Category: Cognitive Bias

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 […]

In prospect theory, the pseudocertainty effect is people’s tendency to perceive an outcome as certain while in fact it is uncertain.[1] It is observed in multi-stage decisions, in which evaluation of outcomes in previous decision stage is discarded when making an option in subsequent stages. Example Kahneman and Tversky (1986) illustrated the pseudocertainty effect by the following examples. First, […]

In diffusion of innovation theory, a pro-innovation bias is the belief that an innovation should be adopted by whole society without the need of its alteration. The innovation’s “champion” has such strong bias in favor of the innovation, that he/she may not see its limitations or weaknesses and continues to promote it nonetheless.

Pessimism bias is an effect in which people exaggerate the likelihood that negative things will happen to them. It contrasts with optimism bias. The difference is that we are in an improbable way worried about our society’s future.Conversely, optimism bias is a tendency to underestimate personal risks and overestimate the likelihood of positive life events. Depressed people are particularly likely […]

Availability cascade, also known as The truth effect, the illusory truth effect or the illusion-of-truth effect is the tendency to believe information to be correct because we are exposed to it more times. Explanation The effect was first named and defined following the results in a study from 1977. Participants in it were given a list of 60 factoids which were plausible, but […]

The observer-expectancy effect (also called the experimenter-expectancy effect, expectancy bias, observer effect, or experimenter effect) is a form of reactivity in which a researcher’s cognitive bias causes them to unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment. Confirmation bias can lead to the experimenter interpreting results incorrectly because of the tendency to look for information that […]

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 […]

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.

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 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 […]