3. Too Much Info

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).
• Conservationism – 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