Every Bias - Explained

• Bias Blind Spot: The tendency to think that oneself is less affected by cognitive biases compared to others.
• Gambler’s Fallacy: The tendency to believe that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they remain unchanged.
• Omission Bias: The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse or less moral than equally harmful inactions.
• Proportionality Bias: The innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, contributing to the acceptance of conspiracy theories.
• Moral Credential Effect: Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.
• Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures.
• Framing Effect: The tendency to draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it is presented.
• Actor-Observer Bias: The tendency to overemphasize personality over situational influences when explaining others’ behaviors, and vice versa for explaining one’s own behaviors.
• Picture Superiority Effect: Concepts learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than those learned by viewing written word counterparts.
• Outcome Bias: Judging a decision by its eventual outcome rather than the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
• Mere Exposure Effect: Developing liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar.
• Hard-Easy Effect: Overestimating one’s ability to accomplish hard tasks and underestimating the ability to accomplish easy ones.
• Survivorship Bias: Concentrating on survivors and overlooking those that did not survive, leading to skewed perspectives.
• Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (Frequency Illusion): The illusion that something recently noticed appears with high frequency shortly afterward.
• Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the likelihood of events that easily come to mind, influenced by recency, unusualness, or emotional charge.
• Dunning-Kruger Effect: Unskilled individuals overestimate their ability, while experts underestimate theirs.
• Halo Effect: Positive or negative traits of a person spilling over from one area to another in others’ perceptions.
• Pygmalion Effect: Others’ expectations influencing a person’s behavior in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Decoy Effect: Consumers changing preferences between two options when presented with a third, asymmetrically dominated option.
• Selection Bias: Bias introduced by selecting individuals, groups, or data in a way that does not achieve proper randomization.
• Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information acquired when making decisions.
• Confirmation Bias: Seeking, interpreting, and remembering information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
• Overconfidence Effect: Having excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions.
• Egocentric Bias: Relying too heavily on one’s own perspective and having a higher opinion of oneself than reality.
• Information Bias: Seeking information even when it does not affect action.
• Hindsight Bias (I-Knew-It-All-Along Effect): Perceiving past events as more predictable than they actually were.
• Projection Bias: Overestimating how much one’s future selves will share current preferences, thoughts, and values.
• Apophenia: Perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things, leading to stereotypes and overestimating correlations.
• Serial Position Effect: Recalling the first and last items in a list better than the middle ones.
• Recency Bias: Giving greater importance to the most recent event.
• Authority Bias: Attributing greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure, regardless of content.
• Unit Bias: Consuming the suggested standard amount, even if it may be too much for a particular person.
• Availability Cascade: A self-reinforcing process where a belief gains plausibility through increasing repetition.
• Bandwagon Effect: Doing things because many others do, driven by conformism or lack of information.
• Illusory Truth Effect: Identifying previously heard statements as true, even if forgotten.
• Next-in-Line Effect: Diminished recall for the words of the person who spoke immediately before in a predetermined order.
• Ingroup Bias: Giving preferential treatment to perceived members of one’s own group.
• Spotlight Effect: Overestimating the extent to which others notice our appearance or behavior.
• Choice-Supportive Bias: Remembering choices as better than they actually were, attributing positive features to chosen options.
• Ostrich Effect: Burying one’s head in the sand to avoid potentially negative but useful information.
• Selective Perception Bias: Noticing and quickly forgetting stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict prior beliefs.
• Peak-End Rule: Perceiving the average of how an experience was at its peak and how it ended.