, or individuals a skill set comes easily may find themselves with weak self-confidence, as they falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding - impostor syndrome - an error about others.
Curse of knowledge
cognitive bias
You can’t unknow what you know. You find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties.
NYTimes: Known as the curse of knowledge the problem is that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your interaction with other experts in the field further locks you into knowing what you know, thereby shutting the door to different thinking and perceptions.
In business: “It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers,”
Simple examples: game of charades, tapping a tune
Planning fallacy
A tendency for people and organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running.
Term first proposed in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
Overconfidence effect
Confidence > Accuracy
A bias in which someone’s subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy, especially when confidence is relatively high.
Introspection illusion
A cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable.
In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called “causal theories”) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
Choice Blindness - how we fool ourselves.
Choice blindness refers to ways in which people are blind to their own choices and preferences.
A type of introspection illusion.
Defeating the Curse of Knowledge: why we need outsiders.
The best ideas and executions are those that communicate with a broad market and not just our peers.
Remedy:
- involve outsiders with different skill sets, thinking and approaches to an issue
- let new ideas in
- speak out even if you are in the unpopular minority
Hype Cycle
The Hype Cycle is a branded graphical tool developed and used by IT research and advisory firm Gartner for representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.
