Cognitive Bias: Decision-Making and Behavioural Biases

• Cognitive Bias refers to a pattern of poor judgement, often triggered by a specific situation.
• Psychology experiments confirm the existence of most listed cognitive biases.
• Cognitive biases are influenced by evolution and natural selection.
• Some biases are adaptive and beneficial because they lead to effective actions and faster decisions for reproductive success and survival.
• Other biases result from brain structure faults or the misapplication of beneficial mechanisms.
• Cognitive biases occur in decision-making, behavior, probability, belief, social situations, and memory.

Decision-Making and Behavioural Biases

• Many biases are studied for their effects on belief formation, business decisions, and scientific research.
• Anchoring is the tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
• Attentional Bias is an implicit cognitive bias related to the tendency of emotionally dominant stimuli to draw and hold attention.
• Bandwagon Effect is the tendency to do or believe things because many others do or believe the same, related to groupthink and herd behavior.
• Bias blind spot is the tendency to see oneself as less biased than others.
• Choice-supportive bias involves remembering one's choices as better than they were.
• Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms existing preconceptions.
• Denomination effect is the tendency to spend more money when it is in small denominations (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., notes).
• Empathy gap is the underestimation of the influence or strength of feelings in oneself or others.
• The Endowment effect occurs when people demand much more to give up an object than they would pay to acquire it.
• Experimenter's or Expectation bias is when experimenters believe, certify, and publish data that align with their expectations, and disbelieve or discard conflicting data.
• Framing effect refers to drawing different conclusions from the same information depending on how it is presented.
• Hostile media effect refers to seeing a media report as biased due to one's strong partisan views.
• Illusion of control is the tendency to overestimate one's influence over external events.
• Impact bias leads to overestimating the length or intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
• Information bias is the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
• Irrational escalation is justifying increased investment in a decision based on prior cumulative investment, despite new evidence suggesting the decision was wrong.
• Mere exposure effect involves expressing undue liking for things merely because of familiarity.
• Negativity bias is the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or information.
• Neglect of probability is disregarding probability completely when making decisions under uncertainty.
• Post-purchase rationalization involves persuading oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
• Reactance is 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.
• Restraint bias is to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
• Status quo bias is the tendency to prefer things to stay relatively the same
• Unit bias refers to wanting to finish a given unit of a task or an item, which significantly affects food consumption in particular.
• Wishful thinking describes forming beliefs and making decisions based on what is pleasing to imagine rather than on evidence or rationality.

Biases in Probability and Belief

• Many biases are studied for how they affect business, economic decisions, and experimental research.
• The Anchoring effect involves relying too heavily on a past reference or trait when making decisions.
• Attentional bias is the tendency to neglect relevant data when judging correlations or associations.
• Availability heuristic is estimating likelihood based on what is readily available in memory, biased towards vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
• Availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process where a collective belief gains plausibility through increasing repetition in public discourse.
• Base rate neglect or base rate fallacy is the failure to base judgments on specifics, and to ignoring general statistical information.
• Hindsight bias, or the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the tendency to see past events as predictable at the time they happened.
• Illusory correlation is inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two events due to prejudice or selective information processing.
• Just-world hypothesis is believing that the world is fundamentally just, leading to rationalizing injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
• Optimism bias is to be overly optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.
• Ostrich effect is ignoring obvious negative situations.
• Overconfident effect is excessive confidence in one's answers, with a surprisingly high error rate.
• Stereotyping is expecting a group member to have certain traits without information about them.
• Subjective validation involves perceiving something as true if it aligns with one's belief and assigns perceived connections between events to coincidences.
• Well travelled road effect refers to an underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and over-estimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.

Social Biases

• Most social biases are labelled as attributional biases, focusing on how we determine responsibility for events or actions.
• Actor-observer bias is the tendency to overemphasize personality in others' behavior and situational factors in one's own behavior.
• Dunning-Kruger effect is a dual bias where unskilled people overrate their abilities due to a lack of metacognitive ability, while skilled people underrate their abilities assuming others have a similar understanding.
• Egocentric bias is claiming more responsibility for oneself for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.
• Forer effect (aka Barnum effect) is the tendency to rate descriptions as highly accurate when they are vague and general enough to apply to many people.
• False consensus effect refers to overestimating the extent to which others agree with one.
• Fundamental attribution error refers to overemphasizing personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and situational influences on the same behaviour.
• Halo effect is the spill-over of positive or negative traits from one area of a person's personality to another in others' perceptions.
• Illusion of transparency is to overestimate others' ability to know them, and at the same time to overestimate their own ability to know others.
• Illusory superiority is to overestimate one's desirable qualities, and to underestimate undesirable qualities, relative to other people.
• Ingroup bias is favoring preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
• Self-serving bias refers to claiming responsibility for successes and avoiding responsibility for failures and is to evaluate ambiguous information to their benefit.
• System justification is to defend and bolster the status quo
• Trait ascription bias: The tendency to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behaviour, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
• Ultimate attribution error refers to making an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group, similar to the fundamental attribution error.

###memory errors and biases

• Cryptomnesia is the misattribution of imagination for a memory.
• Egocentric bias is recalling the past in a self-serving manner.
• False memory is the misattribution of imagination for a memory.
• Hindsight bias is filtering memory of past events through present knowledge.
• Positivity effect: Older adults tend to recall relatively more positive information compared to negative information, especially when compared to younger adults.
• Reminiscence bump: People have a greater tendency to recall personal events from their adolescence and early adulthood compared to other periods in their lives.
• Rosy retrospection: There is a tendency to rate past events more positively than they were actually rated when they occurred.
• Self-serving bias: responsibility for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.
• Suggestibility is the misattribution of ideas suggested by a questioner for memory.
• Telescoping effect: Occurs when recent events appear to have occurred more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.
• Von Restorff effect: the tendency for an item that that is strikingly different form surrounding information is remembered more readily.

To Minimize Cognitive Biases

• Increase Awareness
• Seek Diverse Perspectives
• Challenge Your Assumptions
• Use Critical Thinking Skills
• Slow Down Decision-Making
• Consider the Opposite
• Be Data-Driven
• Cultivate Mindfulness

Cognitive biases are patterns of poor judgment influenced by evolution and natural selection. Some biases are adaptive, leading to effective actions, while others result from brain structure faults. Cognitive biases occur in decision-making, behavior, and memory.