2. Lacking Meaning

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 – 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.