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Name |
Type |
Description |
|---|---|---|
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False priors |
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent. | |
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The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown. | ||
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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). | |
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The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena. | ||
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Anthropomorphism or |
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. | |
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The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts. | ||
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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. | ||
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False priors |
The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions. | |
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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. | ||
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The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs. Note: the existence of this bias as a widespread phenomenon has been disputed in empirical studies | ||
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Base rate fallacy or |
The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important. | |
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An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion. | ||
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The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities. | ||
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The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns). | ||
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The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones. | ||
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The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. | ||
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The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses. | ||
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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. | ||
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Conservatism bias |
The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence. | |
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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 | ||
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The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object. | ||
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When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people. | ||
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The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively. | ||
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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. | ||
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When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one. | ||
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The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills). | ||
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The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value. | ||
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The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately. | ||
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Dread aversion |
Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring. | |
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The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability. | ||
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The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value. | ||
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The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others. | ||
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The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past. | ||
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The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it. | ||
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Exaggerated expectation |
The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen. | |
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | |
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Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented. | ||
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Frequency illusion or |
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. It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned. | |
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Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. | ||
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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.” | |
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False priors |
A widely held set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender. For example, the assumption that women are less suited to jobs requiring high intellectual ability. Or the assumption that people or animals are male in the absence of any indicators of gender. | |
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The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one’s ability to accomplish easy tasks | ||
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Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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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. | ||
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The tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events. | ||
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Overestimating the accuracy of one’s judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated. | ||
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Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events. | ||
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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. | ||
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The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states. | ||
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The speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated. | ||
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The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action. | ||
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The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples. | ||
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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.) | |
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Irrational escalation or |
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. | |
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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.” | ||
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The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly. | ||
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The perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it. (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect). | ||
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The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them. | ||
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The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power. | ||
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Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future. | ||
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The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty. | ||
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Non-adaptive choice switching |
After experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, the tendency to avoid the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again, even though the choice was optimal. Also known as “once bitten, twice shy” or “hot stove effect”. | |
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The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before. | ||
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When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect). | ||
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The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions). | ||
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The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias). | ||
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Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation. | ||
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The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made. | ||
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Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time. | ||
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A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived 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. | ||
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The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them. | ||
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Failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different than anticipated. | ||
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The tendency to underestimate one’s own task-completion times. | ||
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The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments. | ||
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The tendency to ignore plants in their environment and a failure to recognize and appreciate the utility of plants to life on earth. | ||
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The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation’s usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses. | ||
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The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one’s current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices. | ||
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Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories. | ||
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The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes. | ||
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The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is, in fact, long-established (see also frequency illusion). | ||
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Systematic Bias |
Judgement that arises when targets of differentiating judgement become subject to effects of regression that are not equivalent. | |
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The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to show restraint in the face of temptation. | ||
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Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense’s use of the phrase “If the gloves don’t fit, then you must acquit.” | ||
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The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases. | ||
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The tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards. | ||
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Scope neglect or |
The tendency to be insensitive to the size of a problem when evaluating it. For example, being willing to pay as much to save 2,000 children or 20,000 children | |
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The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias. | ||
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The tendency for expectations to affect perception. | ||
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The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm. | ||
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The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification). | ||
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False priors |
Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual. | |
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The tendency to judge the probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts. | ||
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Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences. | ||
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Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest. | ||
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Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility. | ||
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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.) | ||
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Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed. | ||
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The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed. | ||
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Unit bias |
The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person. | |
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Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities. | ||
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Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes. | ||
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A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men. | ||
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Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk. | ||
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A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another). |