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Cognitive Biases · 14

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises

Nickerson's review pulls together decades of scattered research to show confirmation bias isn't one narrow effect but a pattern that shows up in nearly every stage of reasoning: which questions we choose to ask, which sources we choose to consult, how we interpret ambiguous evidence, and what we remember afterward. All of these steps tend to tilt toward confirming what we already believed going in, often without any conscious intent to be biased.

Raymond Nickerson · 1998 swipe · next · J/K

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Anchoring)

In one of the paper's experiments, participants spun a wheel rigged to land on either 10 or 65, then were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries in the United Nations. Despite knowing the wheel was random, people who saw 65 gave estimates almost double those who saw 10 — the arbitrary number contaminated an unrelated factual judgment.

Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman · 1974

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Availability)

The mechanism is a mental shortcut: ease of recall stands in for actual frequency. Since dramatic events, plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorist incidents, get disproportionate media coverage and are more memorable, they come to mind faster than statistically far more common but mundane risks, like heart disease or ordinary car accidents, which distorts how people rank real-world danger.

Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman · 1974

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

The Psychology of Sunk Cost

In one of the paper's field studies, theatergoers who paid full price for a season subscription attended significantly more plays over the following months than those who bought the same subscription at a discount — the higher sunk cost created a stronger pull to keep attending, even though the ticket price had no bearing on how enjoyable any individual play would be.

Hal Arkes & Catherine Blumer · 1985

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Unskilled and Unaware of It

Kruger and Dunning tested this across several domains, logical reasoning, grammar, humor, and found a consistent pattern: participants who scored in the bottom quartile on actual tests dramatically overestimated their own performance and ranking relative to peers, while top performers, if anything, slightly underestimated their relative standing, since they assumed tasks that felt easy to them were probably easy for others too.

Justin Kruger & David Dunning · 1999

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk

Prospect theory, the paper that eventually won Kahneman a Nobel Prize, replaced the classical economic assumption that people evaluate outcomes by their final wealth with a more accurate model: people evaluate outcomes as gains or losses relative to a reference point, usually the status quo, and the psychological impact of a loss is roughly twice as intense as an equally-sized gain — a ratio researchers now call the loss-aversion coefficient, typically found to cluster between 1.5 and 2.5.

Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky · 1979

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings

Thorndike's original study asked military commanding officers to rate soldiers across supposedly independent qualities: physique, intelligence, leadership, character. The ratings across these unrelated categories correlated far too strongly with each other to be measuring genuinely separate traits, suggesting the officers were forming one global impression, a halo, and letting it bleed into every specific rating rather than judging each quality independently.

Edward Thorndike · 1920

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

I Knew It Would Happen: Remembered Probabilities of Once-Future Things

Fischhoff and Beyth asked people to estimate the probability of various outcomes of Nixon's 1972 visits to China and the Soviet Union before the trips happened, then asked the same people afterward to recall what probability they had originally assigned. People systematically misremembered their own past estimates, recalling higher confidence for outcomes that actually happened and lower confidence for outcomes that didn't — a pattern Fischhoff called creeping determinism, the sense that what happened was destined to happen all along.

Baruch Fischhoff & Ruth Beyth · 1975

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

The Zeigarnik Effect

Have you ever laid in bed trying to sleep, but your brain kept reminding you of an email you forgot to send? That's the Zeigarnik Effect. Your brain holds onto unfinished tasks, keeping them active in your short-term memory and causing stress.

Bluma Zeigarnik · 1927

Canonical · Cognitive Biases

Steelmanning

A 'strawman' argument is when you intentionally misrepresent your opponent's position, making it sound stupid so it's easy to knock down. 'Steelmanning' is the exact opposite.

Eliezer Yudkowsky · 2007