Questions tagged [bias]
For questions about systematic patterns of deviation in judgment from normative decision-theoretic expectations.
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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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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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1answer
63 views
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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1answer
42 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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1answer
44 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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1answer
19 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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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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31 views
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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1answer
87 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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Compendium of questions in the Kahneman/Tversky Heuristics and Biases tradition
It's well known that many of Tversky and Kahneman's studies (and many studies of their followers) involved giving questions of the following general type to subjects.
Linda is 31 years old, single, ...
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1answer
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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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1answer
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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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1answer
221 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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1answer
44 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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1answer
28 views
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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1answer
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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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1answer
508 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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1answer
73 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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2answers
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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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1answer
63 views
Is the belief that a consultant knows more than the team a form of cognitive bias?
I've noticed that many people assume that consultants know more than they themselves do and/or more than their team does. That is, when a team is stuck on a problem, some people believe that a ...
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1answer
40 views
What research is there on how people go from examining/gathering evidence to executing on a decision?
I'm curious what research there is about when/how people decide to stop evaluating or gathering evidence, and actually begin executing on an action, and how the order of information presented could ...
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3answers
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Term for when the more you invest yourself in something, the less you agree to drop it
I have got a few examples::
For instance when someone buys something and it turns out that it wasn't worth it, and this person tries to convince himself that he made a good choice or that the product ...
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What is it called when I a person transfers his angry towards another person, instead of the person that cause and anger? [duplicate]
My significant other has described to me how he has always been the good child who received 4.0 in school, went to the marines was honorably discharged and always do things for his family. He says ...
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Correlation of g and Honesty, Rationality, etc?
Are there any meta-analyses reporting the correlations of g (IQ, general mental ability) with:
Honesty-Humility (e.g. in HEXACO model).
I know Conscientiousness (of Big Five) generally has zero ...
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1answer
114 views
Bias of finding others guilty of own shortcomings
I haven't been in cognitive sciences for long, but in my work I have noticed a curious pattern: Individuals who overwhelmingly attribute the responsibility of their own actions to external causes, ...
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1answer
30 views
What is a effective and interactive exercise to demonstrate cognition to a class
I'm new to this site so I may mess up here and there with the question process.
I need to come up with an interactive exercise for a class to demonstrate cognition. The problem is, I find cognition ...
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1answer
72 views
Why do people have different opinions about an object when they are given different information about that object?
I'm studying about perception in psychology. My teacher has an example.
In an experiment, the researcher gives two groups a photo of one person. To Group 1, researcher says "This is a scientist", ...
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1answer
47 views
What would be the Term for this Character Trait?
This might be the wrong place or way to ask this question but I'll give it a shot. It could be more related to literature but it does deal with a form of character or personality.
In Nathaniel ...
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3answers
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Should I look at the data of an experiment before the dataset is complete?
For a research internship I am running psychological experiments online. As it takes a while until the experiment is done (meaning that enough people participated, so that a sufficient sample size is ...
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1answer
549 views
What's the difference between Confirmation Bias and the Affect Heuristic?
I've been reading "Thinking Fast & Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. At the end of Chapter 9, he introduces the "Affect Heuristic," a concept introduced by Paul Slovic that effectively states that people ...
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Cognitive Bias, illusory truth effect: its effects on Software Engineers
I have been trying to understand how illusory truth
effect creates problems for Software Engineers. I have found research on
the effects of other cognitive biases (e.g. representativeness, ...
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1answer
1k views
What's the relationship between priming and availability heuristic?
As I have understood, availability heuristic means that things that are "available" in one's cognition (one has thought recently) are prone to influence one's perception.
Priming has been explained ...
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2answers
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Is there an innate human bias against admitting you are wrong or uncertain? [duplicate]
During interactions with people, I've noticed that it seems like certain people have a habit of admitting uncertainty and a willingness to admit error. There doesn't appear to be a clear group that I ...
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1answer
219 views
Bias in survey questions based on either positive or negative wording
I have this impression that if you ask respondents in a survey, questions such as "do you like the item X/ person X" or "which one of the two variations do you like more", or "what in particular would ...
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2answers
109 views
Baby Names and the Hive Mind
A couple of months ago my wife and I found out we were having a little girl and needed to start thinking seriously about picking some names. After going through a dictionary of names we narrowed it ...
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Risk aversion and/or loss aversion in partner-abuse victims who persist in their relationship with the abuser?
A recent study by Baek et al. (2017) found that depressed patients with a history of suicide attempt(s) were exhibiting risk and loss aversion much more so than the general population does. (Note that ...
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1answer
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What is the difference between a bias and a heuristic explained in layman terms?
Can anyone explain the difference in a way which can be explained to some one who does not a have a clue about psychology? May be examples could help.
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1answer
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Name of false answer effect in surveys
I'm looking for research I've read about a well known effect that happens when participants complete a survey, where they do not answer what they think is right, but what they think the researchers ...
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2answers
296 views
How might the “Imposter Syndrome” typology be reconciled with the robustness of the “self-serving bias”?
TL;DR
What on Earth is going on in someone's head to invert a cognitive bias that is robustly observed in people who are psychologically healthy (Cohen's d = 1.28) and still present in depression (...
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1answer
96 views
Why do we long for freedom?
Psychological reactance is the effect of irrational choice for freedom - we choose to go for a greater loss just because we like to make the bad decision for ourselves. What is the advantage behind ...
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Is acceptance of the science of global warming by politicians primarily a result of the bandwagon effect?
While denial of global warming is without a doubt from bandwagon appeal furthered by campaign donations, I get the impression that the acceptance of global warming by politicians is also primarily a ...
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3answers
94 views
A formal term for overcoming something, or getting over something
I am trying to find a correct psychological term for a specific type of behavior.
When a person is trying to distance themselves from past suffering by projecting an idea of "I'm over it" to others. ...
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2answers
117 views
What's the technical name for this cognitive bias?
I'm pretty sure I've seen this cognitive bias described in the literature, but I can't find its official name, so I'll provisionally call it "the used-book finder's bias", based on the following ...
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Anchoring Heuristic: a type of heuristic or the mechanism of functioning of heuristics?
Heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps us to make decisions and judgments quickly, without spending time analyizing any aspect of reality.
There are several different categories of heuristics, ...
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Name of the bias towards not seeing small harm of many as important?
I observe this kind of thinking especially in politics, for instance when someone brings up that "It is fine to take a few dollars from a lot of people if it helps the country". I think the reason we ...
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To what extent is it true that both too much stress and too much relaxation lead to mental shortcuts? [closed]
Sometimes rational thought seems to be bypassed in the brain for more automatic behaviour (shortcuts, instinct, intuition, heuristics):
In The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal she writes that ...
