Category: Cognitive Bias

The hard–easy effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when, based on a specific level of difficulty of a given task, subjective judgements do not accurately reflect the true difficulty of that task. This manifests as a tendency to overestimate the probability of success in difficult tasks, and to underestimate the probability of success in easy tasks.

The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the finding that people with strong biases toward an issue (partisans) perceive media coverage as biased against their opinions, regardless of the reality. Proponents of the hostile media effect argue that this finding cannot be attributed to the presence […]

Identifiable victim effect” refers to the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid when a specific, identifiable person (“victim”) is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need. The effect is also observed when subjects administer punishment rather than reward. Participants in a study were more likely to mete out […]

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when consumers place a disproportionally high value on products they partially created. The name derives from the Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer IKEA, which sells many furniture products that require assembly. Official experiment results on the IKEA effect were first published by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon of Yale University, and Dan Ariely of Duke […]

The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for instance to feel that they control outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over. The effect was named by psychologist Ellen Langer and has been replicated in many different contexts. It is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Along with illusory superiority and optimism bias, the illusion […]

Illusory correlation is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables (typically people, events, or behaviors) even when no such relationship exists. A common example of this phenomenon would be when people form false associations between membership in a statistical minority group and rare (typically negative) behaviors as variables that are novel or salient tend to capture the attention. This is one […]

The impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, in affective forecasting, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states. Causes Other explanations for the occurrence of the impact bias are the following: Misconstrual of future events When predicting how an experience will impact us emotionally, events which have […]

Information bias is a type of cognitive bias, and involves e.g. distorted evaluation of information. An example of information bias is believing that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.

Insensitivity to sample size is a cognitive bias that occurs when people judge the probability of obtaining a sample statistic without respect to the sample size. For example, in one study subjects assigned the same probability to the likelihood of obtaining a mean height of above six feet [183 cm] in samples of 10, 100, and 1,000 men. In other words, variation […]

Escalation of commitment was first described by Barry M. Staw in his 1976 paper, “Knee deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action”. More recently the term sunk cost fallacy has been used to describe the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new […]