Bias Cheat Sheet

The following is a single searchable page (Control + F) for locating the names of biases.  Documented Biases not included in the original 2016 Codex are shown in the Cognitive Bias Codex Addendum.  

The Need to Act Fast may be broken down into categories:

We favor simple-looking options and complete information over complex ambiguous options, such as:

  • Less-is-better Effect – The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
  • Occam’s Razor – A bias in favor of the simplest solution being the best solution.
  • Conjunction Fallacy – The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions.
  • Delmore Effect – The tendency to provide more articulate and explicit goals for lower priority areas of our lives.
  • Law of Triviality – The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.
  • Bike-shedding Effect – The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.(See Law of Triviality)
  • Rhyme as a Reason Effect – Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful.
  • Belief Bias – An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.
  • Information Bias – The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
  • Ambiguity Bias – The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.

To avoid mistakes we aim to preserve autonomy and group status, and avoid irreversible decisions, such as:

  • Status Quo Bias – The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same.
  • Social Comparison Effect – The tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who don’t compete with one’s own particular strengths.
  • Decoy Effect – Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.
  • Reactance – The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
  • Reverse Psychology – A technique involving the assertion of a belief or behavior that is opposite to the one desired, with the expectation that this approach will encourage the subject of the persuasion to do what actually is desired.
  • System Justification – The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)

To get things done, we tend to complete things we’ve invested time and energy in, such as:

  • Backfire Effect – The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs.
  • Endowment Effect – The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.
  • Processing Difficulty Effect – That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.
  • Pseudocertainty Effect – The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
  • Disposition Effect – The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
  • Zero-risk Bias – Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
  • Unit Bias – The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.
  • IKEA Effect – The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.
  • Loss Aversion – The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.
  • Generation Effect – That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
  • Escalation of Commitment – The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
  • Irrational Escalation – The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
  • Sunk Cost Fallacy – When individuals continue a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources.  For example, individuals sometimes order too much food and then over-eat just to “get their money’s worth”.

To stay focused we favor the immediate relatable thing in front of us, such as:

  • Identifiable Victim Effect – The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.
  • Appeal to Novelty – A fallacy in which one prematurely claims that an idea or proposal is correct or superior, exclusively because it is new and modern.
  • Hyperbolic Discounting – Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.

To act we must be confident we can make an impact and feel what we do is important, such as:

  • Peltzman Effect – The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
  • Risk Compensation – When people adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.
  • Effort Justification – When people believe a goal is worthwhile if they have worked hard to get there.
  • 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.
  • Defensive Attribution Hypothesis – Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
  • 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.
  • Illusory Superiority – Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people.
  • Illusion of Control – The tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events.
  • Actor-observer Bias – The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
  • 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.
  • Barnum Effect – The observation that individuals will 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. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.
  • Forer Effect – The observation that individuals will 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. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.
  • Optimism Bias – The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes.
  • Egocentric Bias – Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
  • Dunning-Kruger Effect – The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
  • Lake Wobegon Effect – A natural tendency to overestimate one’s capabilities and see oneself as better than others.
  • Hard-easy Effect – Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough.
  • False Consensus Effect – The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
  • Third-person Effect – Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
  • Social Desirability Bias – The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.
  • Overconfidence Effect – Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

The Lacking Meaning biases may be broken down into categories:

We Project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future, such as:

  • Self-consistency Bias – Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behavior.
  • Restraint Bias – The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
  • Projection Bias – The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one’s current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.
  • Pro-innovation Bias – The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation’s usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
  • Time-saving Bias – Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
  • Planning Fallacy – The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
  • Pessimism Bias – The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
  • Impact Bias – The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
  • Declinism – The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.
  • Moral Luck – The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
  • Outcome Bias – The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
  • Hindsight Bias – Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.
  • Rosy Retrospection – The psychological phenomenon of people sometimes judging the past disproportionately more positively than they judge the present.
  • Telescoping Effect – The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.

We think we know what other people are thinking, such as:

  • Illusion of Transparency – People overestimate others’ ability to know themselves, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
  • Curse of Knowledge – When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.
  • Spotlight Effect – The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
  • Extrinsic Incentive Error – An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself.
  • Illusion of External Agency – When people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents.
  • Illusion of Asymmetric Insight – People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.

We simplify numbers and probabilities to make them easier to think about, such as:

  • Mental Accounting – Mental accounting, also known as “two-pocket” theory, is a behavioral bias that occurs when people put their money into separate categories, separating them into different mental accounts, based on, say, the source of the money, or the intent of the account.
  • Appeal to Probability Fallacy – An appeal to probability (or appeal to possibility) is the logical fallacy of taking something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might possibly be the case).
  • Normalcy Bias – The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
  • Murphy’s Law – The tendency to think that everything that can go wrong, related to confirmation bias.
  • Zero-sum Bias – A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).
  • Survivorship Bias – Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
  • Subadditivity Effect – The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
  • Denomination Effect – The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).
  • Magic Number 7+2 – Lists that are much longer than 7+-2 (Miller) or 4 (Cowan) become significantly harder to remember and process simultaneously.

We imagine things and people we’re familiar with or fond of as better, such as:

  • Out-group Homogeneity Bias – Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
  • Cross-race Effect – The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
  • In-group Bias – The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
  • Halo Effect – The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
  • Cheerleader Effect – The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
  • Positivity Effect – That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
  • Not Invented Here – Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
  • Reactive Devaluation – Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
  • Well-traveled Road Effect – Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.

We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories, such as:

  • Group Attribution Error – The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
  • Ultimate Attribution Error – Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
  • Stereotyping – Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
  • Essentialism – The view that every entity has a set of attributes that are necessary to its identity and function, or an ‘essence’.
  • Functional Fixedness – Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
  • Moral Credential Effect – Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.
  • Just-world Hypothesis – The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
  • Argument From Fallacy – The formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.
  • Authority Bias – The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.
  • Automation Bias – The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.
  • Bandwagon Effect – The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
  • Placebo Effect – A beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient’s belief in that treatment.

We tend to find stories and patterns even when looking at sparse data, such as:

  • Confabulation – When we make decisions intuitively and nonconsciously, and rationalize the decisions after the fact.
  • Clustering Illusion – The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
  • Insensitivity to Sample Size – The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
  • Neglect of Probability – The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
  • Anecdotal Fallacy – When someone bases an argument on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is evidence based solely on the personal experience of one person or a small number of people.
  • Illusion of Validity – Believing that one’s judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.
  • Masked Man Fallacy – When one makes an illicit use of Leibniz’s law in an argument. Leibniz’s law states that, if one object has a certain property, while another object does not have the same property, the two objects cannot be identical.
  • Recency Illusion – The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
  • Gambler’s Fallacy – The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.”
  • Hot-hand Fallacy – The “hot-hand fallacy” (also known as the “hot hand phenomenon” or “hot hand”) is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
  • Illusory Correlation – Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
  • Pareidolia – A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
  • Anthropomorphism – The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.

Too Much Information biases may be broken down into categories:

We notice flaws in others more easily than we notice flaws in ourselves, such as:

  • Bias Blind Spot – The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
  • Naive Cynicism – Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
  • Naive Realism – The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.

We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs, such as:

  • Confirmation Bias – The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
  • Congruence Bias – The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.
  • Post-purchase Rationalization – The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
  • Choice-supportive Bias – The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
  • Selective Perception – The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
  • 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).
  • Experimenter’s Bias – The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.
  • Observer Effect – Systematic difference between a true value and the value actually observed due to observer variation.
  • Expectation Bias – Occurs when an individual’s expectations about an outcome influence perceptions of one’s own or others’ behavior.
  • Ostrich Effect – Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
  • Subjective Validation – Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
  • Continued Influence Effect – The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.
  • Semmelweis Reflex – The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.

*Many examples found in Data Science and Executive Decision-making

We notice when something has changed, such as:

  • Anchoring – The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).
  • Conservatism – Where people tend to favor prior evidence over new evidence or information that has emerged.
  • Contrast Effect – The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
  • Distinction Bias – The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.
  • Focusing Effect – The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.
  • Framing Effect – Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
  • Money Illusion – The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.
  • Weber-Fechner Law – Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.

*Many Examples commonly found in Marketing

Bizarre, funny, visually-striking, or anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things, such as:

  • Bizarreness Effect – Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
  • Humor Effect – That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
  • Von Restorff Effect – That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.
  • Picture Supremacy Effect – The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.
  • Self-relevance Effect – That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
  • Negativity Bias – Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

*Many examples commonly found in Social Media

We notice things already primed in memory or repeated often, such as:

  • Availability Heuristic – The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.
  • Attention Bias – The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
  • Illusory Truth Effect – A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
  • Mere Exposure Effect – The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.
  • Context Effect – That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
  • Cue-dependent Forgetting – The failure to recall information without memory cues. The term either pertains to semantic cues, state-dependent cues or context-dependent cues.
  • Mood-congruent Memory Bias – The improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.
  • Frequency Illusion – The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).
  • Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon – The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).
  • Empathy Gap – The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.
  • Omission Bias – The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).
  • Base rate Fallacy – The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).

*Many Examples found in Marketing/Branding

 

What to Remember biases may be broken down into categories:

We store memories differently based on how they were experienced, such as:

  • Tip-of-the-tongue Phenomenon – When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.
  • Google Effect – The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
  • Next-in-line Effect – When taking turns speaking in a group using a predetermined order (e.g. going clockwise around a room, taking numbers, etc.) people tend to have diminished recall for the words of the person who spoke immediately before them.
  • Testing Effect – The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.
  • Absent-mindedness – Where a person shows inattentive or forgetful behavior, often caused by a low level of attention (“blanking” or “zoning out”), intense attention to a single object of focus (hyperfocus) that makes a person oblivious to events around him or her, or unwarranted distraction of attention from the object of focus by irrelevant thoughts or environmental events.
  • Levels of Processing Effect – That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.

We reduce events and lists to their key elements such as:

  • Suffix Effect – Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.
  • Serial Position Effect – That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
  • Part-list Cuing Effect – That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.
  • Recency Effect – An order of presentation effect that occurs when more recent information is better remembered and receives greater weight in forming a judgment than does earlier-presented information.
  • Primacy Effect – The tendency to recall information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end.
  • Memory Inhibition – When being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items.
  • Modality Effect – That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
  • Duration Neglect – The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.
  • List-length Effect – A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items (“L30”) and a list of 100 items (“L100”). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).
  • Serial Recall Effect – The tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst.
  • Misinformation Effect – Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
  • Leveling and Sharpening – Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.
  • Peak-end Rule – That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.

We discard specifics to form generalities, such as:

  • Fading Affect Bias – A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.
  • Negativity Bias – Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.
  • Prejudice – An unjustified or incorrect attitude (usually negative) towards an individual based solely on the individual’s membership of a social group.
  • Stereotypical Bias – Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual. (Gender Bias)
  • Implicit Stereotypes – When people have attitudes towards others or associate stereotypes with them without conscious knowledge.
  • Implicit Associations – The speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.

We edit and reinforce some memories after the fact, such as:

  • Spacing Effect – That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
  • Suggestibility – A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
  • False Memory – A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
  • Cryptomnesia – A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
  • Source Confusion – Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.
  • Misattribution of Memory – The ability to remember information correctly, but being wrong about the source of that information.