Decision-making, belief and behavioral Flashcards
Ambiguity effect
The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “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 that we acquire on that subject.)
Attentional bias
The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts.
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 that it will become true”).
Backfire effect
When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink or herd behavior.
Base rate fallacy or base rate neglect
The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).
Belief bias
An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
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.
Cheerleader effect
The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one’s choice 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).
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 general ones.
Conservatism or regressive bias
A certain state or mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.
Conservatism (Bayesian)
The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
Contrast effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain perception’s stimuli 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.
Decoy effect
Preferences for either option A or option B changes when option C is presented, which is similar to option B but in no way better.
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).
Distinction bias
The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluation them separately.
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.
Endowment effect
The fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.
Essentialism
Categorizing people and things according to their essential nature, in spite of variations.
Exaggerated expectation
Based on the estimates, real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).
Experimenter’s or expectation bias
The tendency for experiments to believe, certify and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome for 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.
Framing effect
Drawing difference conclusions from the same information, depending on how or by whom that information is presented.
Frequency illusion or Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbably frequency shortly afterwards (see also recency illusion). Colloquially, this illusion is also known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
