List of cognitive biases

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking or patterns of deviations in judgment that occur in certain situations. The existence of most of these cognitive distortions has been proven in psychological experiments.

​​​​​​​Cognitive distortions are an example of an evolutionarily established mental behavior. Some of them are adaptive in that they encourage more efficient actions or faster decisions. Others appear to stem from a lack of appropriate thinking skills, or from the inappropriate application of skills that were adaptive in other settings.

Decision Making and Behavioral Distortions

• The craze effect — the tendency to do (or believe in) things because so many other people do (or believe in) them. Refers to groupthink, herd behavior and manias.
• Error related to particular examples — ignoring the available statistical data, in favor of special cases.
• Blind spot in relation to cognitive biases — the tendency to not compensate for their own cognitive distortions.
• Distortion in the perception of the choice made — the tendency to remember one’s choices as more correct than they actually were.
• Confirmation bias The tendency to seek or interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing concepts.
• Consistency bias The tendency to test hypotheses solely by direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
• contrast effect – amplification or underestimation of the value of one measurement when it is compared with a recently observed contrast object. For example, the death of one person may seem insignificant in comparison with the death of millions of people in the camps.
• Professional deformation — the tendency to look at things according to the rules generally accepted for one’s profession, discarding a more general point of view.
• Discrimination bias — the tendency to perceive two options as more different when they are implemented simultaneously than when they are implemented separately.
• Contribution effect — the fact that people often want to sell a certain object for much more than they are willing to pay to acquire it.
• Aversion to extreme solutions — the tendency to avoid extreme solutions, choosing intermediate ones.
• focus effect — an error in predictions that occurs when people pay too much attention to any one aspect of the phenomenon; causes errors in correctly predicting the utility of a future outcome. For example, focusing on who is to blame for a possible nuclear war diverts attention from the fact that everyone will suffer in it.
• Narrow border effect — using too narrow an approach or description of a situation or problem.
• Frame effect – different conclusions depending on how the data is presented.
• Hyperbolic discount level — the tendency of people to prefer payments that are closer in time over payments in the more distant future, the closer both payments are to the present time.
• Illusion of control — the tendency of people to believe that they can control or at least influence the outcome of events that they actually cannot influence.
• Impact Reassessment — the tendency of people to overestimate the duration or intensity of the impact of an event on their future experiences.
• Bias towards information retrieval — the tendency to seek information even when it does not affect actions.
• Irrational amplification — the tendency to make irrational decisions based on past rational decisions, or to justify actions already taken. It appears, for example, at auctions, when an item is bought above its value.
• Aversion to loss — the negative utility associated with the loss of an object turns out to be greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.
• The effect of acquaintance with the object — the tendency of people to express unreasonable sympathy for a certain object just because they are familiar with it.
• Moral trust effect — a person who is known to have no prejudice has a great chance of showing prejudice in the future. In other words, if everyone (including himself) considers a person to be sinless, then he has the illusion that his every action will also be sinless.
• The need for completion — the need to reach a conclusion on an important issue, to get an answer and to avoid feelings of doubt and uncertainty. Current circumstances (time or social pressure) may amplify this source of error.
• The need for contradiction — more rapid dissemination of more sensational, poignant or controversial messages in the open press. A. Gore claims that only a few percent of scientific publications reject global warming, but more than 50% of publications in the press designed for the general public reject it.
• Probability negation — the tendency to completely reject probabilistic issues when making decisions under conditions of uncertainty.
• Underestimation of inaction The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse and less moral than equally criminal inaction.
• Deviation towards the result — the tendency to judge decisions by their final results, instead of judging the quality of decisions by the circumstances of the point in time at which they were made. (“Winners are not judged.”)
• Planning error Tendency to underestimate task completion time.
• Rationalization after purchase The tendency to convince oneself with rational arguments that the purchase was worth the money.
• Pseudo-confidence effect The tendency to make decisions that avoid risk if the expected outcome is positive, but to make risky decisions in order to avoid a negative outcome.
• Resistance is the need to do the opposite of what someone encourages you to do, because of the need to resist seeming attempts to limit your freedom of choice.
• selective perception — the tendency that expectations influence perception.
• Deviation towards the status quo — the tendency of people to wish things to remain roughly the same.
• Preference for holistic objects — the need to complete this part of the task. It is clearly shown that people tend to eat more when large portions of food are offered than to take many small portions.
• Von Restorff effect — the tendency of people to better remember stand-alone outstanding objects. The effect of isolation, otherwise called, is the effect of human memory, when an object that stands out from a number of similar homogeneous objects is remembered better than others.
• Zero risk preference — a preference to reduce one small risk to zero rather than significantly reduce another, larger risk. For example, people would rather reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks to zero than dramatically reduce the number of accidents on the roads, even if the second effect would be more lives saved.

Distortions related to probabilities and beliefs

Many of these conative biases are often investigated in relation to how they affect business and how they affect experimental research.

• Cognitive bias under ambiguity – avoidance of action options in which the missing information makes the probability “unknown”.
• Anchor effect (or anchor effect) is a feature of making numerical decisions by a person, causing irrational shifts of answers towards the number that fell into consciousness before making a decision. The anchor effect is known to many store managers: they know that putting a high-value item (such as a $10.000 handbag) next to a cheaper but more expensive item for their category (such as a $200 key ring) will increase sales of the latter. $10.000 in this example is the anchor relative to which the key fob seems cheap.
• Attention bias — neglect of relevant information when judging a correlation or association.
• Availability heuristic — an assessment as more likely of what is more accessible in memory, that is, a deviation towards the brighter, unusual or emotionally charged.
• Cascade of available information is a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief in something becomes more and more convincing through increasing repetition in public discourse (“repeat something long enough and it becomes true”).
• Illusion of clustering The tendency to see patterns where there really aren’t any.
• Distribution completeness error — the tendency to believe that the closer the mean value is to the given value, the narrower the distribution of the data set.
• Match error — the tendency to believe that more special cases are more likely than more particular ones.
• Player error — the tendency to believe that individual random events are influenced by previous random events. For example, in the case of tossing a coin many times in a row, it may well happen that 10 “tails” will fall out in a row. If the coin is «normal», then it seems obvious to many people that the next toss is more likely to come up heads. However, this conclusion is erroneous. The probability of the next heads or tails is still 1/2.
• hawthorne effect — the phenomenon that people observed in the course of the study temporarily change their behavior or performance. Example: Increasing productivity in a factory when a commission arrives.
• The effect of knowledge in hindsight — sometimes called «I knew it would be like this» — the tendency to perceive past events as predictable.
• Illusion of correlation — an erroneous belief in the relationship of certain actions and results.
• Game related error – analysis of the problems associated with the loss of chances, using a narrow set of games.
• Observer anticipation effect — this effect occurs when the researcher expects a certain outcome and unconsciously manipulates the course of the experiment or misinterprets the data in order to discover this outcome (see also the effect of subject expectations).
• Deviation associated with optimism The tendency to systematically overestimate and be over-optimistic about the chances of success of planned activities.
• Overconfidence effect The tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities.
• Deviation towards a positive outcome — the tendency to overestimate the probability of good things when predicting.
• Dominance effect The tendency to overestimate initial events more than subsequent events.
• effect of recent The tendency to value recent events more than earlier events.
• Underestimation of the return of magnitude to the mean – the tendency to expect extraordinary system behavior to continue.
• flashback effect — the effect that people remember more events from their youth than from other life periods.
• embellishment of the past — the tendency to evaluate past events more positively than they were perceived at the moment when they actually happened.
• Selection bias is a distortion in the experimental data that is related to the way the data were collected.
• Stereotyping — expecting certain characteristics from a member of the group, without knowing any additional information about his personality.
• Subadditivity effect — the tendency to evaluate the probability of the whole as less than the probabilities of its constituent parts.
• Subjective Importance the perception of something as true if the subject’s beliefs require it to be true. This also includes perceiving coincidences as relationships.
• telescope effect — this effect consists in the fact that recent events appear more distant, and more distant events appear closer in time.
• Texas Marksman Fallacy – selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data has been collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis honestly.

Social distortions

Most of these distortions are due to attribution errors.

• Distortion in assessing the role of the subject of action — the tendency, when explaining the behavior of other people, to overemphasize the influence of their professional qualities and underestimate the influence of the situation (see also fundamental attribution error). However, paired with this distortion is the opposite tendency in evaluating one’s own actions, in which people overestimate the influence of the situation on them and underestimate the influence of their own qualities.
• Dunning-Kruger effect — cognitive distortion, which lies in the fact that «people with a low level of qualification make erroneous conclusions and make bad decisions, but are not able to realize their mistakes due to their low level of qualification.» This leads them to overestimate their own abilities, while really highly qualified people, on the contrary, tend to underestimate their abilities and suffer from insufficient self-confidence, considering others more competent. Thus, less competent people generally have a higher opinion of their own abilities than do competent people, who also tend to assume that others estimate their abilities as low as they do themselves.
• The effect of self-centeredness — it takes place when people consider themselves more responsible for the result of some collective actions than an external observer finds.
• The Barnum Effect (or Forer Effect) is the tendency to give high marks to the accuracy of descriptions of one’s personality, as if they were purposely forged specifically for them, but which in reality are general enough to be applicable to a very large number of people. For example, horoscopes.
• The False Consensus Effect is the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them.
• Fundamental attribution error is the tendency of people to overestimate explanations of other people’s behavior based on their personality traits, and at the same time underestimate the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
• The halo effect — takes place when one person is perceived by another and consists in the fact that the positive and negative features of a person “flow”, from the point of view of the perceiver, from one area of ​​uXNUMXbuXNUMXbhis personality to another.
• herd instinct — a common tendency to accept the opinions and follow the behavior of the majority in order to feel safe and avoid conflicts.
• Illusion of asymmetric insight — it seems to a person that his knowledge of his loved ones exceeds their knowledge of him.
• Illusion of transparency People overestimate the ability of others to understand them, and they also overestimate their ability to understand others.
• Distortion in favor of your group The tendency of people to give preference to those whom they consider to be members of their own group.
• The phenomenon of a «just world» — the tendency of people to believe that the world is «fair» and therefore people get «what they deserve» in accordance with their personal qualities and deeds: good people are rewarded, and bad people are punished.
• Lake Wobegon effect The human tendency to spread flattering beliefs about oneself and to consider oneself above average.
• Misrepresentation in connection with the wording of the law — this form of cultural distortion is associated with the fact that the recording of a certain law in the form of a mathematical formula creates the illusion of its real existence.
• Distortion in the assessment of the homogeneity of members of another group People perceive members of their own group as relatively more diverse than members of other groups.
• Projection Distortion — the tendency to unconsciously believe that other people share the same thoughts, beliefs, values ​​and positions as the subject.
• Distortion in one’s own favor The tendency to take greater responsibility for successes than for failures. It can also manifest itself as a tendency for people to present ambiguous information in a way that is favorable to them.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies — the tendency to engage in activities that will lead to results that (consciously or not) will confirm our beliefs.
• Justification of the system — the tendency to defend and maintain the status quo, that is, the tendency to prefer the existing social, political and economic order, and to deny change, even at the cost of sacrificing individual and collective interests.
• Distortion when attributing character traits The tendency for people to perceive themselves as relatively changeable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood, while simultaneously perceiving others as much more predictable.
• The effect of the first impression is the influence of the opinion about the person, which was formed by the subject in the first minutes at the first meeting, on the further assessment of the activity and personality of this person. They are also included in a number of mistakes often made by researchers when using the observation method along with the halo effect and others.