11
votes
Accepted
Why do people fear statistically unlikely things?
This is a great question. There isn't a single reason for this phenomenon.
There is a genetic predisposition to certain fears. Though humans are bad at statistics, evolution is quite good at it. ...
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9
votes
Accepted
Is there a term for not recognizing that other people think differently, or projecting your thought patterns on others?
Interesting question!
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states, motivations, etc. to others and recognize that others have separate intentions, states, and motivations from his or her ...
- 3,692
9
votes
What is the name of the bias that associate a thing as good because it has a relation to another good thing?
It's called the Halo Effect:
The halo effect is a ... cognitive bias, where a person making an
initial assessment of another person, place, or thing will assume
ambiguous information based upon ...
- 18.8k
8
votes
Why do we always wake up at the climax of our dreams, even when it is an alarm that wakes us?
There are two possibilities. One is that we do tend to wake up more at the climax of dreams, and that somehow our dreams can sync up with external input like an alarm clock so that the climax of the ...
- 5,864
8
votes
Is most of Kahneman's 'Thinking fast and slow' not supported by evidence/non replicable?
This is complicated. There's no easy answer, but the outlook for replicability/reproducibility of a lot of the empirical evidence is not great.
The R-index (that the blog authors use to rank the ...
- 529
7
votes
Accepted
Are men subject to optimism bias when it comes to assessing their sexual/romantic appeal?
Short answer: Yes, but not really...
Self-enhancement:
Self-enhancement (sometimes referred to as positive illusions) refers to a general preference for positive self-views (in men and women alike). ...
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7
votes
Accepted
Term for when the more you invest yourself in something, the less you agree to drop it
Not certain this is what you are thinking about, but this sounds a lot like the idea of "sunk costs", which is a form of loss aversion.
Sunk costs means that you tend to overvalue the effort you have ...
- 6,679
7
votes
Name of cognitive bias that causes experts to overestimate their ability in other areas?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is specific to expertise in a particular domain. The domains tested in the original studies by Kruger & Dunning (1999) are: humor, logical reasoning, and English grammar.
...
- 3,503
6
votes
What is the psychological term for disregarding correct but unwanted information?
The term I would use is "cognitive dissonance." That is, there is "dissonance" between the result of one's cognitive processes, and the actual truth. According to psychologist Leon Festinger, people ...
- 602
6
votes
Accepted
Is memory biased towards positive or negative memories?
The short answer is: it depends on age. For younger adults, negative memories last longer than positive memories. The opposite is true for older adults (above 60 years old).
This paper is a good ...
- 1,151
6
votes
Accepted
Name of cognitive bias when you diminish one's competency based on someone else's for the same function?
The broad topic is norm theory. Kahnemann & Miller (1986) give a nice overview of the topic. The specific effect is a contrast effect.
Higgins & Lurie (1983) have an experiment which matches ...
- 5,864
6
votes
Accepted
What is the correlation between self-rated and objective measures of intelligence?
The term you are looking for is self-assessed intelligence (SAI) (sometimes subjectively-assessed intelligence or self-estimated intelligence). The leaders in this field are Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic ...
- 18.8k
6
votes
What is the difference between a bias and a heuristic explained in layman terms?
A heuristic is an approach to problem solving, a bias is a prejudice; so in what way do these terms confuse you?
I respectfully disagree. I have noticed that the term bias and heuristic are used ...
- 1,227
6
votes
What is the difference between hindsight bias and confirmation bias?
Hindsight Bias (Also known as the "knew-it-all-along phenomenon"), is the tendency when an individual assumes that he/she knew and predicted an outcome after the outcome has been determined (...
- 91
5
votes
Accepted
Why do children tend to choose the last option in a two-alternative forced choice task?
In general, and not specifically related to children, choosing out of a set of options often depends on people’s memory. In an ideal world, people’s options would be presented simultaneously, but in ...
- 20.3k
5
votes
Name of the psychological phenomenon of doing something just because you've already started doing it?
Although Cognitive Inertia (as mentioned by hexadecimal) is a nice, broad way to point to the phenomenon, people have also studied it from other points of view. Two of them are from economic and ...
- 189
5
votes
Double blindedness in a fully remote trial
Double blind basically consists when the patient does not know to which condition it belongs (control, treatment A, treatment B) and the professional does not know to which group he/she is ...
- 1,059
5
votes
What is the primary source of the "mount stupid" graphic?
Short answer
The cartoon graphics showing mount stupid seem to be exaggerated, popular-scientific representations, and should, as far as I can see, be regarded as schematics to illustrate a more ...
- 20.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Name of the bias towards not seeing small harm of many as important?
Yes. This is a special case of the identifiable victim effect: the cognitive bias implicated in the quote, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
The identifiable victim ...
- 446
5
votes
What's the technical name for this cognitive bias?
I am not entirely sure about the proper scientific names but I think your issue revolves around buying things because they are
cheap;
hard to find.
The first is a notorious reason to buy stuff; the ...
- 20.3k
5
votes
What's the technical name for this cognitive bias?
Not sure what you describe is a cognitive bias in itself, but I suspect the scarcity heuristic may be part of the purchaser's rationalization. (See the wikipedia article for academic references.)
- 151
5
votes
Why do we long for freedom?
Too lazy to paraphrase right now, so quoting from a newsletter
Brehm [the guy how introduced the notion Psychological Reactance--my note] has made but one remark about why people seem to behave as ...
- 10k
5
votes
Accepted
Baby Names and the Hive Mind
There are probably a number of factors at play here.
One important contribution to the "snowballing" of trends like this is the mere exposure effect by which things we encounter repeatedly become ...
- 223
5
votes
Accepted
Should I look at the data of an experiment before the dataset is complete?
Short answer
From an ethical standpoint, not including interim evaluations may be bad practice.
Background
I will start off with a more extreme case than in your question example, just for ...
- 20.3k
5
votes
Should I look at the data of an experiment before the dataset is complete?
gjacob is correct that optional stopping is a common research degree of freedom, and one that has a considerable and unfortunate intuitive basis. Yet, depending on the context of your research, AliceD'...
- 286
5
votes
What is the bias that arises because a thing is way more common than the rest?
Wikipedia refers to "regressive bias" though I admit I have never heard the term used, defined as:
A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low ...
- 6,679
4
votes
What is the name of the cognitive bias where an expert overestimates the knowledge of others?
Reminds me of (one side of) the Dunning–Kruger effect, where "people of high ability incorrectly assume that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for other people."
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