Psychology & Neuroscience

Questions tagged [bias]

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For questions about systematic patterns of deviation in judgment from normative decision-theoretic expectations.

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Why is the shoemaker badly shod?

In other words, why are professionals/experts good at doing what they know to do for others but not for themselves ? What is the psychological bias behind this ? Of course this questions comes from ...
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Research on the psychopathology of rapists

Since not all sexual assaulters are psychopaths or sadists as the media often chalks them up to ,there is scope to at least mend the thinking of some of the rapists, or any which haven't yet given in ...
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Name for the tendency of people to believe authority has more control than they do?

Given an authority figure that in reality is not in control of whatever domain they're supposed to be in control of, some people have the tendency to ignore the evidence that the authority figure is ...
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Term for the implication of the existence of additional entities?

I am looking for the name and description of some psychological process I've observed - having two steps assuming the implication of third. For example - when I sometimes think "A is better then ...
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19 views

Is there a formal name for the effect/cognitive bias of seeing something new

I'm wondering if there is a formal neuroscience or psychology term for the following: We see something new, fresh, and different and as a result pause just a little bit longer to look it over. Imagine ...
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23 views

Are we biased against other people's suggestions?

Recently, I have realized that whenever my friends suggest me a movie or a tv show to watch, there is an instinctive response inside me that always tells me to not try the suggestion. I then realized ...
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30 views

What is the difference between naive cynicism and naive realism?

I understand Naive realism as: I am objective and whoever disagrees with me is biased. I don't get Naive cynicism though. Does is stand for: I am objective and others are more selfish than me? What is ...
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Is the Sagan standard a kind of proportionality bias?

Is the Sagan standard, which says that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", a kind of proportionality bias? Since the proportionality bias is a tendency to believe that ...
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2answers
46 views

What heuristic or bias is at play when drawing conclusions from headlines only?

I'm wondering why many people just read headlines when they scroll through social media and make up their minds based on this? What bias or heuristic is at play? Why don't people read the article? I ...
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Bias caused by the opinion of a famous person on matters they are not well-educated on?

What is the name of the bias caused by the fame of a person on subject matters they are not experts on? E.g: If a celebrity they like talks about climate change, people might tend to read, discuss, ...
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189 views

Name of cognitive bias that causes experts to overestimate their ability in other areas?

Is there a name for a cognitive bias that causes people who have been successful in one area to be overconfident in their level of knowledge / ability in another unrelated area? It's related to the ...
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How do we call a tendency of young children to accept things as facts without doubting them?

I have noticed that young children don't doubt a lot of things. If a teacher tell them "1+1=2", they usually just learn it without questioning. When those children get older, they often start to ...
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56 views

Humans don't understand the accumulation of small numbers - what is this phenomena called?

I find that if you tell someone to give you 20$ vs. giving you 1$ everyday for 20 days - people react differently. Similarly ...
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Is there evidence to support the Dunning-Kruger effect?

The well known Dunning-Kruger effect is oft cited as a general explanation for why people with limited expertise overestimate their abilities. Other than the initial research that described this ...
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How can humans tell when something diverges from the norm

With this I mean the notion of humans being able to, for example, look at a painting and tell that something doesn't belong in there. For example sun glasses on the Mona Lisa, without prior knowledge ...
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234 views

Can one claim that a person is having cognitive distortion and be always correct?

What is cognitive distorion? According to Wikipedia, "cognitive distortion are thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately". It is a negative outlook on reality, ...
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What is the phenomenon of devaluing others' abilities called?

The Dunning-Kruger describes a cognitive bias where people evaluate their own skills as greater than reality. I wonder about a similar situation wherein one underestimates the abilities of others. I ...
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44 views

Cognitive bias with trial and error problem solving

I found through self-observation that while solving some problem I am more inclined sometimes to first try and manipulate the variables that require the least amount of effort to manipulate, rather ...
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Is there a link between confirmation biases and a tendency to subscribe to religions?

I've just read Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, as well as Mark Manson's Everything is F*cked, which I stumbled upon the concept of cognitive biases. In the books they mentioned how ...
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51 views

Believing only one thing matters, when in reality, it was a chain reaction. What's the bias called?

Assume I had a business. That business would've been very close to be sold to a bigger company, if only I didn't mess up some of my papers. Thing is though, I didn't really only mess these papers. The ...
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I can't understand the comparison made by Kahneman [closed]

The chapter "Risk Policies", in Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", opens with this example, which makes vivid the pitfalls of relying on our intuitions in choosing between bets: Imagine that you ...
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Does sexual orientation influence gender bias?

Let's take three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. Suppose Alice is heterosexual. That should imply that Alice finds Bob attractive at some level, but not Carol. Does this mean Alice is more likely to be ...
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Cognitive bias believing you are good at the things you are bad at, as successes are more vivid?

What is the name for this cognitive bias? Scenario I am bad at socializing with people. For 95% of the time I talked to people, I was very awkward. Yet, mostly only 5% of the opposite time stuck to ...
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79 views

What is the name for this form of “influence”?

I have found that people are often "roused to action," activism and even zealotry by attributing either extreme of "nobleness" or "despicability" to their self or group ...
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What is the difference between hindsight bias and confirmation bias?

I'm trying to understand better the influence of psychological biases on the financial market decision-making process. Wikipedia describes hindsight as follow: Refers to the common tendency for ...
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Can you prevent your biases from swaying your logic if you're aware of them?

As in the title. Assuming you are aware of all your biases,and how they interact with your ideas, can you foresee how your biases will warp your judgement or logic, and stop that from happening? ...
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What is the term for the rhetorical, “How hard could it be?”

I looked through the wikipedia page listing cognitive biases looking for a bias that describes the tendency to assume a poorly understood problem must be simple. Planning fallacy is kind of in the ...
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56 views

Name of cognitive bias where people try to use all given information regardless of quality?

In psych class, I recall learning about a cognitive bias where people are inclined to use all information available to them when making a decision, even if some of the information would be better ...
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45 views

How is illusory superiority reconciled with the false-consensus effect?

On one hand, people often seem to exhibit various forms of illusory [self-]superiority, perhaps the best known example of that being the Dunning–Kruger effect. On the other hand, the false consensus ...
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Do any personality factors reduce illusory superiority?

Apparently individuals suffering from schizotypy lack illusory superiority in one particular domain: evaluation of their affect. That is to say, neurotypicals overrate their positive affect (and ...
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186 views

What is the psychology behind blind spots? Why do we fail to see, what others see so clearly about us?

It’s absolutely imperative to identify our blind spots. I believe that they are impediment for one to reach his full potential. But how does one, see his blind spot - #oxymoron? What is the ...
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In what contexts is loss aversion least controversial?

Loss aversion (and related phenomena like the endowment effect) are somewhat controversial, it seems; from Wikipedia: Recently, studies have questioned the existence of loss aversion. In several ...
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How do you predict a cognitive bias theoretically using dual process theory?

Disclaimer: I am a complete layman in psychology, with no education in the field whatsoever. This question was prompted by my reading Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", in which he discusses the ...
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64 views

conservative vs liberal: not related to rate of yes vs no

I am not a psychology major, so forgive me if I'm misusing terms. So on an exam, we had a question about signal detection, and it defined a conservative person as someone who always tend to reply ...
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56 views

Name for a condition where one with their limited knowledge thinks of a problem as bigger than it really is?

I know about Dunning-Kruger... where to put it bluntly, one overestimates oneself. I am looking for a definition/name, to further research and reference in discussions with my peers, for a bias, that ...
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28 views

Term/phrase for remembering the negative over the positive

I work in UX (user experience) which involves a lot of psychological principles to various degrees and came across an interesting thought about bad experiences. My question is, is there some kind of ...
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What could explain the apparent association between high IAT bias scores and percentage of black americans per state?

The implicit Association test (IAT) measures your subconcious preference for white over black or the other way around. It does so by letting you do a task where you have to categorize black and white ...
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171 views

Defensive attribution vs Self-serving bias

What is the difference between "Defensive attribution" and the "self-serving-bias"? Both seem to involve a practice where one would attribute our failures to circumstances and our successes to ...
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Perfect events in a random world?

I have a friend. They believe that God exists because they have experienced a large amount of 'perfect coincidences', or rather, events that are too perfect to be coincidences. What kind of ...
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676 views

Why do people bid on online auctions sooner than a few seconds before it ends? [closed]

This is something that has always puzzled me about human behavior on online auction platforms. I am talking about a specific platform where you can sell almost any item you want with a starting bid ...
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Cognitive biases ontogenesis

Are cognitive biases "hardcoded" into our brain or learned? And have they evolved over time e.g. more cognitive biases could emerge evolutionally?
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Why don't the Big 5 personality traits have more neutral names?

Lots of different areas of study appropriate common-language terms as jargon words with a specific meaning in the context of that particular field, but the names of the Big 5 personality traits have ...
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Do other forms of bias have their own terminologies, similar to “Stockholm Syndrome”?

Three examples would be: Someone who makes an expensive purchase, and even when they are met with objective facts stating why it was a inferior purchase, they continue to sing it's praise. Someone ...
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424 views

Is the placebo effect a form of cognitive bias? [closed]

Recently I’ve been trying to get a better understanding for the cause and mechanism of the placebo effect. A friend suggested that the placebo effect is a form of cognitive bias, but I’ve had trouble ...
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53 views

Does psychology lose it's validity when the subject is versed in psychology?

Quite often, I find myself conforming to typical psychological principals, and exhibiting predictable behavior based on external stimuli. However, upon better research of the psychology behind past ...
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Need to define observation/phenomenon in order to study it, same replies to same political topics, different individuals

I was wondering if anyone could help me define my observation, in order to read some literature on the subject. I have some Cog. Psych. background but have never encountered this during my studies. It ...
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What is the bias that arises because a thing is way more common than the rest?

So I have a sentence: Hence this option is free of abundance bias I've made up the phrase "abundance bias" and I want to replace it with the proper scientific term....
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538 views

What is the name of the bias that associate a thing as good because it has a relation to another good thing?

A customer buys X from "brand A" and has positive experience with it. "Brand A" also sells Y. Now the customer things it is good to buy Y because of his/her positive experience with buying X from ...
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96 views

Is there a name for the phenomenon of perceived repeated interruption?

Is there a documented name for the phenomenon of repeated social interruptions. It's something I've discussed with others who seem to share the observation that often, when one is alone in a public ...
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291 views

How can we get rid of the problems of misconception, assumption, and expectation?

I watched a TedX Talk that called "The Surprising Secret of Solving Problems Quickly" by Collins Key, about 3 problems that most greatly hinder our ability to solve intriguing problems. These 3 ...

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