Articles Tagged: Decision Making

Articles

• 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 Bias - Anchoring bias is a cognitive tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered, using it as a reference point that influences subsequent judgments.
• 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.
• Availability Heuristic - A cognitive bias where easily recalled information is overestimated in importance or likelihood.
• Base Rate Neglect - A cognitive bias where individuals overlook general statistical information in favor of specific, vivid details when making probability judgments.
• Bikeshedding - Bikeshedding, also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality, describes the tendency for groups to over-focus on minor issues at the expense of significant ones.
• Chesterton's Fence - The principle that you should not remove something until you understand why it was put there in the first place. A crucial concept for reformers and business leaders making changes to existing systems.
• Cognitive Dissonance - The psychological tension and discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, and the drive to reduce this inconsistency.
• Commitment and Consistency - A deep-seated psychological principle driving individuals to align their actions and beliefs with their past commitments to maintain a stable self-image.
• Compromise Effect - A cognitive bias where individuals tend to choose a middle option in a set of choices, often influenced by avoiding extremes.
• Confirmation Bias - A pervasive cognitive tendency where individuals actively seek, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms their existing beliefs or values.
• Decoy Effect (Asymmetric Dominance) - Understand how introducing a strategically inferior option can manipulate choices and make another option appear more appealing.
• Effort Justification - The psychological tendency to value outcomes more highly when significant effort has been invested in achieving them.
• Endowment Effect - The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where people value items they own more highly than identical items they do not own, leading to a reluctance to sell.
• Framing Effect - Discover how the way information is presented, rather than its objective content, profoundly influences our decisions and perceptions.
• Gambler's Fallacy - The Gambler's Fallacy is a cognitive bias where individuals mistakenly believe that past outcomes of independent random events influence future outcomes.
• Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
• Hindsight Bias - The "I knew it all along" effect, where people overestimate their ability to have predicted past events.
• Hyperbolic Discounting - Hyperbolic discounting describes our tendency to prefer immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards, even when the delayed reward is objectively more valuable.
• 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.
• Monty Hall Problem - A famous probability puzzle that demonstrates the counterintuitive nature of conditional probability and optimal decision-making under uncertainty.
• Myopic Loss Aversion - The tendency to be overly sensitive to losses when outcomes are evaluated frequently, leading to short-sighted decision-making.
• Paradox of Choice - The counterintuitive finding that too many options can lead to decision paralysis, increased anxiety, and decreased satisfaction with choices made. More options aren't always better.
• Planning Fallacy - The planning fallacy is our pervasive tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future tasks while overestimating their benefits, a bias that affects individuals and organizations alike.
• 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.
• Regression to the Mean - Understand the statistical phenomenon where extreme outcomes tend to move closer to the average upon subsequent measurements, influencing everything from sports performance to investment returns.
• Representativeness Heuristic - A cognitive bias where we judge probabilities based on how closely something matches a mental prototype or stereotype, often neglecting objective data.
• Status Quo Bias - The tendency for individuals to prefer the current state of affairs over change, even when change may be beneficial.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy - Understand the psychological trap of continuing an endeavor due to past investments, even when it's no longer beneficial, and learn how to avoid it.
• Survivorship Bias - An exploration of the cognitive and statistical error where focusing on successes leads to overlooking crucial failures.
• The IKEA Effect - When Labor Leads to Love - The cognitive bias where we overvalue products we help create, explaining our attachment to DIY projects and customized goods.