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The Abilene paradox occurs when a group collectively decides on a course of action that no individual member actually wants, because each person mistakenly believes the others want it and goes along to avoid conflict. Where groupthink is convergence on a leader's or majority's view, Abilene is unanimous agreement to something nobody prefers.
Action bias is the tendency to favor doing something over doing nothing, even when there is no evidence that acting produces better outcomes — and sometimes when the evidence favors waiting. Action feels like competence and control; inaction feels like negligence, even when it is the optimal strategy.
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.
Groupthink is a mode of thinking in cohesive groups where the desire for harmony and consensus overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives. Members self-censor doubts, dissenters are pressured, and the group converges on a decision that many individuals privately question — while feeling more confident than any of them would alone.
The overjustification effect is the tendency for extrinsic rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation: pay someone for what they already loved doing, and once the payment stops — or even while it continues — the love can fade. The activity's explanation shifts from 'I do this because I enjoy it' to 'I do this for the reward.'
The Pygmalion effect is the phenomenon whereby higher expectations placed on a person lead to improved performance by that person. Expectations leak through behavior — attention, challenge, feedback, warmth — and become self-fulfilling; its dark twin, the Golem effect, is underperformance produced by low expectations.
The representativeness heuristic is the tendency to judge the probability that something belongs to a category by how closely it resembles the typical member of that category, rather than by how likely it actually is. Because similarity is easier to assess than probability, we substitute one for the other — and ignore base rates, sample sizes, and chance in the process.
Shared information bias is the tendency of groups to spend their discussion time on information all members already know, while the unique knowledge held by individual members — often the information that would change the decision — never surfaces. Groups exist to pool knowledge, and this bias is precisely the failure to pool.
The streetlight effect is the tendency to search for answers where searching is easiest rather than where the answer is most likely to be — like the drunkard looking for his keys under the streetlight because 'that's where the light is.' In research and analytics, we measure what is measurable and quietly redefine the question to match.
Survivorship bias is drawing conclusions from the winners we can see while missing the failures that vanished from view. The visible sample feels like the whole population, so success looks more common — and more easily copied — than it really is.