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The actor–observer bias is the tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational factors while attributing other people's behavior to their character. When I miss a deadline, it's because the week was chaotic; when you miss one, it's because you're disorganized.
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing cycle in which a claim or risk becomes more believed simply because it is more discussed: media coverage makes it mentally available, availability makes it feel true and important, which generates more coverage and social pressure to agree. Public perception can thereby detach almost completely from underlying facts.
The backfire effect is the proposed possibility that a correction makes a false belief stronger rather than weaker. It became a popular explanation for polarized debate, but large studies suggest it is rare; resistance to correction is real, yet people usually become more accurate when given a clear correction.
Belief bias is a type of cognitive bias that occurs when an individual's evaluation of the logical validity of an argument is influenced by the believability of the conclusion. People tend to accept conclusions that align with their existing beliefs and reject those that do not, regardless of the soundness of the supporting premises.
Belief perseverance is the tendency to maintain a belief even after the evidence that originally supported it has been completely discredited. Once a belief exists, it recruits its own supporting structure — explanations, connections, identity — and survives the removal of its foundations.
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.
Change blindness is the failure to detect substantial changes to a visual scene when the change coincides with a brief disruption — a blink, a cut, a flicker, or a moment of occlusion. Large objects can be removed, swapped, or recolored without observers noticing, revealing how sparse our internal representation of the world really is.
Compassion fade is the tendency for empathy and willingness to help to decrease as the number of people in need increases. Concern peaks for a single identified individual and begins declining as early as the second person — the emotional inverse of what the arithmetic of suffering demands.
The continued influence effect is a cognitive bias where people continue to maintain beliefs based on misinformation, even after it has been debunked. Despite corrections and factual information being presented, the initial misinformation persists in influencing beliefs and decisions.
The curse of knowledge is forgetting what it is like not to know something. Once information becomes obvious to us, we overestimate how much other people can infer, understand, or hear in what we say.
Declinism is a cognitive bias characterized by a pessimistic belief that a society or an institution is inexorably declining or worsening. This perception often overlooks positive change and growth, focusing instead on nostalgia for a perceived better past. Declinism influences how individuals assess both current conditions and future prospects, often leading to an irrational emphasis on negative aspects over positive developments.
Group attribution error is a cognitive bias in which individuals erroneously attribute the behaviors or characteristics of a group to all of its members, or vice versa. This bias stems from a tendency to generalize based on limited information, leading to misconceptions and stereotypes.
Hostile attribution bias is the tendency to interpret ambiguous behavior by others as intentionally hostile. The bumped shoulder, the unanswered email, the terse comment — where intent is unclear, the biased reading defaults to malice, and the response escalates accordingly.
The illusion of transparency is overestimating how visible our thoughts, emotions, and nervousness are to other people. What feels loud inside often leaves only a faint external signal.
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias that describes how repeated exposure to information can lead to its perception as more truthful or accurate, regardless of its veracity. This phenomenon occurs because repetition makes statements easier to process, and this ease is often misattributed to truthfulness.
The misattribution of memory is a cognitive bias that involves incorrectly recalling the source or context of a particular memory. It occurs when a person attributes a memory or idea to the wrong source, leading to distortions and inaccuracies in recollection. This bias can cause individuals to believe they remember something that never actually happened or confuse the details of separate events.
The misinformation effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person's memory of an event becomes less accurate due to the influence of post-event information. This phenomenon often leads to the creation of false memories and impacts an individual's ability to recall events as they actually occurred.
Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information in ways that arrive at the conclusions we want to reach, while experiencing the process as objective. Desired conclusions get asked 'Can I believe this?'; undesired ones get asked 'Must I believe this?' — two very different evidentiary bars.
Proportionality bias is the intuition that big events must have big causes — that a world-changing outcome cannot plausibly stem from a trivial, random, or lone-actor cause. It is a core engine of conspiracy thinking and of over-engineered corporate postmortems alike.
The recency illusion is a cognitive bias where an individual perceives a linguistic phenomenon as new or recent, even though it has been present for a longer period. This is often due to a person's initial awareness or freshly encountered information, leading to the false belief that it is a recent development.
Reverse psychology is a persuasion technique that involves advocating for a behavior or outcome that is the opposite of what is desired, with the expectation that the recipient of the communication will be motivated to assert their autonomy and choose the original desired outcome. This technique often exploits the cognitive bias where individuals are motivated to preserve their sense of autonomy and status.
The self-relevance effect, a cognitive bias, is the tendency for individuals to better remember information that relates to themselves than information that has less personal relevance. This bias fundamentally affects how we process and prioritize the vast amount of information we encounter daily, making personally relevant information particularly salient.
Stereotyping is using a broad belief about a group to infer traits, ability, motives, or behavior in a particular person. A category replaces individual evidence, often with more confidence than the evidence can support.
The suffix effect is a cognitive bias that affects how information is remembered, particularly when it comes to lists and sequences. It refers to the phenomenon where the recall of the last items in a list is impaired when a distracting suffix is added immediately after the list. This effect highlights the intricacies of memory mechanisms, especially concerning auditory stimuli.
The telescoping effect is a cognitive bias that affects how individuals perceive the timing of past or future events. This phenomenon leads people to either perceive recent events as farther away than they are or perceive distant events as more recent. It often results in distorted recollections of when certain events occurred.
The third-person effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that other people are more affected by media messages than they are themselves. This perception can lead people to overestimate the influence of media on others while underestimating its effect on themselves.
Ultimate attribution error is a cognitive bias that leads to the systematic attribution of behaviors of individuals or groups based on perceived inherent characteristics, especially in cases involving in-group versus out-group dynamics. This often results in attributing positive actions of in-group members to inherent traits and negative actions to situational factors, while interpreting out-group members' positive behaviors as situational and negative behaviors as inherent.