Fundamental Attribution Error: We judge others on their personality or fundamental character, but we judge ourselves on the situation.
Self-Serving Bias: Our failures are situational, but our successes are our responsibility.
In-Group Favoritism: We favor people who are in our in-group as opposed to an out-group.
Bandwagon Effect: Ideas, fads, and beliefs grow as more people adopt them.
Groupthink: Due to a desire for conformity and harmony in the group, we make irrational decisions, often to minimize conflict.
Halo Effect: If you see a person as having a positive trait, that positive impression will spill over into their other traits. (This also works for negative traits.)
Moral Luck: Better moral standing happens due to a positive outcome; worse moral standing happens due to a negative outcome.
False Consensus: We believe more people agree with us than is actually the case.
Curse of Knowledge: Once we know something, we assume everyone else knows it, too.
Spotlight Effect: We overestimate how much people are paying attention to our behavior and appearance.
Availability Heuristic: We rely on immediate examples that come to mind while making judgments.
Defensive Attribution: As a witness who secretly fears being vulnerable to a serious mishap, we will blame the victim less if we relate to the victim.
Just-World Hypothesis: We tend to believe the world is just; therefore, we assume acts of injustice are deserved.
Naïve Realism: We believe that we observe objective reality and that other people are irrational, uninformed, or biased.
Naïve Cynicism: We believe that we observe objective reality and that other people have a higher egocentric bias than they actually do in their intentions/actions.
Forer Effect (aka Barnum Effect): We easily attribute our personalities to vague statements, even if they can apply to a wide range of people.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less confident you are.
Anchoring: We rely heavily on the first piece of information introduced when making decisions.
Automation Bias: We rely on automated systems, sometimes trusting too much in the automated correction of actually correct decisions.
Google Effect (aka Digital Amnesia): We tend to forget information that’s easily looked up in search engines.
Reactance: We do the opposite of what we’re told, especially when we perceive threats to personal freedoms.
Confirmation Bias: We tend to find and remember information that confirms our perceptions.
Backfire Effect: Disproving evidence sometimes has the unwarranted effect of confirming our beliefs.
Third-Person Effect: We believe that others are more affected by mass media consumption than we ourselves are.
Belief Bias: We judge an argument’s strength not by how strongly it supports the conclusion but how plausible the conclusion is in our own minds.
Availability Cascade: Tied to our need for social acceptance, collective beliefs gain more plausibility through public repetition.
Declinism: We tent to romanticize the past and view the future negatively, believing that societies/institutions are by and large in decline.
Status Quo Bias: We tend to prefer things to stay the same; changes from the baseline are considered to be a loss.
Sunk Cost Fallacy (aka Escalation of Commitment): We invest more in things that have cost us something rather than altering our investments, even if we face negative outcomes.
Gambler’s Fallacy: We think future possibilities are affected by past events.
Zero-Risk Bias: We prefer to reduce small risks to zero, even if we can reduce more risk overall with another option.
Framing Effect: We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it’s presented.
Stereotyping: We adopt generalized beliefs that members of a group will have certain characteristics, despite not having information about the individual.
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias: We perceive out-group members as homogeneous and our own in-groups as more diverse.
Authority Bias: We trust and are more often influenced by the opinions of authority figures.
Placebo Effect: If we believe a treatment will work, it often will have a small physiological effect.
Survivorship Bias: We tend to focus on those things that survived a process and overlook ones that failed.
Tachypsychia: Our perceptions of time shift depending on trauma, drug use, and physical exertion.
Law of Triviality (aka “Bike-Shedding”): We give disproportionate weight to trivial issues, often while avoiding more complex issues.
Zeigarnik Effect: We remember incomplete tasks more than completed ones.
IKEA Effect: We place higher value on things we partially created ourselves.
Ben Franklin Effect: We like doing favors; we are more likely to do another favor for someone if we’ve already done a favor for them than if we had received a favor from that person.
Bystander Effect: The more other people are around, the less likely we are to help a victim.
Suggestibility: We, especially children, sometimes mistake ideas suggested by a questioner for memories.
False Memory: We mistake imagination for real memories.
Cryptomnesia: We mistake real memories for imagination.
Clustering Illusion: We find patterns and “clusters” in random data.
Pessimism Bias: We sometimes overestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes.
Optimism Bias: We sometimes are over-optimistic about good outcomes.
Blind Spot Bias: We don’t think we have bias, and we see it others more than ourselves.
