Cognitive Bias Flashcards
(202 cards)
What is COGNITIVE BIASES?
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.[1] Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases:
Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.
Agent detection
The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Ambiguity effect
The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.
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).
Anthropocentric thinking
The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.
Anthropomorphism or personification
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.
Attentional bias
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
Attribute substitution
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.
Automation bias
The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.
Availability heuristic
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.
Availability cascade
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
Backfire effect
The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs. cf. Continued influence effect.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect
The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.[
Belief bias
An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
Ben Franklin effect
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.
Berkson’s paradox
The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.
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.
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
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).
Compassion fade
The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
Congruence bias
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.