Cognitive Biases

in Cognitive Biases

Observer-expectancy effect – when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).

in Cognitive Biases

Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.

in Cognitive Biases

Ostrich effect – ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.

in Cognitive Biases

Overconfidence effect – excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

in Cognitive Biases

Belief bias – an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.

in Cognitive Biases

Clustering illusion – the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.

in Cognitive Biases

Capability bias – the tendency to believe that the closer average performance is to a target, the tighter the distribution of the data set.

in Cognitive Biases

Conjunction fallacy – the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.

in Cognitive Biases

Disposition effect – the tendency to sell assets that have increased in value but hold assets that have decreased in value.

in Cognitive Biases

Gambler's fallacy – the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. Results from an erroneous conceptualization of the Law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."