Cognitive Biases (3 of 10)

Loss aversion

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

Illusory truth effect

A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.

Look-elsewhere effect

An apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.

Illusion of validity

Belief that furtherly acquired information generates additional relevant data for predictions, even when it evidently does not.

Hyperbolic discounting

Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time - people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning. Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency.

Illusory correlation

Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.

Negativity bias or Negativity effect

Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

Hostile attribution bias

The "hostile attribution bias" is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.

Hot-hand fallacy

The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

Illusion of control

The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.

Irrational escalation

The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.

IKEA effect

The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.

Neglect of probability

The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

Money illusion

The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.

Mere exposure effect

The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.

Impact bias

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

Identifiable victim effect

The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.

Information bias

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

Insensitivity to sample size

The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.

Moral credential effect

a bias that occurs when a person's track record as a good egalitarian establishes in them an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license that increases the likelihood of less egalitarian decisions later.

Law of the instrument (a.k.a the law of the hammer, Maslow's hammer/gavel, or the golden hammer)

an over-reliance on a familiar tool, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Less-is-better effect

when the lesser or smaller alternative of a proposition is preferred when evaluated separately, but not evaluated together.