A state of mind in which a person shows a lack of attention or awareness of their surroundings or immediate concerns, often due to preoccupation with other thoughts.

Absent–mindedness

A tendency to attribute one's own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes.

Actor–observer bias

A cognitive bias where decision making is affected by a lack of information, or "ambiguity". People tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.

Ambiguity bias

A cognitive bias whereby an individual's decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'.

Anchoring

Using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound arguments or compelling evidence. (Related to fallacy of insufficient statistics / hasty generalization)

Anecdotal fallacy

The attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities.

Anthropomorphism

A fallacy in which one prematurely claims that an idea or proposal is correct or superior, exclusively because it is new and modern.

Appeal to novelty

A statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).

Appeal to probability fallacy

The formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

Argument from fallacy

The tendency for perception to be affected by recurring thoughts, or to pay more attention to certain types of information while ignoring others.

Attentional bias

The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.

Authority bias

The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems and trust their outputs, potentially leading to errors when the automated system makes a mistake.

Automation bias

A mental shortcut relying on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.

Availability heuristic

(Another name for Frequency Illusion) A cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often.

Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon

The tendency of some people to resist accepting evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, and to strengthen their support for their original stance when challenged.

Backfire effect

The tendency to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same.

Bandwagon effect

(Same as Forer effect) The tendency to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to oneself.

Barnum effect

The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, statistical information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).

Base rate fallacy

The tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion.

Belief bias

The cognitive bias of recognizing the impact of biases on the judgment of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one's own judgment.

Bias blind spot

(Also Law of Triviality) The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Bike–shedding effect

The tendency for bizarre material to be better remembered than common material.

Bizarreness effect

The cognitive bias which causes people to think individuals are more attractive when they are in a group than when they are seen individually.

Cheerleader effect

The tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has chosen.

Choice–supportive bias

The tendency to erroneously perceive "streaks" or "clusters" in random sequences of events.

Clustering illusion

A memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive.

Confabulation

The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

Confirmation bias

A type of confirmation bias; the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.

Congruence bias

A formal fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.

Conjunction fallacy

The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.

Conservatism

A principle in cognitive psychology that describes the influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus.

Context effect

The tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning even after it has been corrected.

Continued influence effect

The enhancement or diminishment, relative to normal, of perception, cognition or related performance as a result of successive (immediately previous) or simultaneous exposure to a stimulus of lesser or greater value in the same dimension.

Contrast effect

The tendency to more easily recognize faces of the race that one is most familiar with.

Cross–race effect

Occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original.

Cryptomnesia

A type of forgetting that occurs when information is available in memory but cannot be recalled without appropriate retrieval cues.

Cue–dependent forgetting

A cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.

Curse of knowledge

The predisposition to view the past more favorably and the future more negatively.

Declinism

The phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.

Decoy effect

A set of beliefs used as a shield against the fear that one will be the victim or cause of a serious mishap. It may involve blaming the victim for their fate.

Defensive attribution hypothesis

The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).

Denomination effect

The tendency of investors to sell assets that have increased in value, while keeping assets that have dropped in value.

Disposition effect

The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.

Distinction bias

A cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of individuals to recognize their lack of ability.

Dunning–Kruger effect

The psychological observation that people's judgments of the unpleasantness of painful experiences depend very little on the duration of those experiences.

Duration neglect

The tendency to attribute a greater value (greater than the objective value) to an outcome they had to put effort into acquiring or achieving.

Effort justification

The tendency to overemphasize one's own perspective and role in events or to overestimate the importance of one's own contributions.

Egocentric bias

A cognitive bias that causes people to underestimate the influence of visceral states (e.g., hunger, pain, emotion) on their own or others' behavior or preferences.

Empathy gap

The hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.

Endowment effect

A human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continues the behavior instead of altering course.

Escalation of commitment

The view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity and function. In social contexts, this can lead to stereotyping.

Essentialism

(A form of Observer-expectancy effect) When an individual's expectations about an outcome influence their perception of events or their own behavior.

Expectation bias

(Same as Observer-expectancy effect) A researcher's cognitive bias causes them to subconsciously influence participants.

Experimenter's bias

The tendency to attribute others' motivations more to extrinsic incentives (like pay) and less to intrinsic incentives (like enjoyment or personal values) than is actually the case.

Extrinsic incentive error

A psychological phenomenon in which information regarding negative emotions tends to be forgotten more quickly than that regarding positive emotions.

Fading affect bias

An attributional type of cognitive bias whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical.

False consensus effect

A psychological phenomenon where a person recalls something that did not happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened.

False memory

A cognitive bias that occurs when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Focusing effect

(Also Barnum effect) The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Forer effect

A cognitive bias where people decide on options based on whether the options are presented with positive or negative connotations; e.g. as a loss or as a gain.

Framing effect

A cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading one to believe that it has an increased frequency.

Frequency illusion

A cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.

Functional fixedness

The tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations.

Fundamental attribution error

The mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa).

Gambler's fallacy

The phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read.

Generation effect

The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.

Google effect

The tendency to believe that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, or that a group's decision outcome must reflect the preferences of individual group members, even when information is available suggesting otherwise.

Group attribution error

The tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas.

Halo effect

A cognitive bias that manifests as overconfidence on hard tasks and underconfidence on easy tasks.

Hard–easy effect

The tendency, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it.

Hindsight bias

The fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

Hot–hand fallacy

Humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, due to increased cognitive processing or emotional arousal.

Humor effect

The tendency for people to increasingly choose a smaller-sooner reward over a larger-later reward as the delay occurs sooner rather than later in time.

Hyperbolic discounting

The tendency of individuals 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.

Identifiable victim effect

A cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created.

IKEA effect

A cognitive bias whereby people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people's knowledge of them.

Illusion of asymmetric insight

The tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events.

Illusion of control

The experience of an action being willed or chosen by oneself is retrospectively attributed to an external agent. (Less common in typical business, more psychopathological).

Illusion of external agency

The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others.

Illusion of transparency

A cognitive bias in which a person overestimates their ability to interpret and predict accurately the outcome when analyzing a set of data, in particular when the data analyzed show a very consistent pattern.

Illusion of validity

The phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists.

Illusory correlation

A cognitive bias whereby a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other persons.

Illusory superiority

The tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure.

Illusory truth effect

The tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

Impact bias

The preconscious, automatic association between concepts in memory.

Implicit association

Learned, automatic associations between social groups and attributes.

Implicit stereotypes

The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

In–group favoritism

The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Information bias

A cognitive bias that occurs when people judge the probability of obtaining a sample statistic without respect to the sample size.

Insensitivity to sample size

(Related to Sunk Cost Fallacy and Escalation of Commitment) Making irrational decisions to justify actions already taken.

Irrational escalation

The cognitive bias that a person's actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person.

Just–world hypothesis

A natural human tendency to overestimate one's capabilities; a specific form of illusory superiority.

Lake Wobegone effect

(Same as Bike-shedding effect) Argues that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Law of Triviality

A type of preference reversal that occurs when the lesser or smaller alternative of a proposition is preferred when evaluated separately, but not evaluated together.

Less–is–better effect

Two complementary types of memory distortion in which details of a memory are lost (leveling) while others are highlighted or exaggerated (sharpening) as the memory is retold.

Leveling and sharpening

A model of memory that suggests that the depth of mental processing affects memory retention, with deeper, more semantic processing leading to better recall.

Levels–of–processing effect

The finding that recall performance decreases as the length of a list to be remembered increases.

List–length effect

The tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it's better to not lose $5 than to find $5.

Loss aversion

An informal fallacy which occurs when one makes an illicit use of Leibniz's law in an argument (substituting identicals).

Masked–man fallacy

The ability not to remember irrelevant information, or to suppress retrieval of information that is no longer relevant.

Memory inhibition

Continuing a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort), even if current costs outweigh the benefits.

Sunk cost fallacy

Sunk cost fallacy in business decision

Sunk cost fallacy in personal life decision

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Sunk cost fallacy

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Sunk cost fallacy in business decision

Sunk cost fallacy in personal life decision

Sunk cost fallacy: Mitigation Strategies

Sunk cost fallacy: Positive Uses

Sunk cost fallacy: Adversarial Uses

Other Biases in the Group: To get things done, we tend to complete things we've invested time and energy in

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