Cognitive Bias Flashcards
What is COGNITIVE BIASES?
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.[1] Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases:
Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.
Agent detection
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Ambiguity effect
The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.
Anchoring or focalism
The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).
Anthropocentric thinking
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Anthropomorphism or personification
The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions. The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception, a type of objectification.
Attentional bias
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
Attribute substitution
Occurs when a judgment has to be made (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead a more easily calculated heuristic attribute is substituted. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system.
Automation bias
The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.
Availability heuristic
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
Availability cascade
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
Backfire effect
The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs. cf. Continued influence effect.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect
The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.[
Belief bias
An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
Ben Franklin effect
A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.
Berkson’s paradox
The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.
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.
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
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).
Compassion fade
The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
Congruence bias
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
Conjunction fallacy
The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions. For example, subjects in one experiment perceived the probability of a woman being both a bank teller and a feminist as more likely than the probability of her being a bank teller.
Conservatism (belief revision)
The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
Continued influence effect
The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred. cf. Backfire effect
Contrast effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
Courtesy bias
The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.
Curse of knowledge
When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
Declinism
The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.
Decoy effect
Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.
Default effect
When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.
Denomination effect
The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).
Disposition effect
The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
Distinction bias
The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Dread aversion
Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.
Dunning–Kruger effect
The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
Duration neglect
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.
Empathy gap
The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
End-of-history illusion
The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.
Endowment effect
The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.
Exaggerated expectation
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.
Experimenter’s or expectation bias
The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.
Focusing effect
The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.
Forer effect or Barnum effect
The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. 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.
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.
Framing effect
Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
Frequency illusion
or
Baader–Meinhof phenomenon
The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of Selection bias).
The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.
The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is sometimes conflated with frequency illusion and the recency illusion.
Functional fixedness
Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
Gambler’s fallacy
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.
Groupthink
The psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.
Hard–easy effect
The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one’s ability to accomplish easy tasks.
Hindsight bias
Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.
Hostile attribution bias
The “hostile attribution bias” is the tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign
Hot-hand fallacy
The “hot-hand fallacy” (also known as the “hot hand phenomenon” or “hot hand”) is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Hyperbolic discounting
Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.
Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
Identifiable victim effect
The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.
IKEA effect
The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.
Illicit transference
Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Illusion of control
The tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events.
Illusion of validity
Believing that one’s judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
Illusory correlation
Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
Illusory truth effect
A 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. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Impact bias
The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Implicit association
The speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.
Information bias
The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Insensitivity to sample size
The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Interoceptive bias
The tendency for sensory input about the body itself to affect one’s judgement about external, unrelated circumstances. (As for example, in parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.)
Irrational escalation or Escalation of commitment
The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Law of the instrument
An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Less-is-better effect
The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Look-elsewhere effect
An apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.
Loss aversion
The perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.[76] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Mere exposure effect
The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.
Money illusion
The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
Moral credential effect
Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.
Negativity bias or Negativity effect
Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.
Neglect of probability
The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Normalcy bias
The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.