Search the atlas or filter by field of impact. Each page follows the same structure, so browsing stays fast even when the concept gets slippery.
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 judging an argument's logic by whether its conclusion feels believable. A valid argument can be rejected because its conclusion seems false, while an invalid argument can be accepted because its conclusion matches what we already think.
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 using misinformation in reasoning after learning that it was false. A correction can update a stated belief while the original claim continues to supply the causal story that explains what happened.
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 the tendency to see a society, institution, or culture as broadly worsening while idealizing a selectively remembered past.
Group attribution error is treating a group's average, a prominent member's act, or an official position as though it describes every individual in the group.
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 finding a repeated claim more believable because familiarity feels like evidence.
Misattribution of memory is remembering information but assigning it to the wrong source, time, person, or context.
The misinformation effect is a change in memory after misleading information arrives following an event. Later wording, discussion, headlines, or suggestions can become blended with what a person originally saw, leaving a memory that feels direct but contains an introduced detail.
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 mistaking your first notice of a word, practice, or trend for the moment it began.
Reverse psychology is a persuasion tactic that tries to trigger reactance by advocating the opposite of the outcome the persuader wants.
The self-relevance effect is the tendency to notice and remember information better when it is connected to yourself.
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.
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.
The past does not arrive with date stamps. Telescoping is the tendency to place an event too recently (forward telescoping) or too far back (backward telescoping) when recalling when it happened. A vivid event can feel close even when it was years ago.
The third-person effect is believing that media messages influence other people more than they influence you.
The ultimate attribution error is explaining your group's good outcomes by character and its bad outcomes by circumstance, while reversing that pattern for an out-group.