The moral credential effect is a bias that occurs when a person’s track record as a good egalitarian establishes in them an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license that increases the likelihood of less egalitarian decisions later. This effect occurs even when the audience or moral peer group is unaware of the affected person’s previously established moral […]
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Selection bias
Selection bias is a statistical bias in which there is an error in choosing the individuals or groups to take part in a scientific study. It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The phrase “selection bias” most often refers to the distortion of a statisticalanalysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account, […]
Omission bias
The omission bias is an alleged type of cognitive bias. It is the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions) due to the fact that actions are more obvious than inactions. It is contentious as to whether this represents a systematic error in thinking, or is supported by a substantive moral […]
Optimism bias
The optimism bias (also known as unrealistic or comparative optimism) is a bias that causes a person to believe that they are less at risk of experiencing a negative event compared to others. There are four factors that cause a person to be optimistically biased: their desired end state, their cognitive mechanisms, the information they have about themselves versus others, and overall […]
Ostrich effect
In behavioral finance, the ostrich effect is the avoidance of apparently risky financial situations by pretending they do not exist. The name comes from the common (but false) legend that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. Galai and Sade (2006) explain differences in returns in the fixed income market by using a psychological explanation, which they name the “ostrich […]
Outcome bias
The outcome bias is an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known. Specifically, the outcome effect occurs when the same “behavior produce[s] more ethical condemnation when it happen[s] to produce bad rather than good outcome, even if the outcome is determined by chance.” While similar to […]
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, “beside, alongside, instead”) in this context meaning something […]
Planning fallacy
The planning fallacy is a tendency for people and organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running. The term was first proposed in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Since then the effect has been found for predictions of a wide variety of tasks, including […]
Conservatism
In cognitive psychology and decision science, conservatism or conservatism bias is a bias in human information processing. This bias describes human belief revision in which persons over-weigh the prior distribution (base rate) and under-weigh new sample evidence when compared to Bayesian belief-revision. According to the theory, “opinion change is very orderly, and usually proportional to the numbers of Bayes’ Theorem – but it is insufficient in amount”. In other words, persons update their […]
Decoy effect
In marketing, the decoy effect (or asymmetric dominance effect) is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that isasymmetrically dominated. An option is asymmetrically dominated when it is inferior in all respects to one option; but, in comparison to the other option, it […]