Cognitive Biases Flashcards
The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information you learn. For example, if you learn the average price for a car is a certain value, you will think any amount below that is a good deal, perhaps not searching for better deals.
Anchoring
The tendency to attribute your own actions to external causes while attributing other people’s actions to internal causes. For example, you attribute your high cholesterol level to genetics while you consider others to have a high level due to poor diet and lack of exercise.
Actor-observer bias
The favouring of information that conforms to your existing beliefs while discounting evidence that does not.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to see objects as only working in a particular way. For example, if you don’t have a hammer, you never consider that a big wrench can also be used to drive a nail into the wall. This could extend to people’s functions, such as not realising a personal assistant has skills to be in leadership.
Functional fixedness
The tendency for people incompetent in a certain skill to overestimate their capabilities in it. For example, people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. This is because low-ability people do not possess the self awareness and skills needed to recognise their own incompetence.
Put simply - if you don’t know something, it’s common to also lack the ability to recognise that you don’t know it.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
Apophenia
The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (i.e, seeing phantom patterns). A type of apophenia.
Clustering illusion
The 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.
Pareidolia
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory. This can be influenced by how recent, unusual or emotionally charged the memories are.
Availability bias / heuristic
The tendency to think that, once something has been noticed, then every instance of that thing is noticed thereafter - leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence.
Frequency illusion
The tendency where something that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. A type of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned.
The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon
The logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. For example, reinforcing the damaged parts of returning warplanes. A form of selection bias.
Survivorship bias
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
Attentional bias
The mental disturbance people feel when they realise their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory. This can often be experienced as psychological stress.
Cognitive dissonance
The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, regardless of the quality of the end product. An example of effort justification.
The IKEA effect
