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.
Absent-mindedness is forgetting an intended action or location because attention was elsewhere when the memory cue needed to be created.
The argument from fallacy, or fallacy fallacy, is concluding that a claim is false because someone made a bad argument for it. Bad reasoning fails to establish a conclusion; it does not establish the opposite 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.
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 bias blind spot is readily detecting bias in other people while treating our own judgment as unusually objective. Because our reasoning feels sincere from the inside, the absence of a felt motive is mistaken for the absence of bias.
The bizarreness effect is remembering unusual or incongruous material better than ordinary material in some learning settings.
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 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 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 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.
The Delmore effect is the tendency to set clear, detailed, and articulate goals for the lower-priority areas of our lives, while our most important ambitions remain vague and unarticulated. Named after the poet Delmore Schwartz, it describes why people often have precise plans for minor tasks but only hazy intentions for the goals that matter most to them.
Effort justification is valuing something more because getting it was costly, painful, or difficult.
Essentialism is treating membership in a category as evidence of a fixed inner essence that explains how its members naturally are.
Extrinsic incentive error is overestimating how much other people are driven by visible rewards while underestimating interest, meaning, identity, and other internal motives.
Functional fixedness is overlooking a useful solution because an object or idea is locked into its familiar role.
The generation effect is remembering information better when we produce it ourselves rather than only reading or hearing it. Filling in an answer, completing a word, or explaining an idea creates a richer memory trace than passive exposure alone.
The Google effect, or digital offloading, is remembering where information can be found rather than remembering the information itself when we expect reliable access to it later. External memory changes what is worth encoding, not necessarily whether we can think.
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 hard-easy effect is a calibration pattern: confidence is often too high on difficult tasks and too low on easy ones.
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 illusion of validity is feeling confident in a judgment because the evidence forms a coherent story, even when it predicts poorly.
Illusory superiority is rating your own ability or character as better than most people's on a trait where that cannot be true for everyone.
The illusory truth effect is finding a repeated claim more believable because familiarity feels like evidence.
Implicit associations are automatic links between social categories and concepts that can be measured in rapid-response tasks, whether or not a person endorses those links explicitly.
The just-world hypothesis is the pull to believe that people get what they deserve, especially when unfairness would otherwise feel frightening or senseless.
The Lake Wobegon effect is the impossible pattern in which most people rate themselves above average on a valued trait.
Leveling and sharpening are complementary memory changes: retellings lose qualifying detail while a few salient details become more central or exaggerated.
The levels-of-processing effect is remembering information better when we process its meaning and connections rather than only its surface form. Asking what an idea means, why it matters, or how it relates to prior knowledge usually creates a more durable memory than merely noticing its sound or appearance.
The masked-man fallacy is wrongly treating a difference in what someone knows about two descriptions as proof that the descriptions refer to different things.
Memory inhibition is a cognitive bias involving the ability to keep irrelevant or redundant information from interfering with other cognitive processes, particularly recall. This form of selective forgetting allows individuals to focus on the most pertinent details by suppressing unnecessary or distracting data.
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.
The modality effect is a short-term memory advantage for the final items of an auditory list over an equivalent visual list.
The Next-in-line effect is a cognitive bias where individuals have a diminished ability to remember information presented immediately before their turn to perform or speak, such as when they are in line to give a presentation or speak in a meeting.
Observer expectancy is when an evaluator's expectations quietly shape what participants do, what gets noticed, or how ambiguous results are scored.
Out-group homogeneity bias is seeing members of another group as more alike than members of our own group: 'they are all the same; we are a collection of individuals.' Distance hides variation while familiarity makes it visible.
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 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.
Prejudice is a negative or hostile evaluation of people because of their group membership. Unlike a stereotype, which is a generalized belief, prejudice includes an evaluative attitude that can shape attention, trust, and treatment before individual evidence is considered.
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.
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.
Regression to the mean is the statistical fact that extreme measurements tend to be followed by less extreme ones, simply because extremes are partly luck. The bias is our systematic failure to expect this: we attach causal stories — credit, blame, interventions that 'worked' — to changes that are just statistics doing what statistics does.
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.
Self-consistency bias is rewriting your past views to make your present self feel more coherent than it really was.
The self-relevance effect is the tendency to notice and remember information better when it is connected to yourself.
The Semmelweis reflex is a cognitive bias wherein people tend to reject new evidence or knowledge if it contradicts established norms or beliefs. Named after Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian physician who discovered that hand-washing could drastically reduce childbed fever incidence, the term describes the tendency to dismiss or undervalue findings that conflict with accepted paradigms.
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.
The Spacing Effect is a cognitive phenomenon where learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out over time rather than when completed in immediate succession. This phenomenon highlights how distributed practice produces more robust long-term memory retention compared to massed practice (i.e., cramming), influencing both formal education and informal learning activities.
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 testing effect is a cognitive phenomenon where long-term memory retention is improved through retrieval practice and self-testing. This effect suggests that the act of recalling information strengthens the memory trace more effectively than simply studying the material repeatedly.
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the feeling of nearly retrieving a word or name while being unable to produce it. It is a memory-retrieval state, not a judgment bias in the narrow sense.
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.
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.
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.