A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert […]
Category: Cognitive Bias
Cherry picking
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example […]
Valence effect
The valence effect of prediction is the tendency for people to simply overestimate the likelihood of good things happening rather than bad things. Valence refers to the positive or negative emotional charge some entity possesses. This finding has been corroborated by dozens of studies. In one straightforward experiment, all other things being equal, participants assigned […]
Wishful thinking
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely […]
Not invented here (NIH)
Not invented here (NIH) is the philosophy of social, corporate, or institutional cultures that avoid using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins and costs. The reasons for not wanting to use the work of others are varied, but can include fear through lack of understanding, an unwillingness […]
Full text on net bias (FUTON)
FUTON (an acronym for full text on net) bias is a tendency of scholars to cite academic journals with open access—that is, journals that make their full text available on the Internet without charge—in their own writing as compared with toll access publications. Scholars can more easily discover and access articles that have their full […]
Media bias
Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term “media bias” implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist […]
No abstract available bias (NAA)
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
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 […]
Reporting bias
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 […]