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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 affect heuristic is the tendency to let an immediate feeling of 'good' or 'bad' stand in for a deliberate evaluation of risks and benefits. Things we like are judged to be low-risk and high-benefit; things we dislike are judged high-risk and low-benefit — even though in reality risk and benefit are often positively correlated.
Attentional bias is repeatedly noticing information that fits a current concern, goal, fear, or desire while giving less attention to other relevant signals.
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.
Automation bias is giving an automated recommendation more trust than its reliability and the surrounding evidence justify.
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.
The base-rate fallacy is judging a specific case from a vivid clue while neglecting how common the outcome was before the clue appeared. A compelling story can feel more diagnostic than the numbers that should set the starting odds.
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.
Confabulation is producing a confident, coherent account to fill a gap in memory or explanation without intending to deceive.
Conservatism cognitive bias refers to the tendency of individuals to insufficiently revise their beliefs when presented with new evidence. This bias falls under the broader category of information overload, as people tend to give disproportionate weight to their prior knowledge or beliefs and do not adequately adjust them with fresh information. The phenomenon is closely associated with the psychological difficulty of abandoning previously held concepts and the innate preference for consistency.
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.
Decision fatigue is the claimed deterioration in decision quality after a long sequence of decisions: later choices drift toward defaults, avoidance, and impulsivity as the effort of active deciding accumulates. It is practically influential — and scientifically contested.
The default effect is the tendency to end up with whatever option requires no action. Pre-selected choices are adopted at far higher rates than identical options requiring an active step — one of the largest and most reliable effects in behavioral science, and the workhorse of choice architecture.
Duration neglect is underweighting how long an experience lasted when remembering or choosing it. Retrospective evaluation often follows the peak and the ending more than the total amount of pleasure, pain, effort, or time.
The end-of-history illusion is the tendency to believe that who we are right now is who we will remain — that our present values, preferences, and personality are the finished product, even while readily acknowledging how much we've changed in the past. At every age, people report substantial past change and predict minimal future change.
The focusing illusion is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of whatever we are currently thinking about. As Kahneman put it: nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it. Attention inflates the weight of the attended factor in judgments of happiness, value, and choice.
The framing effect is changing a choice by changing its presentation while leaving the underlying facts the same. A 90% survival rate and a 10% mortality rate describe the same outcome, yet they invite different feelings, attention, and decisions.
Hyperbolic discounting is the pattern in which a delay feels much more costly near the present than the same delay feels in the distant future.
We normally experience our thoughts and actions as our own. An external-agency attribution is what happens when that sense of authorship is misplaced and an internal thought, choice, or feeling is instead credited to an outside person, force, or system. The label is most useful as a description of agency misattribution, not as a catch-all explanation for every belief about outside influence.
Illusory correlation is seeing a meaningful relationship between two things because their co-occurrences are vivid, even when the full data do not support one.
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.
The Lake Wobegon effect is the impossible pattern in which most people rate themselves above average on a valued trait.
Neglect of probability is reacting to the size or vividness of a possible outcome while giving too little weight to how likely it is.
Normalcy bias is treating an unfolding threat as if ordinary conditions will continue, especially when the alternative is disruptive or frightening. Because a disaster has not happened here before, warnings are discounted until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
Not Invented Here is discounting a useful external idea, tool, or solution because it came from outside the team or organization. Internal ownership feels like evidence of quality; external origin feels like a reason for suspicion.
Observer expectancy is when an evaluator's expectations quietly shape what participants do, what gets noticed, or how ambiguous results are scored.
Outcome bias is treating a decision as good because it worked out, or bad because it did not, even when the result depended heavily on luck.
Pareidolia is perceiving a familiar pattern—often a face, voice, or figure—in ambiguous or random input.
The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias that impacts how people retrospectively evaluate experiences. According to this rule, individuals tend to judge experiences based largely on how they felt at the most intense point (the peak) and at the end, rather than on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
Pessimism bias is forecasting negative outcomes as more likely, more severe, or less manageable than the available evidence supports.
The placebo effect is a change in symptoms or experience caused by the meaning and expectation attached to treatment, rather than its active ingredient. It is not a cognitive bias in the strict sense: expectations can produce real changes, especially in subjective outcomes such as pain, while they are not a substitute for effective treatment of disease.
The positivity effect is an age-related tendency, observed in some studies, to attend to and remember positive information more than negative information.
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.
Present bias is the tendency to give disproportionate weight to immediate costs and rewards relative to future ones — beyond what any consistent discounting of the future would justify. We plan patiently for our future selves, then reliably overrule the plan when the moment arrives.
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.
Restraint bias is overestimating how well your future self will resist a temptation, then placing that future self in its path.
Risk compensation is increasing risky behavior after a safety measure makes danger feel lower, reducing some of the measure's benefit.
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.
Social desirability bias is giving the answer that looks respectable, safe, or acceptable rather than the most accurate answer.
A change is judged against its background, not in isolation. Adding one candle is obvious in a dark room but barely registers in a brightly lit one. The Weber–Fechner tradition describes this diminishing sensitivity: as a stimulus grows, a larger absolute change is often needed for people to notice a difference.
Zero-risk bias is choosing to eliminate a small risk completely instead of reducing a much larger risk by more. Zero feels categorically safer than a small residual risk, even when the alternative leaves people safer overall.