Availability heuristic

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important (“if you can think of it, it must be important.”). Subsequently, people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making […]

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Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note 1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply […]

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Bandwagon effect

The bandwagon effect is a well documented form of groupthink in behavioral science and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with “the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion who have already done so”. As more people come to believe […]

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Base rate fallacy

Base rate fallacy, also called base rate neglect or base rate bias, is an error in thinking. If presented with related base rate information (i.e. generic, general information) and specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case), the mind tends to ignore the former and focus on the latter. This is what the base […]

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Cognitive bias

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a “standard of rationality” or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics. A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical […]

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Overconfidence effect

The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which someone’s subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy, especially when confidence is relatively high. For example, in some quizzes, people rate their answers as “99% certain” but are wrong 40% of the time. It has been proposed that a metacognitive trait mediates […]

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Impostor syndrome

The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, […]

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Four stages of competence

In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the “conscious competence” learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill. Initially described as “Four Stages for Learning Any New Skill”, The Four Stages of Learning provides a model for learning. It suggests that individuals are […]

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Introspection illusion

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called “causal theories”) or inaccurate predictions of their future […]

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Fundamental attribution error

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is people’s tendency to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone else’s behavior in a given situation, rather than considering external factors. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior, where situational factors are more […]

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