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No abstract available bias, or NAA bias, refers to failures in academic research and academic publishing, whereby researchers will often ignore articles that could have a high degree of relevance, if they do not have an abstract available. When searching for a given phenomenon, often many spurious results are gleaned. This overload of information will […]

Publication bias is a bias with regard to what is likely to be published, among what is available to be published. Not all bias is inherently problematic – for instance, a bias against publishing lies is often a desirable bias – but one problematic and much-discussed bias is the tendency of researchers, editors, and pharmaceutical […]

In epidemiology, reporting bias is defined as “selective revealing or suppression of information” by subjects (for example about past medical history, smoking, sexual experiences). By extension, in empirical research in general, the term reporting bias may be used to refer to a tendency to under-report unexpected or undesirable experimental results, attributing the results to sampling […]

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may literally be people, as in a medical study, or could be companies […]

The time-saving bias describes people’s tendency to incorrectly estimate the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) speed. In general, people underestimate the time that could be saved when increasing from a relatively low speed (e.g., 25 mph or 40 km/h) and overestimate the time that could be saved when increasing from a […]

The well travelled road effect is a cognitive bias in which travellers will estimate the time taken to traverse routes differently depending on their familiarity with the route. Frequently traveled routes are assessed as taking a shorter time than unfamiliar routes. This effect creates errors when estimating the most efficient route to an unfamiliar destination, when […]

Zero-risk bias is a tendency to prefer the complete elimination of a risk even when alternative options produce a greater reduction in risk (overall). This effect on decision making has been observed in surveys presenting hypothetical scenarios and certain real world policies (e.g. war against terrorism as opposed to reducing the risk of traffic accidents […]

Naïve realism, also known as direct realism or common sense realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of […]

The illusion of transparency is a tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others. Another manifestation of the illusion of transparency (sometimes called the observer’s illusion of transparency) is a tendency for people to overestimate how well they understand others’ personal mental states. This cognitive bias […]

The illusion of asymmetric insight is a cognitive bias whereby people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people’s knowledge of themselves. This bias seems to be due to the conviction that observed behaviors are more revealing of others than self, while private thoughts and feelings are more revealing of the self. A study […]