Cognitive Biases

Cognitive bias is a distortion in the way we perceive reality. No matter how clever we are, we can't get rid of cognitive biases. They're thought to be instances of evolved mental behaviour.



Here's a list of the most common ones:

• Bandwagon effect: we often do and believe things because many other people do and believe the same things... It's related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias.

• Confirmation bias: a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.

• Hindsight bias: the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. It's related to believing in prophecies..

• Hawthorne effect: the tendency of people to perform or perceive differently when they know that they are being observed. Problem when it comes to research...

• Anchoring: describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

• Exposure effect: (also known as the mere exposure effect) a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behaviour.

• Choice-supportive bias: the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.

• Post-purchase rationalization: the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.

• Fundamental attribution error: the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behaviour. For example: I passed the test because I'm clever! He was successful due to good luck!