Examples of Cognitive Biases and Cognitive Prejudices

In cognitive science, cognitive biases are understood as systematic errors in thinking, or patterned deviations, that arise from dysfunctional beliefs embedded in cognitive schemas and are readily detected through the analysis of automatic thoughts . The existence of most cognitive biases has been described by researchers, and many have been demonstrated in psychological experiments .A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.

Cognitive biases are an example of evolutionarily developed behavior. Some of them serve an adaptive function, since they promote more effective actions or faster decision-making. Others appear to arise from a lack of appropriate thinking skills, or from the inappropriate application of skills that were adaptive in other conditions.

The development and application of methods for correcting cognitive biases that cause problems of an emotional, personal or social nature is the subject of various fields of psychotherapy, in particular cognitive psychotherapy.

Biases related to behavior and decision-making

Excessive concern for success

• Amplification — investing more effort into achieving a goal than necessary, an attempt to “kill a fly with a sledgehammer”. A variant is excessively detailed planning under conditions of insufficient source data and the presence of uncertain or random factors with a strong influence on the outcome.
• Acceleration — carrying out work at a speed greater than necessary or even permissible. In the extreme case, both literally and figuratively: running across a minefield.
• Pre-emption — an unjustifiably early start to actions aimed at achieving a goal.
• Bias toward information seeking — the tendency to seek information even when it has no effect on actions or outcome.

Overestimating the likelihood of individual cases

• Overgeneralization of individual cases — the groundless extension of the characteristics of particular or even single cases onto broad sets of them. There are many varieties of this cognitive bias; the classic example is conspiracy theory.
• Contrast effect — the amplification or diminishment of the significance of one item when it is compared with a contrasting object just encountered. For example, a person is glad to have bought an inexpensive item at a store, but stops being glad after discovering another, little-known store where the same item costs twice as little.
• Baader–Meinhof phenomenon , or frequency illusion — recently learned information that reappears again after a short period of time is perceived as occurring unusually often.

Overestimating the significance of individual cases

• Outcome bias — the tendency to judge decisions by their final results, rather than assessing the quality of decisions by the circumstances of the moment when they were made (“winners are not judged”).
• Impact bias — people’s tendency to overestimate the duration or intensity of the impact of some event on their future experiences.
• Focusing effect — an error in predictions that occurs when people pay too much attention to one aspect of a phenomenon; it causes errors in correctly predicting the utility of a future outcome. For example, focusing attention on who is to blame for a possible nuclear war distracts attention from the fact that everyone would suffer in it.

Overestimating one’s own abilities

• Overconfidence effect — the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities.
• Illusion of control — the tendency of people to believe that they can control, or at least influence, outcomes of events that they in fact cannot influence .
• Zero-risk bias — a preference for a controllable but potentially more harmful (due to its more frequent occurrence) situation over the opposite one, owing to an overestimation of the possibility of control. That is, a person, for their part, believes that they are completely getting rid of the risk (while not actually having full control), while from a statistical point of view this is merely a reduction of a single, not the largest, risk to zero. For example, most people would prefer to reduce the probability of terrorist attacks to zero rather than reduce road accident rates, even if the second effect would save more lives . Another common example is iatrophobia: many people fear the complications of medical interventions more than the diseases and deaths resulting from those diseases that arise from a lack of treatment (for example, anti-vaccination sentiment).

• Dunning — Kruger effect — people with a low level of competence draw erroneous conclusions, make poor decisions, and at the same time are unable to recognize their own mistakes because of their low level of competence.

Overestimating the significance of one’s own opinion/position/choice

• Choice-supportive bias — excessive persistence, attachment to one’s own choice, perceiving it as more correct than it actually is, followed by justifying it further. For example, attempts to find non-obvious advantages in a purchase and thereby justify it when another, more suitable product existed that for some reason was not bought.
• Perception of choice — it has been noted that we first make a choice and only then does the brain try to justify it, and the more meaningless
  the choice, the more we defend it. As an example, one can cite attempts to find non-obvious advantages in a purchase and thereby
  justify it when another, more suitable product existed that for some reason was not bought.
  This is exactly the principle on which destructive cults and various financial pyramid schemes operate. To some extent this effect resembles Stockholm syndrome — when the victim justifies the aggressor
• Mere-exposure effect — people’s tendency to express unwarranted liking for some object merely because they are familiar with it (patriotism, the effect of having been involved in creating an item). Perhaps all advertising that exists in the world
  works on this effect of thinking; the point is that among several unfamiliar objects we will inevitably give preference to the one we know at least something about — for example, if you need a hand cream, coming into a store you will almost certainly take the cream that you have at least once
  heard about somewhere, for example in an advertisement, over one you know nothing about at all.
• Irrational escalation — the tendency to remember one’s choice as more correct than it actually was.
• Bias blind spot — it is easier to detect flaws in other people than in oneself.

Methods for defending one’s opinion under such biases are usually:

• the Texas sharpshooter fallacy — choosing or adjusting a hypothesis to fit the results of measurements;
• confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing conceptions;
• observer-expectancy effect — unconscious manipulation of the course of an experiment in order to detect an expected result (see the Rosenthal effect and the Golem effect);
• selective perception — taking into account only those facts that are consistent with expectations.
  Selective perception is people’s tendency to pay attention to those elements of the environment that are consistent with their expectations
  and to ignore the rest. In a classic experiment, viewers watched footage of a particularly rough American football match between Princeton University and Dartmouth College; viewers from Princeton noticed almost twice as many infractions committed by the Dartmouth team as viewers from Dartmouth did, and one viewer from Dartmouth did not notice a single infraction by their own team at all. This phenomenon plays a huge role in advertising.
• Backfire effect — the tendency to become more firmly convinced that one is right in the face of evidence contradicting a person’s original, established belief. Because of the backfire effect, it can be difficult to change an interlocutor’s mind in an argument, even when presenting them with strong evidence refuting their position .

Other biases

• Resistance — a manifestation of mental inertia, disbelief in a threat, continuation of a previous course of action under conditions of urgent need to switch: when delaying the transition threatens to worsen the situation; when procrastination may lead to the loss of an opportunity to improve the situation; when faced with emergency situations, unexpected opportunities and sudden obstacles.
• Authority bias — the tendency to attribute a higher rating to the opinion of an authority figure and to rely on that opinion to a greater extent. See the Milgram experiment.
• Rosy retrospection — the tendency to rate past events more positively than they were perceived at the moment they actually occurred.
• Attentional bias —the brain tends to notice only what you like or what interests you. for example ,
  if you are a hairdresser, your colleague’s new haircut will immediately be studied in detail, while others won’t even notice it; if you love fashionable brands, any acquaintance’s new bag will catch your interest

  
• “Curse of knowledge” — the difficulty informed people have when trying to consider a problem from the point of view of less informed people.
• Frequency illusion — the brain does not notice many of the things around us until they catch our interest.
  for example, you need to buy a baby stroller and you settle on some brand; suddenly you find that strollers of that brand have started turning up very often. This is an illusion; in reality you simply started paying attention to them, not that they suddenly became widespread.
• Illusory truth effect — this is one of the most popular tools of propaganda throughout the world. It has long been known that if
  you repeat a lie long enough, loudly enough, often enough — people will start to believe the lie. If you tell a person a hundred times that they are a pig, by the hundred-and-first time they will oink!
• Professional deformation — the psychological disorientation of a person’s personality in the course of their professional activity. A tendency to look at things according to the rules generally accepted in one’s profession, discarding a more general point of view.
• Endowment effect — overvaluing a purchase immediately after acquiring it. Its consequence is loss aversion — the negative utility associated with losing an object turns out to be greater than the utility associated with acquiring it. Knowing the benefit of something they own, people are more upset by its loss than they would have been pleased by finding it, before which they had not thought about the item and accordingly had not factored in its benefit.
• Need for closure and preference for whole objects — the need to reach closure on an important question, get an answer, and avoid feelings of doubt and uncertainty. Present circumstances (time or social pressure) can amplify this source of errors. The drive for closure is one of the fundamental properties of Gestalt, the central concept of Gestalt psychology, manifesting itself, in particular, in the Zeigarnik effect. Another case is the “less-is-better” effect, in which, in the absence of a direct comparison of objects, preference is given to the one closer to its ideal, despite its value being lower.
• Regulation — the trap of continuously ordering oneself to do something, instead of sometimes acting impulsively, spontaneously, when this is more appropriate — when seeking something new, while on vacation, or resting.
• Status quo bias — people’s tendency to want things to remain approximately the same.
• Bandwagon effect, conformity — the fear of standing out from the crowd, the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people are doing (or believing) them. Related to groupthink, herd behavior and manias (see, for example, the effect of siding with the winning side ).
• Procrastination — the systematic, unjustified postponement and delaying of the start of inevitable work.
• Omission bias — a preference for greater harm resulting from inaction over harm resulting from action, due to a failure to recognize fault in inaction.
• Framing effect — the dependence of the choice of a decision option on the form in which the original information is presented. Thus, changing the wording of a question, while its semantic content remains identical, can cause the percentage of positive (negative) answers to change from 20% to 80% or more . Word choice can make up a substantial part of how information is presented. For any formulation of a discount pricing scheme for certain categories of buyers, there exists a financially equivalent presentation of prices with markups for additional categories of buyers; however, using it can lead to a significant drop in revenue and is therefore not applied.

• Pseudocertainty effect — the tendency to make decisions aimed at avoiding risk when the expected outcome is positive, but to make risky decisions in order to avoid a negative outcome (manifests as part of the framing effect).
• Division — the attempt to carry out two or more tasks simultaneously that require conscious attention, which is fundamentally indivisible.
• Articulation — continuous verbalizing of one’s thoughts about what seems to be true.
• Reversion — the systematic return to thoughts about hypothetical past actions aimed at preventing losses resulting from irreversible events that have occurred, at correcting the uncorrectable, at changing the unchangeable past. Guilt and shame are forms of reversion.
• Time-saving bias — the human tendency to misjudge the amount of time that can be saved (or lost) as a result of increasing (or decreasing) speed.
• Planning fallacy — the tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete tasks, and the cost and duration of project implementation, especially for new, complex, large or unique projects. A particular case of the planning fallacy found expression in Murphy’s law: “Every job takes longer than you think.”
• Reactance — a person’s need to do the opposite of what someone is urging them to do, arising from a need to resist perceived attempts to restrict freedom of choice. Under reactance, an individual often acts to their own detriment.
• Need for confrontation — deliberately seeking out an interlocutor with a different opinion in order to prove one’s own point to them.
• Congruence bias — the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, while neglecting or rejecting indirect testing.

Socially conditioned biases

A large group of biases related to behavior and decision-making. Most of them are related to attribution errors.

Self-serving biases

• End-of-history illusion — according to a large-scale study[10] from 2013, people of any age believe that their personality has changed a great deal in the past, but will change little in the future.
• Out-group homogeneity bias — people perceive members of their own group as relatively more diverse than members of other groups.
• In-group favoritism — people’s tendency to give preference to those whom they consider to be members of their own group.
• Projection bias — the tendency to unconsciously assume that other people share the same thoughts, beliefs, values and positions as oneself.
• Self-serving bias — the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than for failures. This can also manifest itself as people’s tendency to present ambiguous information in a way that is favorable to themselves (see In-group favoritism).
• Trait ascription bias — the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behaviour and mood, while viewing others as much more predictable. For example, the illusion of transparency — people overestimate others’ ability to understand them, and they also overestimate their own ability to understand others.
• Fundamental attribution error — the tendency for people to explain other people’s behaviour by their personal traits, underestimating situational factors, while at the same time overestimating the role and power of situational influences on their own behaviour, underestimating the personal aspect.[12]
• Lake Wobegon effect — the human tendency to report flattering beliefs about oneself and consider oneself above average (see worse-than-average effect and overconfidence effect).
• False consensus effect — the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
• False uniqueness bias — an individual’s underestimation of the prevalence among others of abilities or of desirable or successful behaviours characteristic of them.
• Egocentric bias — occurs when people consider themselves more responsible for the outcome of some joint action than an outside observer would.

Other biases

• The “door-in-the-face” phenomenon — people tend to make a concession and agree to an unattractive proposal if it is offered to them right after they refuse another, more burdensome (onerous) request.
• The “foot-in-the-door” phenomenon — after complying with an initially minor request, people tend to agree to comply with other, more burdensome demands.
• The “just-world” phenomenon — the tendency for people to believe that the world is “just” and that, consequently, people get “what they deserve”.[14]
• The Forer effect (also the Barnum effect) — the tendency to rate the accuracy of descriptions of one’s personality highly, as though they had been written specifically for you, when in fact they are general enough to apply to a very large number of people. For example, horoscopes (generalized astrological characterizations and predictions).[15]
• Halo effect — occurs in the perception of one person by another and consists in the fact that positive and negative traits of a person “spill over”, from the perceiver’s point of view, from one area of the perceived person’s personality into another (see physical attractiveness stereotype).[16]
• First-impression effect — the influence of an opinion about a person, formed by the subject in the first minutes of a first meeting, on the further evaluation of that person’s activity and personality. It is also counted among the errors often made by researchers using the observation method, alongside the halo effect and others.[17]
• Bias related to the formulation of a law — this form of cultural bias is connected with the fact that expressing some law as a mathematical formula creates the illusion of its real existence.
• Identifiable victim effect — the tendency to give more generous help to a single individual (victim) whose difficult life circumstances can be observed directly, rather than to an indeterminate group of people with similar problems.

Biases related to probability and stereotyping

Many of these cognitive biases are often studied in connection with how they affect business and how they affect experimental research.

Common errors resulting from a misunderstanding of the nature of randomness

• Primacy effect — the tendency to overweight initial events more than subsequent events.
• Gambler’s fallacy — the tendency to believe that individual random events are influenced by previous random events.
• Clustering illusion — the tendency to see patterns where none actually exist.

Overestimating or underestimating the probability of the state a person currently finds themselves in

• Survivorship bias — the tendency to underestimate data, unavailable to direct observation, on the group of the “dead”.
• Availability heuristic — assessing as more probable that which is more available in memory, that is, a bias toward what is more vivid, unusual or emotionally charged. This thinking error arises because our brain estimates the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which examples or cases come to mind, that is, by how easily they are recalled. Or, for example, a person estimates the risk of a heart attack among middle-aged people by recalling a similar case among their acquaintances
• Distribution completeness error — the tendency to believe that the closer a sample mean is to a given value, the narrower the spread of the data set.
• Stereotyping — expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without knowing any additional information about their individuality.
• Base rate fallacy — ignoring or underusing basic prior information under the influence of the specifics of the case at hand

• Recency effect (proximity aberration) — the tendency to rate the significance of recent events higher than that of earlier events.

Other biases

• Placement bias — the tendency to remember oneself as having achieved better results than other individuals in tasks where we rate our own abilities as “above average”; and likewise the tendency to remember oneself as having achieved worse results than other individuals in tasks where we rate our own abilities as “below average”.
• Selection bias — a bias in experimental data that is related to the way in which the data were collected.
• Availability cascade — a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief in something becomes increasingly plausible through its growing repetition in public discourse (“repeat something long enough and it becomes true”).
• Positive outcome bias — the tendency to overestimate the probability of good things when predicting.
• Attentional bias — the neglect of relevant information when judging a correlation or association.
• Ludic fallacy — analyzing problems involving the outcome of chance by means of a narrow set of games.
• Functional fixedness — using an object in one particular capacity prevents its subsequent use in a different capacity within the same current situation.
• Hawthorne effect — a phenomenon whereby people being observed during a study temporarily change their behaviour or performance. Example: an increase in labour productivity at a factory when a commission arrives to study labour productivity at that factory.
• Hindsight bias — sometimes called the “knew-it-all-along” effect — the tendency to perceive past events as predictable.
• Ambiguity effect — avoiding options where missing information makes the probability “unknown”.
• Illusory correlation — the perceived phenomenon of an exaggeratedly close relationship between variables which in reality either does not exist or is significantly smaller than assumed.
• Anchoring effect — a feature of human numerical decision-making that causes irrational shifts in responses toward a number that entered the mind before the decision was made.
• Context effect - the context effect is used by marketers to provoke you into buying something
  that you do not need at all. That is precisely why the layout of goods in a store is arranged not merely for convenience, but with the deliberate
  use of the context effect. Another example: one property owner managed to sell
  their apartment extremely profitably because before the buyer’s arrival they baked a fragrant sweet bun. Entering the prospective apartment, the client felt warmth and such a pleasant homely aroma that the brain simply could not avoid falling into the context trap.
• Negativity bias - we subconsciously overrate the significance of negative things. Indeed, it is precisely for
  this reason that bad news will always have a much larger audience than good news, and the offhand words of a journalist
  from a well-known news service — "the newsroom demands blood" — became a meme that is not so far from reality: newsrooms
  really do need more blood, since it guarantees a multiple increase in views
• Anchoring effect — this feature of evaluating numerical values shifts the estimate toward the initial approximation
  for example, you need to buy a coat, you go into a shop, you find a model that suits you, and after trying it on you find out it costs
  500 dollars, which is expensive for you, and you are already about to leave when suddenly a sales assistant runs up and, having asked whether
  the coat suited you, tells you that this is a unique series consisting of only 80 pieces, and moreover this model is today
  on sale with a 50 percent discount — and this is exactly where the anchoring effect kicks in, the role of the anchor here being played by
  the number 500. In all likelihood, the customer in such a situation will make the purchase without even thinking about the fact that for such
  a coat, even 250 dollars is a high price. Interestingly, the anchoring effect works regardless of whether you
  are aware of it or not. The same thing is observed with the rule of reciprocity.
  
• moral credential effect a person who is known to have no prejudices has in the future
  a greater chance of displaying those very prejudices. In other words, if everyone, including the person themselves, considers them to be sinless
  an illusion arises that any of their actions will likewise be sinless.

Biases related to memory errors

• Telescoping effect — this effect consists in the fact that recent events seem more distant, while more distant events seem closer in time.
• Cryptomnesia — a form of misattribution in which a memory is mistakenly taken for a product of the imagination. For example, a person may feel that they themselves invented a joke, when in reality they had already heard it and simply recalled it.[19]
• Egocentric bias — recalling the past in a self-aggrandizing manner, for example, remembering exam grades as better than they were, and a caught fish as bigger than it was.
• False memory — memory disturbances expressed in false recollections.[20]
• Childhood amnesia — the very weak ability of adults to reproduce memories from the period of life before 2—4 years of age[21], which may be explained by the immaturity of brain structures — such as the hippocampus and amygdala — responsible for encoding and retaining memories and which usually develop sufficiently by the age of two[22][23].
• Apparent constancy — the incorrect recollection of someone’s past positions and behaviour as resembling their present positions and behaviour.
• Semantic cognitive bias — the essence of which lies in the tendency to believe that one knows the meaning of a word, when in fact one knows only the scope of its application and use.
• Misinformation effect — occurs when the recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post factum information received[24]. It is a classic example of retroactive interference, which occurs when information received later interferes with the ability to retain previously encoded information[25].
• Levels-of-processing effect — describes the recall and reproduction of memories about a given stimulus as a function of the depth of mental processing: deeper analysis produces a more reliable, more detailed and longer-lasting trace in memory than shallow analysis[26]. For example, information is remembered better if it is generated by the individual themselves, rather than read or obtained in some other way from outside.[27]
• Self-reference effect — a phenomenon whereby memories encoded with reference to oneself are recalled better than equivalent information not related to oneself.

Belief, decision-making and behavioural

These biases affect the formation of beliefs, thought processes, business and economic decisions, and human behaviour in general.

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See also

• Examples of Cognitive Biases and Cognitive Prejudices
• The primacy effect in political science and marketing
• Edge Effect (Memory) and the Recency Effect