58 Cognitive Biases That Screw Up Everything We Do

  • Published: 06-19-2014 Edited: 06-19-2014
  • "We like to think we're rational human beings. In fact, we are prone to hundreds of proven biases that cause us to think and act irrationally, and even thinking we're rational despite evidence of irrationality in others is known as blind spot bias."



    Read more in Business Insider:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-2014-6


    The 58 cognitive biases are:
    1. Affect heuristic - "The way you feel filters the way you interpret the world. "
    2. Anchoring bias - "People are overreliant on the first piece of information they hear. "
    3. Confirmation bias - "We tend to listen only to the information that confirms our preconceptions" [1]
    4. Observer-expectancy effect - "Our expectations unconsciously influence how we perceive an outcome. " [1]
    5. Bandwagon effect - "The probability of one person adopting a belief increases based on the number of people who hold that belief." [1]
    6. Bias blind spots - "Failing to recognize your cognitive biases is a bias in itself. " [1]
    7. Choice-supportive bias - "When you choose something, you tend to feel positive about it, even if the choice has flaws. " [1]
    8. Clustering illusion - "This is the tendency to see patterns in random events."
    9. Conservatism bias - "Where people believe prior evidence more than new evidence or information that has emerged." [1]
    10. Conformity - "This is the tendency of people to conform with other people." [1]
    11. Curse of knowledge - "When people who are more well-informed cannot understand the common man." [1]
    12. Decoy effect - "A phenomenon in marketing where consumers have a specific change in preference between two choices after being presented with a third choice." [1]
    13. Denomination effect - "People are less likely to spend large bills than their equivalent value in small bills or coins." [1]
    14. Duration neglect - "When the duration of an event doesn't factor enough into the way we consider it." [1]
    15. Availability heuristic - "When people overestimate the importance of information that is available to them."
    16. Empathy gap - "Where people in one state of mind fail to understand people in another state of mind." [1]
    17. Frequency illusion - "Where a word, name or thing you just learned about suddenly appears everywhere." [1]
    18. Fundamental attribution error - "This is where you attribute a person's behavior to an intrinsic quality of her identity rather than the situation she's in."
    19. Galatea Effect - "Where people succeed — or underperform — because they think they should." [1]
    20. Halo effect - "Where we take one positive attribute of someone and associate it with everything else about that person or thing." [1]
    21. Hard-Easy bias - "Where everyone is overconfident on easy problems and not confident enough for hard problems." [1]
    22. Herding - "People tend to flock together, especially in difficult or uncertain times." [1]
    23. Hindsight bias - "Of course Apple and Google would become the two most important companies in phones — tell that to Nokia, circa 2003."
    24. Hyperbolic discounting - "The tendency for people to want an immediate payoff rather than a larger gain later on." [1]
    25. Ideometer effect - "Where an idea causes you to have an unconscious physical reaction, like a sad thought that makes your eyes tear up." [1] [2]
    26. Illusion of control - "The tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, like when a sports fan thinks his thoughts or actions had an effect on the game." [1]
    27. Information bias - "The tendency to seek information when it does not affect action." [1] [2]
    28. Inter-group bias - "We view people in our group differently from how see we someone in another group." [1]
    29. Irrational escalation - "When people make irrational decisions based on past rational decisions."
    30. Negativity bias - "The tendency to put more emphasis on negative experiences rather than positive ones." [1]
    31. Omission bias - "The tendency to prefer inaction to action, in ourselves and even in politics." [1]
    32. Ostrich effect - "The decision to ignore dangerous or negative information by "burying" one's head in the sand." [1]
    33. Outcome bias - "Judging a decision based on the outcome — rather than how exactly the decision was made in the moment." [1]
    34. Overconfidence - "Some of us are too confident about our abilities, and this causes us to take greater risks in our daily lives." [1]
    35. Overoptimism - "When we believe the world is a better place than it is, we aren't prepared for the danger and violence we may encounter." [1]
    36. Pessimism bias - "This is the opposite of the overoptimism bias." [1]
    37. Placebo effect - "Where believing that something is happening helps cause it to happen." [1]
    38. Planning fallacy - "The tendency to underestimate how much time it will take to complete a task." [1]
    39. Post-purchase rationalization - "Making ourselves believe that a purchase was worth the value after the fact." [1]
    40. Priming - "Priming is where if you're introduced to an idea, you'll more readily identify related ideas." [1]
    41. Pro-innovation bias - "When a proponent of an innovation tends to overvalue its usefulness and undervalue its limitations." [1]
    42. Procrastination - "Deciding to act in favor of the present moment over investing in the future." [1]
    43. Reactance - "The desire to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do, in order to prove your freedom of choice." [1]
    44. Recency - "The tendency to weigh the latest information more heavily than older data." [1]
    45. Reciprocity - "The belief that fairness should trump other values, even when it's not in our economic or other interests." [1]
    46. Regression bias - "People take action in response to extreme situations." [1]
    47. Restraint bias - "Overestimating one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation." [1]
    48. Salience - "Our tendency to focus on the most easily-recognizable features of a person or concept." [1]
    49. Scope insensitivity - "This is where your willingness to pay for something doesn't correlate with the scale of the outcome." [1]
    50. Seersucker Illusion - "Over-reliance on expert advice. This has to do with the avoidance or responsibility." [1]
    51. Selective perception - "Allowing our expectations to influence how we perceive the world." [1]
    52. Self-enhancing transmission bias - "Everyone shares their successes more than their failures." [1]
    53. Status quo bias - "The tendency to prefer things to stay the same." [1]
    54. Stereotyping - "Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the individual." [1] [2]
    55. Survivorship bias - "An error that comes from focusing only on surviving examples, causing us to misjudge a situation." [1]
    56. Tragedy of the commons - "We overuse common resources because it's not in any individual's interest to conserve them." [1]
    57. Unit bias - "We believe that there is an optimal unit size, or a universally-acknowledged amount of a given item that is perceived as appropriate." [1]
    58. Zero-risk bias - "The preference to reduce a small risk to zero versus achieving a greater reduction in a greater risk." [1]

    To summary, our cognitive experience can be unreasonable influenced by our emotional experience and our cognition can be based upon invalid logic and influence our emotional experience.

    Related concepts in Neojungian Typology:
    Organic Contextualization, Deterministic Contextualization, Contextualization Delta, Abstract, Concrete, Execution, Processing.

    Related concepts in Big 5:
    Agreeableness, Conscientiousness.

    Related concepts in CEST:
    Experiential, Cognitive.