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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.
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.
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.
The bystander effect is the tendency for individuals to be less likely to help — or act at all — when other people are present. Responsibility diffuses across the group, everyone assumes someone else will step in, and each person reads the others' inaction as evidence that action isn't needed.
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.
Confabulation is producing a confident, coherent account to fill a gap in memory or explanation without intending to deceive.
Defensive attribution is assigning blame in ways that protect your sense that the same misfortune could not happen to you.
A false memory is a remembered event or detail that is inaccurate or did not occur, yet can feel as vivid and sincere as a true memory. Memory is reconstructive: it combines fragments, meaning, expectation, later information, and source cues rather than preserving a perfect recording.
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.
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.
Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully visible but unexpected object or event when attention is engaged elsewhere. We don't see with our eyes; we see with our attention — and attention is a narrow beam we systematically overestimate.
The just-world hypothesis is the pull to believe that people get what they deserve, especially when unfairness would otherwise feel frightening or senseless.
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 moral credential effect is the temptation to treat a past good deed as proof that a questionable choice now cannot reflect badly on you.
Moral luck is judging identical choices more harshly or more favorably because chance made their outcomes different.
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.
Omission bias is judging harm caused by action as worse than equal harm caused by inaction. Doing nothing feels morally cleaner because the causal role is less visible, even when the decision to refrain was itself a choice.
The rhyme-as-reason effect is the tendency for a rhyming claim to feel truer or wiser than an equivalent non-rhyming claim.
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.
System justification is the tendency to defend, rationalize, and see as legitimate the existing social, economic, and organizational arrangements one lives under — even when those arrangements work against one's own interests. The status quo isn't just preferred; it gets moralized.
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.