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The affect heuristic is the tendency to let an immediate feeling of 'good' or 'bad' stand in for a deliberate evaluation of risks and benefits. Things we like are judged to be low-risk and high-benefit; things we dislike are judged high-risk and low-benefit — even though in reality risk and benefit are often positively correlated.
Anchoring is the pull of an initial number, price, or estimate on later judgment — even when the starting point is arbitrary. We adjust away from the anchor, but usually not far enough.
Anthropomorphism is interpreting an animal, object, system, or natural event through human intentions, emotions, or social traits.
The appeal to novelty is treating newness as evidence of superiority. A product, idea, or method feels like progress because it is new, even when its outcomes, fit, and reliability have not yet earned that conclusion.
Authority bias is giving a claim extra weight because it comes from a prestigious, powerful, or credentialed person, beyond what their relevant evidence and expertise justify. Authority becomes a substitute for checking the claim itself.
The availability heuristic is judging frequency, danger, or importance by how easily examples come to mind. What is vivid, recent, emotional, or repeatedly covered by media feels common — even when the base rate says otherwise.
The Ben Franklin effect is the tendency to like someone more after doing them a favor — rather than only doing favors for people we already like. The causal arrow runs backward from folk intuition: behavior shapes attitude.
The bizarreness effect is remembering unusual or incongruous material better than ordinary material in some learning settings.
The certainty effect is the tendency to overweight outcomes that are certain relative to outcomes that are merely probable. Reducing risk from 5% to 0% feels far more valuable than reducing it from 10% to 5%, though both remove the same five points of probability — certainty carries a premium that distorts otherwise consistent preferences.
The cheerleader effect is the finding that a face can be judged more attractive when seen in a group than when seen alone.
Choice overload is the phenomenon whereby having too many options can make deciding harder, reduce satisfaction with the chosen option, and sometimes prevent choosing at all. More choice is not monotonically better: beyond a point, each added option adds comparison cost, anticipated regret, and doubt.
The context effect cognitive bias refers to the influence that environmental factors can have on a person's perception and memory retrieval. When information is repeated in varied contexts, it can have an impactful influence on how effectively memory is encoded, stored, and later retrieved. Under the subcategory of repetition and memory is noticed, it highlights how external cues from the environment can either aid or hinder memory recall. Often associated with cue-dependent forgetting, the presence or absence of specific associative cues can determine the accessibility of memories.
The cross-race effect, also known as own-race bias, refers to the tendency for people to more easily recognize faces of their own race compared to faces of other races. This cognitive bias is prevalent in facial recognition tasks and has significant implications in various fields, such as criminal justice, psychological research, and social interactions.
The decoy effect is a shift in preference caused by adding a third option that nobody should choose. The decoy makes one target option look clearly superior by comparison, even though it does not improve that option itself.
The denomination effect is spending the same amount of money more freely when it is divided into smaller, easier-to-part-with units.
Distinction bias is exaggerating the importance of small differences when options are compared side by side, even though the difference would barely matter in use.
Effort justification is valuing something more because getting it was costly, painful, or difficult.
The endowment effect is valuing an item more once it is ours than we valued the identical item before owning it. Ownership changes the reference point: giving it up feels like a loss, while acquiring it had felt like a possible gain.
Extrinsic incentive error is overestimating how much other people are driven by visible rewards while underestimating interest, meaning, identity, and other internal motives.
The focusing illusion is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of whatever we are currently thinking about. As Kahneman put it: nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it. Attention inflates the weight of the attended factor in judgments of happiness, value, and choice.
The framing effect is changing a choice by changing its presentation while leaving the underlying facts the same. A 90% survival rate and a 10% mortality rate describe the same outcome, yet they invite different feelings, attention, and decisions.
The frequency illusion, often called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is the sense that something suddenly appears everywhere after we first notice it. Attention changes what enters awareness, and the new sightings are mistaken for evidence that the world changed.
The halo effect is letting one positive trait — attractiveness, prestige, polish, friendliness, a famous brand — spill into judgments about unrelated traits. A good first impression quietly becomes evidence of competence, honesty, or quality.
The identifiable-victim effect is giving more help when need is represented by one known person than by an equally serious statistical description of many people.
We tend to value things more when we helped make them. The IKEA effect is the extra attachment or willingness to pay that can follow successful assembly, customization, or creation—even when an equivalent finished version would serve just as well.
Illusory correlation is seeing a meaningful relationship between two things because their co-occurrences are vivid, even when the full data do not support one.
The illusory truth effect is finding a repeated claim more believable because familiarity feels like evidence.
In-group bias is favoring people we see as 'us' over people we see as 'them,' even when group membership is arbitrary and the evidence about individuals is equivalent. Belonging can quietly become a proxy for trust, competence, and deservingness.
A smaller option can look better when it is judged on its own, then lose as soon as it is placed beside a clearly superior alternative. The less-is-better effect is this preference reversal: people overweight an easy-to-evaluate cue and underweight total value in separate evaluation.
The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to develop a preference for things they are repeatedly exposed to. This cognitive bias suggests that familiarity with something can lead to affection, even if it was initially neutral or disinterested.
The mere ownership effect is the tendency to evaluate an object more favorably simply because you own it — independent of any transaction. Where the endowment effect concerns what you'd charge to give something up, mere ownership shows that possession alone, even momentary and unchosen, makes things seem better.
Misattribution of memory is remembering information but assigning it to the wrong source, time, person, or context.
The modality effect is a short-term memory advantage for the final items of an auditory list over an equivalent visual list.
The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias that impacts how people retrospectively evaluate experiences. According to this rule, individuals tend to judge experiences based largely on how they felt at the most intense point (the peak) and at the end, rather than on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
The picture-superiority effect is remembering pictures more readily than equivalent words in many memory tasks. A concrete image can supply a distinctive visual trace as well as a verbal meaning, giving memory more than one route back to the item.
The positivity effect is an age-related tendency, observed in some studies, to attend to and remember positive information more than negative information.
Post-purchase rationalization is defending a purchase after the fact so it feels more valuable and less regrettable. It is the consumer version of choice-supportive bias: the receipt turns a debatable option into 'the right choice.'
Projection bias is assuming that future preferences will resemble the preferences we feel right now. Hunger, excitement, loneliness, motivation, and fear masquerade as stable information about what our future selves will want.
The pseudocertainty effect is treating a conditional or partial reduction in risk as though it creates certainty in the overall situation.
Reactance is the urge to reassert freedom when a message, rule, or person feels controlling. A threatened option can become more attractive precisely because someone appears to be taking it away.
The recency effect is remembering or overweighting what came last because it is still active in short-term memory. The newest information can feel most representative even when it is only the latest item in a longer record.
Reverse psychology is a persuasion tactic that tries to trigger reactance by advocating the opposite of the outcome the persuader wants.
The rhyme-as-reason effect is the tendency for a rhyming claim to feel truer or wiser than an equivalent non-rhyming claim.
Salience bias is the tendency to focus on information that is vivid, emotionally striking, or perceptually prominent while neglecting information that is duller but often more important. What grabs attention gets weighted; what doesn't, effectively doesn't exist for the decision.
The self-relevance effect is the tendency to notice and remember information better when it is connected to yourself.
The Serial Position Effect is a cognitive bias that influences how people recall items from a list. This effect suggests that individuals tend to remember the first and last items in a series better than those in the middle. This phenomenon reveals key insights into human memory and information retention, providing a framework for understanding how we prioritize and recall data.
When a list is long enough to be difficult, its middle is often the least memorable territory. In immediate recall, people commonly recover more items from the beginning and end than from the center—a serial-position pattern rather than proof that the middle was unimportant.
Social desirability bias is giving the answer that looks respectable, safe, or acceptable rather than the most accurate answer.
The spotlight effect is overestimating how much other people notice, remember, or care about your visible mistakes and appearance.
A final, irrelevant sound can steal the special advantage of the last few spoken items. This is the suffix effect: after an auditory list, a word such as “okay” can reduce recall of the end of the list, even though listeners know it is not one of the items.
Memory is reconstructed when we retrieve it, not replayed from a recording. Suggestibility is the tendency for wording, authority, repetition, or later information to shape what people report remembering or believing—sometimes adding a detail that was never part of the original event.
The third-person effect is believing that media messages influence other people more than they influence you.
The Von Restorff effect, also known as the isolation effect, is a cognitive bias that predicts an item noticeably different from others will be more likely to be remembered. This concept hinges on the principle that unusual or distinctive features enhance memory recall within a list of otherwise homogenous items.
A change is judged against its background, not in isolation. Adding one candle is obvious in a dark room but barely registers in a brightly lit one. The Weber–Fechner tradition describes this diminishing sensitivity: as a stimulus grows, a larger absolute change is often needed for people to notice a difference.
The Zeigarnik effect is the tendency to remember interrupted or incomplete tasks better than completed ones. Unfinished business keeps a background process running: the task intrudes on attention until it is either finished or given a concrete plan.