Cognitive Biases

in Cognitive Biases

Illusory superiority – overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect," "better-than-average effect," "superiority bias," or "Dunning-Kruger effect").

in Cognitive Biases

Ingroup bias – the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

in Cognitive Biases

False consensus effect – the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.

in Cognitive Biases

Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).

in Cognitive Biases

Halo effect – the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).

in Cognitive Biases

Herd instinct – common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

in Cognitive Biases

Actor-observer bias – the tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also fundamental attribution error). However, this is coupled with the opposite tendency for the self in that explanations for our own behaviors overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality.

in Cognitive Biases

Dunning–Kruger effect – a two-fold bias. On one hand the lack of metacognitive ability deludes people, who overrate their capabilities. On the other hand, skilled people underrate their abilities, as they assume the others have a similar understanding.

in Cognitive Biases

Egocentric bias – occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.

in Cognitive Biases

Forer effect (aka Barnum effect) – the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.