Cognitive Biases

Common systematic patterns of deviation from rational judgment.

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A working list of named cognitive biases, each with a one-line description of the systematic error it names. Entries cover judgment under uncertainty, memory, social perception and decision framing, so one lookup can serve a decision-review checklist or a reasoning-failure taxonomy.

Use it when

  • You are building a decision-review checklist and need consistent names for failure modes.
  • You want to label a reasoning error precisely instead of calling it generically 'bias'.

Watch out for

  • Biases overlap and some names describe the same phenomenon from different angles (the primacy effect and anchoring both involve early information).
  • Not every named bias has the same replication record; the effect can be small or context-dependent.

The data

BiasDescription
Confirmation BiasFavoring information that confirms existing beliefs.
AnchoringOver-relying on the first piece of information offered.
Availability HeuristicJudging probability by how easily examples come to mind.
Dunning-Kruger EffectUnskilled individuals overestimate their ability.
Sunk Cost FallacyContinuing an endeavor because of previously invested resources.
Hindsight BiasBelieving past events were more predictable than they were.
Bandwagon EffectAdopting beliefs or behaviors because others do.
Fundamental Attribution ErrorOverweighting personality and underweighting situation when explaining other people's behavior.
Actor-Observer BiasExplaining one's own actions by the situation but other people's actions by their character.
Self-Serving BiasCrediting successes to oneself and blaming failures on external factors.
Optimism BiasExpecting good outcomes to be more likely, and bad ones less likely, for oneself than for others.
Overconfidence EffectHolding more certainty in one's judgments than their accuracy supports.
Planning FallacyUnderestimating the time, cost and risk of a plan while overestimating its benefits.
Framing EffectReaching different decisions from logically equivalent information depending on how it is presented.
Loss AversionFeeling losses more strongly than equivalent gains, which pushes people to avoid losses.
Endowment EffectValuing something more highly merely because one owns it.
Status Quo BiasPreferring the current state of affairs and treating change as a loss.
Halo EffectLetting a favorable impression in one area color judgments of unrelated traits.
Survivorship BiasDrawing conclusions from the cases that survived a selection process while ignoring those that did not.
Base Rate NeglectGiving too little weight to how common something is in general when evaluating specific evidence.
Gambler's FallacyBelieving that independent random events are 'due' to reverse after a streak.
Recency BiasGiving disproportionate weight to the most recent events or information.
Primacy EffectRemembering and weighting the earliest items in a sequence more than later ones.
Representativeness HeuristicJudging probability by how closely something resembles a typical case rather than by statistical likelihood.
Negativity BiasGiving more weight to negative information and experiences than to positive ones of equal size.
In-Group BiasFavoring members of one's own group over outsiders in evaluation and treatment.
False Consensus EffectOverestimating how many other people share one's own beliefs and behaviors.
Curse of KnowledgeStruggling to imagine what it is like not to know something once you know it.
Spotlight EffectOverestimating how much other people notice one's appearance and actions.
Illusion of ControlOverestimating one's influence over events that are largely determined by chance.
Belief PerseveranceClinging to a belief after the evidence that supported it has been discredited.
Authority BiasAttributing greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and being unduly influenced by it.
Mere-Exposure EffectComing to prefer things simply because they are familiar.
Peak-End RuleJudging an experience mainly by its most intense moment and its ending, not by its average.
Normalcy BiasUnderestimating the likelihood and impact of a disaster because nothing like it has happened before.
Decoy EffectA third, inferior option shifts preference between two other options.
Law of the InstrumentOver-relying on a familiar tool for every problem ('if all you have is a hammer').
Bias Blind SpotRecognizing the impact of biases on others' judgment more readily than on one's own.
Clustering IllusionSeeing meaningful patterns or streaks in random data.
Affect HeuristicLetting current emotion stand in for an assessment of risk or benefit.

Fields

The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.

SectionFieldTypeExample
databiasstringConfirmation Bias
datadescriptionstringFavoring information that confirms existing bel…

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Topics

  • psychology
  • biases
  • cognition

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