Cognitive Biases Flashcards
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.[18]
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.
Backfire Effect
The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs.[20] Note: the existence of this bias as a widespread phenomenon has been disputed in empirical studies
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.
Berkson’s Paradox
The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.
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).[13]
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.[26]
Conservatism Bias
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.
Contrast Effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
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.