Category: Cognitive Bias

Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive […]

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of […]

The ambiguity effect is a cognitive bias where decision making is affected by a lack of information, or “ambiguity”. The effect implies that people tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown. The effect was first described […]

Bizarreness effect is the tendency of bizarre material to be better remembered than common material. The scientific evidence for its existence is contended. Some research suggest it does exist, some suggests it doesn’t exist and some suggest it leads to worse remembering. McDaniel and Einstein argues that bizarreness intrinsically does not enhance memory in their paper […]

The Von Restorff effect (named after psychiatrist and children’s paediatrician Hedwig von Restorff 1906–1962), also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” (called distinctive encoding) is more likely to be remembered than other items. A bias in favour of remembering the unusual. Modern theory of the isolation […]

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT), sometimes called presque vu, is the failure to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent. The phenomenon’s name comes from the saying, “It’s on the tip of my tongue.” The tip of the tongue phenomenon reveals that lexical access occurs in stages. People in […]

The testing effect is a psychological phenomenon that refers to an enhancement in the long-term retention of information as a result of taking a memory test.  However, in order for this effect to be demonstrated the test trials must have a medium to high retrieval success. Logically if the test trials are so difficult that […]

In cognitive psychology, the telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are. The former is known as backward telescoping or time expansion, and the latter as is known as […]

Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion.

The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. The term was created by Emily Pronin, a social psychologist from Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross. The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot. Pronin and her co-authors explained […]