Anchoring Bias: The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.
Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is available to us.
Bandwagon Effect: The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: The phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill in a domain overestimate their ability.
Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to overemphasize personal characteristics and ignore situational factors in judging others’ behavior.
Halo Effect: The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
Hindsight Bias: The inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place.
Illusory Correlation: Perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists.
In-group Bias: The tendency to favor one’s own group.
Loss Aversion: The tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains.
Negativity Bias: The notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things.
Projection Bias: The tendency to project your current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future.
Recency Bias: The tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.
Self-serving Bias: The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures.
Status Quo Bias: The preference for the current state of affairs, and the resistance to change.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: The tendency to continue a behavior as a result of previously invested resources (time, money, effort, etc.).
Overconfidence Bias: The tendency for someone to overestimate their own abilities.
Gambler’s Fallacy: The belief that past events can affect the probabilities in the random events of the future.
Optimism Bias: A bias that leads people to believe that they are at less risk of experiencing a negative event compared to others.
Pessimism Bias: The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes.
Framing Effect: Making different decisions based on how the same information or question is presented.
Actor-Observer Bias: The tendency to attribute one’s own actions to external causes, while attributing other people’s behaviors to internal causes.
Groupthink: The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.
Mere Exposure Effect: The tendency to develop a preference for things merely because we are familiar with them.
Bystander Effect: The tendency for individuals to be less likely to help a victim when other people are present.
Choice-Supportive Bias: Once a decision is made, individuals are inclined to feel positive about it, even if the decision has flaws.
Clustering Illusion: The tendency to see patterns in random events.
Endowment Effect: The theory that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.
False Consensus Effect: The tendency to overestimate how much other people agree with us.
Herd Behavior: The tendency to follow what others are doing.
Illusion of Control: The tendency for individuals to overestimate their ability to control events.
Illusion of Validity: Believing that one’s abilities and judgments are always accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
Information Bias: The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Neglect of Probability: The disregard of probability in decision making under uncertainty.
Omission Bias: The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Outcome Bias: Judging a decision based on its eventual outcome instead of on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Overgeneralization: Making broad generalizations from a few observations.
Planning Fallacy: The tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete tasks.
Primacy Effect: The tendency to remember the first pieces of information encountered better than information accessed later.
Regression Fallacy: Ascribing cause where none exists, with a failure to account for natural fluctuations.
Restraint Bias: Overestimating one’s ability to control impulsive behavior.
Risk Compensation / Peltzman Effect: The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Selective Perception: The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Stereotyping: Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the individual.
Zero-risk Bias: Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Curse of Knowledge: Once someone knows something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it, which leads to a bias in decision-making and communication.
Default Effect: The tendency to choose an option that is pre-selected or perceived as a standard choice.
Distinction Bias: The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
Egocentric Bias: The tendency to rely too heavily on one’s own perspective and/or have a higher regard for oneself than for others.
Experimenter’s Bias: A form of confirmation bias in which an experimenter continues to adhere to a hypothesis or biases the data due to subjective belief in its truth.
Forer (or Barnum) Effect: The tendency to believe vague, general statements to be specifically meaningful, especially when they are flattering.
Functional Fixedness: The inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions.
Hedonic Adaptation: The observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.
Hyperbolic Discounting: The tendency for people to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, later rewards.
Identifiable Victim Effect: The tendency to offer greater aid when a specific, identifiable person (“victim”) is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need.
IKEA Effect: The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects they partially assembled themselves.
Impact Bias: The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Just-world Hypothesis: The tendency to believe that the world is just and therefore people get what they deserve.
Less-is-Better Effect: The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Look Elsewhere Effect: The tendency to look for information that confirms rather than disproves one’s preconceptions.
Moral Credential Effect: The phenomenon where a person’s track record of non-prejudice increases subsequent prejudice.
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 don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome: The tendency to avoid products and services that were not developed internally.
Ostrich Effect: The decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by “burying” one’s head in the sand, like an ostrich.
Outcome Sequencing Effect: The order of presented outcomes influences the perception of randomness.
Pareidolia: The tendency to interpret vague stimuli as something familiar, such as seeing shapes in clouds or faces in inanimate objects.
Peak-End Rule: The tendency to judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
Reactance: The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.
Rosy Retrospection: The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Scarcity Bias: The tendency to value an item more when it is perceived as rare or in short supply.
Self-Consistency Bias: Believing one’s opinions and beliefs remain the same over time when they actually change.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Expectations about a subject can lead to behaviors that cause the expectations to come true.
Serial Position Effect: The tendency to remember the first and last items in a series better than the middle items.
Social Comparison Bias: The tendency, when making decisions, to favor potential candidates who don’t compete with one’s own particular strengths.
Social Desirability Bias: The tendency to respond to questions in a socially desirable manner.
Spotlight Effect: The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Survivorship Bias: Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
Time-saving Bias: Underestimating the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed.
Unit Bias: The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving, package size) is perceived as the appropriate amount to use.
Weber–Fechner Law: The difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Wishful Thinking: The formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality.
Zero-sum Bias: A belief that a situation is like a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is another’s loss.
Ambiguity Effect: The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”
Attentional Bias: The tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts.
Backfire Effect: When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
Base Rate Fallacy: Ignoring available statistical data in favor of specifics.
Belief Bias: An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
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.
Contrast Effect: The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
Déformation Professionnelle: A tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession rather than from a broader perspective.
Denomination Effect: The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).
Effort Justification: When people attribute a greater value (greater than the objective value) to an outcome they had to put effort into acquiring or achieving.
Exaggerated Expectation: The tendency for high expectations to lead to disappointment.
False Memory: A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Focusing Effect: The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.
Galatea Effect: The phenomenon where people succeed (or underperform) simply because they think they should.
Hostile Attribution Bias: The tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.
Illusory Superiority: Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people.
