Cognitive Biases Flashcards
Actor–observer bias
The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Defensive attribution hypothesis
Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
Dunning–Kruger effect
An effect in which incompetent people fail to realise they are incompetent because they lack the skill to distinguish between competence and incompetence. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.[73]
Egocentric bias
Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
Extrinsic incentives bias
An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
False consensus effect
The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.[74]
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect)
The tendency to 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. For example, horoscopes.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
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.
Halo effect
The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[76]
Illusion of asymmetric insight
People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.[77]
Illusion of external agency
When people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents
Illusion of transparency
People overestimate others’ ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Illusory superiority
Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as “Lake Wobegon effect”, “better-than-average effect”, or “superiority bias”.)[78]
Ingroup bias
The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Just-world hypothesis
The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Moral luck
The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event
Naïve cynicism
Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself
Naïve realism
The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Outgroup homogeneity bias
Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.[79]
Projection bias
The tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one’s future selves) share one’s current emotional states, thoughts and values.[80]
Self-serving bias
The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).[81]
Shared information bias
Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).[82]
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. (See also status quo bias.)
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.
Ultimate attribution error
Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Worse-than-average effect
A tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult[83]
Bizarreness effect
Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias
In a self-justifying manner retroactively ascribing one’s choices to be more informed than they were when they were made.
Change bias
After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one’s past performance as more difficult than it actually was[84][unreliable source?]
Childhood amnesia
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Conservatism or Regressive bias
Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough[25][26]
Consistency bias
Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[85]
Context effect
That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa)
Cross-race effect
The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia
A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.[84]
Egocentric bias
Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias
A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.[86]
False memory
A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect)
That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect
The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Hindsight bias
The inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were; also called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
Humor effect
That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.[87]
Illusion of truth effect
That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Illusory correlation
Inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.[24][50]
Leveling and Sharpening
Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[88]
Levels-of-processing effect
That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.[89]
List-length effect
A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.[90][further explanation needed]
Misinformation effect
Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.[91]
Modality effect
That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias
The improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.
Next-in-line effect
That a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before himself, if they take turns speaking.[92]
Part-list cueing effect
That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items[93]
Peak–end rule
That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g. pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence
The unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.[citation needed]
Picture superiority effect
The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.[94][95][96][97][98][99]
Positivity effect
That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect, Recency effect & Serial position effect
That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[100]
Processing difficulty effect
That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.[101]
Reminiscence bump
The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods[102]
Rosy retrospection
The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-relevance effect
That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source confusion
Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.[103]
Spacing effect
That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect
The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Stereotypical bias
Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender), e.g., “black-sounding” names being misremembered as names of criminals.[84][unreliable source?]
Suffix effect
Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.[104][105]
Suggestibility
A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Telescoping effect
The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect
The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.[106]
Tip of the tongue phenomenon
When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[84]
Verbatim effect
That the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.[107] This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
Von Restorff effect
That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items[108]
Zeigarnik effect
That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.
