Anchoring bias

Main article: Anchoring (cognitive bias)

The anchoring bias, or focalism, is the tendency to rely too heavily—to "anchor"—on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).[11][12] Anchoring bias includes or involves the following:

Common source bias, the tendency to combine or compare research studies from the same source, or from sources that use the same methodologies or data.[13]

Conservatism bias, the tendency to insufficiently revise one's belief when presented with new evidence.[5][14][15]

Functional fixedness, a tendency limiting a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.[16]

Law of the instrument, 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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Apophenia

Main article: Apophenia

The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[17] The following are types of apophenia:

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).[12]

Illusory correlation, a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events.[18][19]

Pareidolia, a tendency to perceive a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) 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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Availability heuristic

Main article: Availability heuristic

The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is 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.[20] The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:

Anthropocentric thinking, the tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.[21]

Anthropomorphism is characterization of animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human traits, emotions, or intentions.[22] The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception,[23] a type of objectification.

Attentional bias, the tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.[24]

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. 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).[25] 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.[26][27] It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned.[28]

Implicit association, where the speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.

Salience bias, 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. See also von Restorff effect.

Selection bias, which happens when the members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population.

Survivorship bias, which is concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.

Well travelled road effect, the tendency to underestimate the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.

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Cognitive dissonance

Main article: Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.

Normalcy bias, a form of cognitive dissonance, is the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it. This can result in more value being applied to an outcome than it actually has. An example of this is the IKEA effect, 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.[29]

Ben Franklin effect, where a person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[30]

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Cognitive dissonance

Main article: Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.

Normalcy bias, a form of cognitive dissonance, is the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

Effort justification is a person's tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome if they had to put effort into achieving it. This can result in more value being applied to an outcome than it actually has. An example of this is the IKEA effect, 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.[29]

Ben Franklin effect, where a person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[30]>>20747438

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Confirmation bias

Main article: Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[31] There are multiple other cognitive biases which involve or are types of confirmation bias:

Backfire effect, a tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.[32]

Congruence bias, the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[12]

Experimenter's or expectation bias, 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.[33]

Observer-expectancy effect, 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).

Selective perception, the tendency for expectations to affect perception.

Semmelweis reflex, the tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[15]

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Egocentric bias

Main article: Egocentric bias

Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective and/or have a different perception of oneself relative to others.[34] The following are forms of egocentric bias:

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.[35]

False consensus effect, the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.[36]

False uniqueness bias, the tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.[37]

Forer effect or Barnum effect, the tendency for individuals to 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.[38]

Illusion of asymmetric insight, where people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.[39]

Illusion of control, the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[40]

Illusion of transparency, the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others, and to overestimate how well they understand others' personal mental states.

Illusion of validity, the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.[41]

Illusory superiority, the tendency to overestimate one's desirable qualities, and underestimate undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect", "better-than-average effect", or "superiority bias".)[42]

Naïve cynicism, expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.

Naïve realism, the belief that we see reality as it really is—objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who do not are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.

Overconfidence effect, a tendency to have 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.[5][43][44][45]

Planning fallacy, the tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task.[46]

Restraint bias, the tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.

Trait ascription bias, the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

Third-person effect, a tendency to believe that mass-communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.