Cognitive Biases
The systematic errors in thinking — confirmation bias, anchoring, sunk cost, availability, and 50+ more.
61 entries
All behaviors in Cognitive Biases
Actor-Observer Bias
The asymmetry of attributing your own behaviour to the situation but other people's behaviour to their character — a Threat System protecting the self-image as agent-of-circumstance while reading others as agents-of-disposition.
Affect Heuristic
Substituting how you feel about a thing for what you actually know about it — a Threat System shortcut that reads the felt valence as if it were a verdict on risk, value, or truth.
Anchoring Bias
The tendency for an initial numerical or conceptual reference point to pull subsequent judgments toward itself — a Threat System shortcut that uses the first available value as the baseline even when it is irrelevant or arbitrary.
Apophenia
Perceiving meaningful patterns, connections, or signals in random or unrelated information — a Threat System's pattern-recognition system over-firing, treating noise as signal because missing a real pattern would once have been costly.
Authority Bias
The tendency to ascribe greater accuracy, value, or moral weight to the opinion of an authority figure — a Threat System outsourcing judgment to perceived rank because deference once reduced the cost of being wrong.
Availability Heuristic
Estimating the frequency or probability of an event by how easily examples come to mind — a Threat System shortcut that confuses memorability with frequency, especially under vivid, recent, or emotionally charged inputs.
Backfire Effect
The tendency for a directly-challenged belief to be held more strongly afterwards than before — a Threat System treating the correction as the attack and the entrenchment as defence of identity.
Bandwagon Effect
The tendency to adopt a belief, behaviour, or preference because many others have already adopted it — a Threat System using crowd size as a proxy for correctness because belonging once depended on tracking the group's verdicts.
Base Rate Neglect
Ignoring the underlying frequency of a category in favour of specific case information — a Threat System shortcut that weights vivid individuating detail over the statistical reality that would actually predict the outcome.
Bizarreness Effect
The tendency to remember unusual, strange, or bizarre information more readily than common information — a Threat System's memory system prioritising the anomalous because anomalies once carried disproportionate informational weight.
Commitment Consistency Bias
The drive to remain consistent with prior public commitments, even when new evidence would warrant a different stance — a Threat System protecting self-image as a coherent agent at the cost of accurate updating.
Confirmation Bias
The selective search for, weighting of, and recall of information that confirms what you already believe — a Threat System protecting belief networks from the metabolic cost of revision.
Conjunction Fallacy
Judging the conjunction of two events as more probable than one of its component events — a Threat System using narrative coherence as a substitute for probability, because the more specific story sounds more believable than the broader truth.
Curse of Knowledge
The difficulty of imagining what it is like not to know what you know — a Threat System's model of others' minds defaulting to your own, costing communication, teaching, and design that the bias makes invisible from inside expertise.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The asymmetry between competence and meta-competence — people lacking the skills to perform a task are also lacking the skills to assess their own performance — a Threat System protecting self-image where the very mechanism of evaluation has not yet been built.
Egocentric Bias
Over-weighting one's own perspective, contributions, or attention in shared situations — a Threat System using the self as the default reference frame because the self is the most accessible input the system has.
Endowment Effect
The tendency to value something more because you own it — a Reward System reading possession as proof of value, with loss aversion attaching disproportionate weight to giving up what is already held.
False Consensus Effect
Over-estimating how widely your own beliefs, preferences, or judgments are shared — a Threat System using own-views as the default model of others' views because the self is the cheapest available reference.
Familiarity Heuristic
Judging the familiar as safer, better, or more true than the unfamiliar — a Threat System using recognition as a fast proxy for verdict, because in ancestral environments familiarity correlated reliably with safety.
Framing Effect
The shift in preference or decision based on how a logically equivalent choice is presented — a Threat System using gain-frame and loss-frame as different inputs, even when the underlying outcomes are identical.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Over-attributing others' behaviour to dispositional traits while under-attributing it to situational factors — a Threat System compressing the social world into stable categories of character, because stable categories are cheaper than situational modelling.
Gambler's Fallacy
Believing that independent random events become more likely after a run of opposite outcomes — a Threat System's expectation that the world will rebalance because the system cannot stop predicting from a too-small sample.
Halo Effect
The tendency for a positive judgment in one domain to inflate judgments in unrelated domains — a Meaning System preserving the coherence of a positive impression by reading favourable traits into evidence that does not support them.
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to perceive past events as having been predictable after they have occurred — a Threat System rewriting the prior uncertainty as foresight, because the system cannot easily reconstruct the state it was in before knowing.
Horn Effect
The tendency for a negative judgment in one domain to deflate judgments in unrelated domains — a Meaning System preserving the coherence of a negative impression by reading unfavourable traits into evidence that does not support them.
Hot Hand Fallacy
Believing that streaks of success in independent random processes predict continued success — a Threat System's pattern-detection over-firing on randomness, reading runs as evidence of a transient skill or luck-state that is not actually there.
Identifiable Victim Effect
The tendency to allocate more concern, attention, or resources to a single identified individual than to a statistical mass of equivalent or greater suffering — a Belonging System responding to face-and-name as relational kin while the abstract many remain affectively invisible.
IKEA Effect
The disproportionate valuation of objects you have helped assemble or create — a Reward System binding effort to value, treating the labour invested as evidence of the object's worth regardless of its actual quality.
Illusion of Control
Believing you have more influence over outcomes than you actually do, especially in chance-dominated processes — a Threat System preferring perceived agency to felt helplessness, even when the perception is unsupported by the underlying causal structure.
Illusion of Transparency
Over-estimating how visible your internal states — emotions, thoughts, intentions — are to others — a Threat System's model of others' perception defaulting to your own felt experience, treating internal vividness as external visibility.
Impostor Phenomenon
The persistent felt-conviction that one's competence is fraudulent and discovery is imminent — a Threat System's identity-defence mechanism running in reverse, protecting self-image against the disconfirming evidence of one's own success.
In-Group Bias
The systematic preference — in attention, generosity, trust, and the benefit of the doubt — for members of a group one identifies with, even when the group boundary is arbitrary or recently formed.
Just-World Hypothesis
The conviction, often unspoken, that the world distributes outcomes in proportion to merit — that suffering is at some level deserved, and that good fortune at some level reflects good character — because a fair universe is easier for the Threat System to inhabit than an indifferent one.
Loss Aversion
The systematic weighting of losses as roughly twice as heavy as equivalent gains, so that the prospect of giving something up dominates decision-making in ways that the prospect of acquiring something does not — a steep asymmetry the Threat System inherited and the conscious mind rarely notices.
Mere Exposure Effect
The reliable tendency to prefer a stimulus — a face, a song, a logo, an idea, a turn of phrase — simply because one has encountered it before, with familiarity itself producing liking independent of the stimulus's content.
Negativity Bias
The differential weighting of negative information over positive information of equivalent magnitude — bad events attract more attention, are processed more thoroughly, and are remembered longer than good events of the same size, producing a chronically tilted picture of the world.
Optimism Bias
The systematic underestimation of one's own risk of negative outcomes — illness, accident, divorce, bankruptcy, project overrun — relative to the base rate or relative to similar others, with the conviction that the average will fall on someone else.
Out-Group Homogeneity Effect
The perception that members of groups one does not belong to are more similar to each other — in attitude, motivation, ability, and character — than members of one's own group, even when the actual variation is identical or greater on the out-group side.
Outcome Bias
The tendency to judge the quality of a decision by the quality of the outcome it produced rather than by the quality of the reasoning that produced it — the lucky win is read as wisdom, the unlucky loss as foolishness, regardless of what was known at the moment of choice.
Pareidolia
The perception of meaningful patterns — faces in clouds, voices in static, intentional shapes in random arrangements — in stimuli that contain no such patterns, produced by the perceptual system's bias toward detecting agency and meaning over missing it.
Pattern Recognition Bias
The chronic tendency of the mind to find regularities in randomness — to read a streak as a trend, a coincidence as a connection, a noisy time-series as a meaningful sequence — producing patterns the data does not contain and acting on them as if it did.
Peak-End Rule
The tendency of memory to compress an extended experience into the felt-intensity of its peak moment and the felt-quality of its ending, with the experience's duration and the bulk of its middle weighing far less than they should in the remembered summary.
Pessimism Bias
The systematic overweighting of negative outcomes when forecasting the future — a protective vigilance that began as appropriate caution and kept running after the calibration window closed.
Planning Fallacy
The systematic underestimation of how long a task will take and how much it will cost, even by people who have just lived through the same kind of overrun and know about the bias.
Pratfall Effect
The tendency of a clearly competent person to become more likeable, not less, after a small visible blunder — the warmth-after-vulnerability response the Belonging System extends to people it had been holding at a respectful distance.
Primacy Effect
The disproportionate weight that the first piece of information receives in shaping later impressions, judgements, and memory — a Threat System compression that treats the opening of a sequence as its centre of gravity.
Reactance Bias
The increase in desire for, or commitment to, a course of action when an external pressure tries to restrict it — the Threat System's defence of perceived autonomy, often firing faster and harder than the actual constraint warrants.
Recency Bias
The disproportionate weight given to the most recent information when forming judgements, forecasts, and emotional impressions — the Threat System treating the latest data point as the present trend.
Reciprocity Bias
The felt obligation to return a favour, gift, or concession — often disproportionate to the original and largely independent of whether the original was wanted, useful, or freely given.
Regression to the Mean Neglect
The failure to expect that extreme results will tend to drift back toward the underlying average — leading to over-interpretation of one-off highs and lows as durable changes in the situation or the self.
Representativeness Heuristic
The judgement of probability and category membership by how closely a case resembles a mental prototype, rather than by the underlying base rates — a Threat System shortcut that treats resemblance as evidence.
Scarcity Bias
The disproportionate increase in desire for and perceived value of items, opportunities, or relationships that appear to be in short supply — the Reward System over-weighting the felt cost of loss of opportunity.
Selection Bias
Drawing conclusions from a sample that was not gathered randomly — so the pattern you see in the data is partly the pattern of who or what made it into the data in the first place.
Self-Generation Effect
The robust memory advantage that information receives when you generate it yourself — by completing, paraphrasing, or producing it — over information that arrives ready-made and is read passively.
Self-Reference Effect
The memory advantage that information receives when it is encoded in relation to the self — when you ask 'does this describe me, does it matter to my life' — over information processed for meaning at a less personal level.
Self-Serving Bias
The systematic attributional asymmetry by which successes are credited to one's own character or effort, while failures are credited to circumstance, other people, or bad luck — protecting the self-concept at the cost of accurate causal reading.
Social Proof Bias
The tendency, under uncertainty, to take others' behaviour as evidence about the right course of action — borrowing the crowd's verdict in place of an independent judgement the situation might actually require.
Spotlight Effect
The systematic overestimation of how much other people notice, remember, and care about one's appearance, behaviour, or mistakes — treating an inner stage on which you stand as if it were the room's actual stage.
Status Quo Bias
The systematic preference for the current state of affairs over change, even when the change is neutral or favourable — defaults inherit a weight in decision-making that the evidence on their own would not give them.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
Continuing investment in a course of action because of resources already committed — money, time, effort, or identity — when the same decision, evaluated on what remains ahead, would not justify continuing.
Survivorship Bias
Drawing conclusions about success, durability, or causation by examining only the cases that survived a filter — the funds still trading, the companies still standing, the founders still talked about — while the equally informative population of failures sits silent.