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Absent-mindedness is forgetting an intended action or location because attention was elsewhere when the memory cue needed to be created.
Ambiguity bias is preferring a known risk over an unknown one, even when the unknown option may have equal or better expected value. Uncertainty about the probabilities themselves feels like extra danger beyond the outcomes at stake.
Anchoring is the pull of an initial number, price, or estimate on later judgment — even when the starting point is arbitrary. We adjust away from the anchor, but usually not far enough.
The anecdotal fallacy is treating one vivid story as evidence of a general rule while ignoring how representative the story is. An anecdote can make a possibility emotionally real; it cannot by itself establish frequency, cause, or typical outcome.
The appeal to novelty is treating newness as evidence of superiority. A product, idea, or method feels like progress because it is new, even when its outcomes, fit, and reliability have not yet earned that conclusion.
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 availability heuristic is judging frequency, danger, or importance by how easily examples come to mind. What is vivid, recent, emotional, or repeatedly covered by media feels common — even when the base rate says otherwise.
The bandwagon effect is adopting a belief, product, or action because many other people appear to have adopted it. Popularity becomes a shortcut for truth, quality, or safety — and each new adopter makes the signal look stronger.
The Barnum effect is accepting a vague, broadly applicable description as an unusually accurate reading of you.
The bizarreness effect is remembering unusual or incongruous material better than ordinary material in some learning settings.
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.
Choice overload is the phenomenon whereby having too many options can make deciding harder, reduce satisfaction with the chosen option, and sometimes prevent choosing at all. More choice is not monotonically better: beyond a point, each added option adds comparison cost, anticipated regret, and doubt.
Choice-supportive bias is revising memory so the option we chose looks better and the options we rejected look worse than they did at the time. The decision becomes evidence of its own quality.
The clustering illusion is seeing meaningful runs, clusters, or hot spots in data that random variation can produce on its own. Randomness is lumpy; we expect it to look more evenly mixed than it does.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to treat evidence as a lawyer for what we already believe rather than a test of whether we are right. It shapes what we search for, notice, remember, and count as convincing — often without feeling like bias at all.
Congruence bias is testing a hypothesis only in ways that could confirm it, rather than seeking observations that might rule it out.
The conjunction fallacy is judging a detailed story as more likely than a broader category that includes it. A description can feel highly representative, but 'A and B' can never be more probable than 'A' alone.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Distinction bias is exaggerating the importance of small differences when options are compared side by side, even though the difference would barely matter in use.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is the debated finding that low performers can overestimate their ability, partly because the knowledge needed to perform a task also helps a person judge performance. The popular caricature — ignorant people are always supremely confident and experts always humble — goes far beyond the evidence.
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.
Egocentric bias is overweighting your own perspective, effort, and role because it is more available to you than everyone else's.
The empathy gap is failing to appreciate how strongly a different emotional or bodily state will shape our own or another person's choices. Calm selves underestimate hunger, pain, fear, craving, anger, and stress; hot selves underestimate what calm reflection will want.
The false-consensus effect is overestimating how many other people share your view, preference, or behavior.
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.
The frequency illusion, often called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is the sense that something suddenly appears everywhere after we first notice it. Attention changes what enters awareness, and the new sightings are mistaken for evidence that the world changed.
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain other people's behavior by character while underweighting the situation they were in. We see the person clearly and the pressures, incentives, and missing information around them only dimly.
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.
Hindsight bias is seeing an outcome as obvious after it happens and remembering our earlier uncertainty as smaller than it was. Once we know the answer, it becomes hard to reconstruct a world in which the answer was still unknown.
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 tend to value things more when we helped make them. The IKEA effect is the extra attachment or willingness to pay that can follow successful assembly, customization, or creation—even when an equivalent finished version would serve just as well.
Having a choice can feel like having influence, even when chance or outside conditions determine the result. The illusion of control is the tendency to overestimate how much one’s actions affect an outcome that is largely random or externally constrained.
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.
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.
Information bias is seeking more information even when it will not change the decision. More data feels like progress and protection from regret, but it can add delay, noise, and a false sense of rigor without adding decision value.
Insensitivity to sample size is treating a striking result from a small sample as though it were as stable as the same result from a large sample.
The Law of Triviality, also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality, describes a phenomenon where people give disproportionate weight and time to trivial issues while neglecting more complex and critical matters. This cognitive bias leads to decision-makers focusing on simple tasks that are easy to understand and discuss, rather than tackling the more significant issues that require deeper analysis.
A smaller option can look better when it is judged on its own, then lose as soon as it is placed beside a clearly superior alternative. The less-is-better effect is this preference reversal: people overweight an easy-to-evaluate cue and underweight total value in separate evaluation.
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.
Loss aversion is the tendency for a loss to hurt more than an equivalent gain feels good. It makes keeping what we have psychologically compelling, even when a neutral comparison of future outcomes would favor a change.
The 'magic number' 7±2 is Miller's famous 1956 estimate of how many units people can hold briefly in mind. It is a landmark idea, not a bias — and it is too simple as a modern rule: capacity depends on chunking, rehearsal, familiarity, and the task, with tightly controlled estimates often closer to about four items.
The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to develop a preference for things they are repeatedly exposed to. This cognitive bias suggests that familiarity with something can lead to affection, even if it was initially neutral or disinterested.
The modality effect is a short-term memory advantage for the final items of an auditory list over an equivalent visual list.
Murphy's Law is a useful engineering maxim, not a cognitive bias: if a failure mode is possible and left unguarded across enough opportunities, it may eventually occur.
Naïve realism is experiencing our own view as a direct reading of reality and explaining disagreement as ignorance, irrationality, or bias in the other person. We forget that our own attention, values, incentives, and prior beliefs also shape what looks obvious.
Negativity bias is giving bad news, criticism, threats, and losses more attention and weight than equally strong good news. One sharp negative signal can dominate a much larger body of positive or neutral evidence.
Neglect of probability is reacting to the size or vividness of a possible outcome while giving too little weight to how likely it is.
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.
Occam's razor is a reasoning principle, not a bias: when explanations fit the evidence equally well, prefer the one that adds fewer unsupported assumptions.
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.
Optimism bias is expecting better outcomes for ourselves than for similar other people. We accept the general risk — layoffs, illness, delays, losses — while quietly treating our own case as the exception.
The ostrich effect is avoiding threatening information because looking at it feels worse, even when the information could improve the next decision.
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.
Overconfidence is believing a judgment is more accurate, a skill stronger, or an outcome more controllable than the evidence warrants. Its most useful form is overprecision: confidence intervals that are far too narrow for how uncertain the world really is.
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.
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.
The planning fallacy is predicting a project from its best-case internal story while neglecting how similar projects actually went. We see the steps we intend to take and miss delays, rework, coordination costs, and the base rate of overruns.
Post-purchase rationalization is defending a purchase after the fact so it feels more valuable and less regrettable. It is the consumer version of choice-supportive bias: the receipt turns a debatable option into 'the right choice.'
The primacy effect is remembering or overweighting what came first in a sequence. Early items receive more attention and rehearsal, and early impressions can become the frame through which later information is interpreted.
Pro-innovation bias is treating a new technology or idea as inherently beneficial while discounting its trade-offs, failure modes, and distribution of costs.
Projection bias is assuming that future preferences will resemble the preferences we feel right now. Hunger, excitement, loneliness, motivation, and fear masquerade as stable information about what our future selves will want.
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.
Restraint bias is overestimating how well your future self will resist a temptation, then placing that future self in its path.
Salience bias is the tendency to focus on information that is vivid, emotionally striking, or perceptually prominent while neglecting information that is duller but often more important. What grabs attention gets weighted; what doesn't, effectively doesn't exist for the decision.
Selective perception is noticing, interpreting, and remembering information through a filter shaped by what you already expect or believe.
The self-relevance effect is the tendency to notice and remember information better when it is connected to yourself.
Self-serving bias is claiming personal credit for success while assigning failure to circumstances, luck, or other people. The same evidence gets two attribution rules, both of which protect a flattering view of the self.
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.
Status quo bias is preferring the current arrangement because it is current, even when a fresh comparison would favor change. The costs of changing are vivid and immediate; the costs of staying put are familiar, dispersed, and easy to leave uncounted.
The subadditivity effect is assigning a lower probability to a whole event than the probabilities assigned to its mutually exclusive parts add up to.
Subjective validation is finding a statement convincing because it feels personally meaningful, even when the statement is too vague to distinguish you from many others.
The sunk-cost fallacy is continuing a course of action because of time, money, or effort already spent, even though that investment cannot be recovered. The past feels like a reason to continue; economically, only the value and cost from this moment forward should decide.
Survivorship bias is drawing conclusions from the winners we can see while missing the failures that vanished from view. The visible sample feels like the whole population, so success looks more common — and more easily copied — than it really is.
Unit bias is the tendency to treat one presented unit—a plate, packet, episode, or task—as the natural amount to finish.
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.
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.
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.