List of cognitive biases

Social psychology: Altruism · Attribution · Attitudes · Conformity · Discrimination · Groups · Interpersonal relations · Obedience · Prejudice · Norms · Perception · Index · Outline

Cognitive bias is distortion in the way we perceive reality (see also cognitive distortion).

Some of these have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are considered general categories of bias.

Decision making and behavioral biases

Many of these biases are studied for how they affect belief formation and business decisions and scientific research

anchoring - the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
belief bias - the tendency to base assessments on personal beliefs (see also belief perseverance and Experimenter's regress)
bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing
contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe the world is "just" and so therefore people "get what they deserve."
loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
mere exposure effect - the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
color psychology - the tendency for cultural symbolism of certain colors to affect affective reasoning.
planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
rosy retrospection - the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik effect - the tendency for people to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.

Probability prediction biases

Many of these biases are often studied for how they affect business and economic decisions and how they affect experimental research.

anthropic bias - the tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
availability error - the distortion of one's perceptions of reality due to the tendency to remember one alternative outcome of a situation much more easily than another.
clustering illusion - the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist
conjunction fallacy - the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
gambler's fallacy - the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events—"the coin doesn't have memory"
hindsight bias - sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
illusory correlation - beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.
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)
Positive outcome bias (prediction) - a bias in prediction in which people overestimate the probability of good things happening to them. (see also wishful thinking and valence effect)
recency effect - the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule)
primacy effect - the tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

Barnum effect (or Forer Effect) - the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
egocentric bias - occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.
false consensus effect - the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
fundamental attribution error - the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. (see also group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect)
halo effect - the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them. (see also physical attractiveness stereotype)
illusion of asymmetic insight - people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
ingroup bias - preferential treatment people give to whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Lake Wobegon effect - the human tendency to report flattering beliefs about oneself and believe that one is above average (see also worse-than-average effect, and overconfidence effect).
notational bias - a form of cultural bias in which a notation induces the appearance of a nonexistent natural law.
outgroup homogeneity bias - individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
projection bias - the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.
self-serving bias - the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests. (see also group-serving bias)
trait ascription bias - the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
self-fulfilling prophecy - the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or subconsciously) confirm our beliefs.

Memory errors

See Memory bias. Memory biases may either enhance or inhibit the recall of memory, or they may alter the content of what we report remembering.

Most research into this theory of bias has concluded that, there exists a 'mood congruent memory bias' in some emotional disorders. This particular bias has been further defined as the individual's ability to pick and select information cognitively that is analogous with the patient's mood.

Memory biases may either enhance or impair the recall of memory, or they may alter the content of what we report remembering.

List of memory biases

Choice-supportive bias, chosen options are remembered as better than rejected options.
Classroom effect
Context effect
Hindsight bias
Humor effect
Infantile amnesia, few memories are retained from before age 2.
Generation effect, self-generated information is remembered best.
Mere exposure effect, familiarity increases liking.
Misinformation effect
Modality effect
Lag effect
Levels-of-processing effect
List-length effect
Mood congruent memory bias, information congruent with one's current mood is remembered best.
Next-in-line effect
Part-list cueing effect, being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items.
Picture superiority effect
Positivity effect, older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Processing difficulty effect
Primacy effect, the first items on a list show an advantage in memory.
Recency effect, the last items on a list show an advantage in memory.
Rosy retrospection, the past is remembered as better than it really was.
Serial position effect
Self-generation effect
Self-relevance effect
Spacing effect
Suffix effect
Testing effect
Time-of-day effect
Von Restorff effect
Zeigarnik effect

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Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

Attribution theory, especially:
- Salience
Cognitive dissonance, and related:
- Impression management
- Self-perception theory
Heuristics, including:
- Availability heuristic
- Representativeness heuristic
Adaptive Bias

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

References

Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070504776
Gilovich, T. (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0029117062
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521284147
Gilovich, T., Griffin D. & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002). Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521796792
Pohl, R. F. (Ed.). (2004). Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgement and memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-351-0