Articles Tagged: Cognitive Bias

Articles

• AD/BC Problem - A temporal reference point problem illustrating how arbitrary historical conventions can create cognitive biases and affect our perception of historical distances, progress, and significance.
• Actor-Observer Bias - A cognitive bias where we attribute our own actions to situational factors but others' actions to their inherent personality traits.
• Affect Heuristic - A cognitive bias where people rely on emotions rather than objective information for decision-making, leading to quick but potentially biased judgments.
• Ambiguity Aversion - The psychological tendency to prefer known risks over unknown risks, even when potential payoffs are equal or lower.
• Anchoring Effect - A cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered, using it as a reference point for subsequent decisions.
• Authority Bias - The tendency to overvalue the opinions and directives of perceived experts or authority figures, often irrespective of evidence.
• Cheerleader Effect - The Cheerleader Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals appear more attractive in a group than when seen alone, a phenomenon with roots in evolutionary psychology and widespread application in social and marketing contexts.
• Curse of Knowledge - A cognitive bias where individuals struggle to communicate effectively because they assume others share their knowledge, leading to communication breakdowns.
• False Consensus Effect - The False Consensus Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals overestimate the extent to which others share their own beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Framing Effect - Discover how the way information is presented, rather than its objective content, profoundly influences our decisions and perceptions.
• Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect - A cognitive bias where individuals critically evaluate media on topics they know well but uncritically accept information on subjects outside their expertise.
• Halo Effect - A cognitive bias where an overall positive or negative impression of a person, brand, or product influences judgments about specific traits or characteristics.
• Hindsight Bias - The "I knew it all along" effect, where people overestimate their ability to have predicted past events.
• Hofstadter's Law - A self-referential adage highlighting the pervasive human tendency to underestimate the time required for complex tasks, even when accounting for this tendency itself.
• Illusory Truth Effect - The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias where repeated exposure to a statement increases its perceived truthfulness, regardless of its factual accuracy.
• Loss Aversion - Loss aversion is the psychological bias where the pain of losing something is felt more intensely than the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount.
• Mental Accounting - Explores how individuals categorize, evaluate, and manage their financial activities by creating distinct mental "accounts," often leading to irrational financial behaviors.
• Mere Ownership Effect - The psychological bias where individuals value an object more simply because they own it, often inflating its perceived worth, attractiveness, and quality.
• Observation Selection Effect - A bias that occurs because the conditions for observation affect what can be observed, leading to systematic distortions in our understanding of phenomena. We can only observe outcomes where observers exist to make the observation.
• Recency Bias - A cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. People tend to weigh recent information more heavily than older information when making decisions.
• Representativeness Heuristic - A cognitive bias where we judge probabilities based on how closely something matches a mental prototype or stereotype, often neglecting objective data.
• Scarcity Heuristic - A cognitive bias where limited availability increases perceived value, driving urgency and desirability.
• Survivorship Bias - An exploration of the cognitive and statistical error where focusing on successes leads to overlooking crucial failures.
• The Backfire Effect - An exploration of the cognitive bias where individuals strengthen their existing beliefs when confronted with contradictory evidence.
• The Barnum Effect - Discover the Barnum Effect, a common cognitive bias where people readily accept vague, general personality descriptions as uniquely tailored to them.