Acquiescence bias is a category of response bias in which respondents to a survey have a tendency to agree with all the questions or to indicate a positive connotation. Acquiescence is sometimes referred to as “yea-saying” and is the tendency of a respondent to agree with a statement when in doubt. This particularly is in the […]
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Halo effect
The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of a person influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that person’s character. It was named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in reference to a person being perceived as having a halo.
Self-selection bias
In statistics, self-selection bias arises in any situation in which individuals select themselves into a group, causing a biased sample with non-probability sampling. It is commonly used to describe situations where the characteristics of the people which cause them to select themselves in the group create abnormal or undesirable conditions in the group. Self-selection bias is a […]
Systemic bias
Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems such as institutions; the equivalent bias in non-human systems (such as measurement instruments or mathematical models used to estimate physical quantities) is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error […]
Attribution bias
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional bias is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate and/or try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviors. People constantly make attributions regarding the cause of their own and others’ behaviors; however, attributions do not always accurately mirror reality. Rather than […]
Appeal to spite
An appeal to spite (also called argumentum ad odium) is a fallacy in which someone attempts to win favor for an argument by exploiting existing feelings of bitterness, spite, or schadenfreude in the opposing party. It is an attempt to sway the audience emotionally by associating a hate-figure with opposition to the speaker’s argument. Fallacious ad […]
Groupthink
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by […]
Magical thinking
Magical thinking is the attributing of causal relationships between actions and events where scientific consensus says that there are none. In religion, folk religion, and superstition beliefs, the correlation posited is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can […]
Informal fallacy
An informal fallacy is an argument whose stated premises fail to support its proposed conclusion. The problem with an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in reasoning that renders the conclusion unpersuasive. In contrast to a formal fallacy of deduction, the error is not merely a flaw in logic.
Anchoring Effect (focalism)
Anchoring effect or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions. It’s the tendency to compare and contrast only a limited set of items. It can also be known as the relativity trap. During decision making, anchoring […]