Examples of attribution bias

Attribution Bias: What is Attribution Bias?

Attribution bias is the tendency to explain a person’s behaviour by referring to their character rather than any situational factor. In essence, it leads us to overestimate the weight of someone’s personality traits, and underestimate the influence of their individual circumstances. Still confused? Read on for some examples as we delve deeper into this unconscious bias.

‍

Attribution bias examples

Example #1

Situation – You’re driving along the motorway and another car cuts in front of you in an erratic, haphazard way.

Biased interpretation – You might draw some conclusions about the other driver’s character based on their poor driving. Perhaps you think they’re rude, arrogant, or aggressive.

Reality – What you don’t know, however, is that the driver is speeding to the A&E department following a serious accident. They’re driving badly because they’re injured.

Example #2

Situation – When eating out with a group, one of your friends leaves a large tip for the restaurant.

Biased interpretation – You may think that your friend is inherently generous for leaving the tip. ‍

Reality – What you don’t know, is that your friend is actually trying to impress the rest of the group by giving a large tip.

Example #3

Situation – A teacher asks one student to be a ‘quizmaster’, and devise 5 questions from his own knowledge to pose to another student in the class. The other student only gets 1 question correct. The teacher then asks the rest of the class ‘who do you think is more intelligent?’

Biased interpretation – The class responds that the quizmaster is more intelligent, based solely on the fact that he knew the answers (to the questions that he made!).

Reality – There’s no actual evidence in this scenario which indicates the intelligence of either the quizmaster or the student. The class based their assumption on the limited and flawed data that they had to hand, which was ‘who knew the most answers’.

(N.B – This example was actually an experiment conducted at the University of Illinois)

‍

Different types of attribution bias

As you can see from the above examples, the main characteristic of attribution bias is ‘perceptual error’. When we don’t have the full picture of a situation, we use the information we do have to draw conclusions – and these are often related to people’s character and are usually unfounded. Whilst this is the crux of attribution bias, there are a number of variants, including:

Ultimate attribution error – Attribution bias on a group-level. It’s the belief that positive acts committed by our own ‘group’ are the result of ‘good’ personality traits. Inversely, positive acts committed by other groups are considered more as the result of situational factors.

Hostile attribution bias – The idea that we interpret ambiguous behaviour as outwardly hostile. Whispering, for example, is seen as malign despite a lack of evidence to suggest so. ‍

Self-serving bias – Similar to ‘meritocratic hubris’. This is the belief that one’s own successes are the direct result of their character and abilities, rather than luck or other situational factors. Equally, self-serving bias leads us to assign blame for our failures to external rather than internal causes.

‍

Attribution bias and hiring

Attribution bias can clearly influence many aspects of our lives. One area where it’s particularly prominent, however, is the world of work. Attribution bias can creep into the recruitment process, leading employers to hire people based on factors that aren’t necessarily linked to their skills.

CVs, for example, have been proven not to be indicative of a candidate’s ability. When a recruiter sees the grades of a candidate, they will make assumptions about that candidate’s skills – for better or worse. This is a case of attribution bias.

Rather than trawling through out-dated CVs that only serve to trigger our unconscious bias, employers should use work samples instead. By setting candidates tasks that simulate the day-to-day job and anonymising them, companies give themselves the best chance to hire the most able candidate regardless of where they’re from or what they’ve done. They’re also more likely to stay for the long term.

‍

Applied is the essential recruitment platform for fairer hiring. Purpose-built to make hiring ethical and predictive, our platform uses anonymised applications and skills-based assessments to improve diversity and identify the best talent.

Start transforming your hiring now: book in a demo or browse our ready-to-use, science-backed talent assessments.

What It Is & How to Avoid It

There's been a lot written about cognitive biases in the last decade. If you walk into the Psychology section of Barnes of Noble today or browse Amazon for "decision-making," you're sure to see a library of books about how irrational humans can be.

Many cognitive biases affect humans and their everyday actions, like confirmation bias and overconfidence. But the most important, and troubling, error that professionals tend to make in their thinking may be the fundamental attribution error.

Cognitive biases such as these often shape how an individual interacts with the world around them. In the world of business, understanding these biases and becoming aware of the ways that they influence your behavior is vital to becoming a better manager.

What Is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.

For instance, if you've ever chastised a "lazy employee" for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you've made the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error exists because of how people perceive the world. While you have at least some idea of your character, motivations, and situational factors that affect your day-to-day, you rarely know everything that's going on with someone else. Similar to confirmation and overconfidence biases, its impact on business and life can be reduced by taking several measures.

Fundamental Attribution Error Examples

It's clear to see how the fundamental attribution error (FAE) can impact your personal life, but it's important to recognize the influence it can have on your work, as well. Whether you're an employee or manager, cognitive biases, like the FAE, can play a role in how you interact with others in the workplace and how you make key business decisions.

In working with your colleagues, for example, you probably form a general impression of their character based on pieces of a situation, but never see the whole picture. While it would be nice to give them the benefit of the doubt, your brain tends to use limited information to make judgments.

Within organizations, FAE can cause everything from arguments to firings and ruptures in organizational culture. In fact, it's at the root of any misunderstanding in which human motivations have the potential to be misinterpreted.

For example, think back to the "lazy employee." Since she was late to an important meeting, you might be inclined to form a judgment of her character based on this one action alone. It's possible, however, that her behavior is due to several external, rather than internal, factors. For instance, any number of situational factors could have caused her to run behind schedule, such as a family emergency or traffic jam, which have nothing to do with the quality of her character.

In action, forming impressions of a person's character based on limited information can have long-lasting effects. Now that you perceive this person as "lazy," your opinions of her may begin to shift over time. Unless the opportunity arises for you to get to know your employee better, you may always view her in a negative light.

How to Avoid the Fundamental Attribution Error

Think of the last time you thought a co-worker should be fired or a customer service representative was incompetent. How often have you really tried to understand the situational factors that could be affecting this person's work? Probably not often.

The fundamental attribution error is so prevalent because it's rooted in psychology, so completely overcoming it can be difficult. One tool that can be helpful in combating FAE is gratitude. When you become resentful at someone for a bad "quality" they demonstrate, try to make a list of five positive qualities the person also exhibits. This will help balance out your perspective and can help you view your co-worker as a whole person instead of through the lens of a single negative quality.

Another method is to practice becoming more emotionally intelligent. Emotional intelligence has become a buzzword in the business world over the past 20 to 30 years, but it involves practicing self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, and other methods of becoming more objective in the service of one's long-term interests and the interests of others. Practicing empathy, in particular, such as having discussions with co-workers about their opinions on projects and life out of the office, is a good first step.

FAE is impossible to overcome completely. But with a combination of awareness and a few small tools and tactics, you can be more gracious and empathic with your co-workers. In fact, being able to acknowledge cognitive biases like FAE and make the conscious effort to limit their effects is an essential component of becoming a better manager.

Are you interested in improving your managerial skills? Explore our eight-week online course Management Essentials and gain the skills and strategies to excel in decision-making, implementation, organizational learning, and change management.

This post was updated on February 14, 2020. It was originally published on June 8, 2017.

7 examples of self-bias you see throughout your life

When something good happens, people tend to think, "I worked so hard, I'm so talented, I did a great job!". But when something goes wrong, people often begin to mentally consider any external factors that might be to blame. Can you remember a time when you quickly conceded victory but were looking for other possible reasons when something went wrong? I can remember a few.

Today we're going to look at a cognitive bias that offers some explanation for why we tend to do things the way we do. And we will talk about this with Artyom Ginevsky - a blogger, author and leader of the marathon to achieve the goals of "Achiever".

Artyom Ginevsky : Self-serving bias is very common and it is important to be aware of it so that you can make an honest and comprehensive assessment when you do not achieve the expected results. Let's first look at the detailed definition of self-serving bias and why it's important to be aware of it, and then look at some examples of when you might encounter it in your daily life. nine0003

What is selfish bias towards oneself?

Artyom Ginevsky: Simply put, self-serving bias is a mindset in which people attribute positive outcomes to internal factors (such as talent and hard work) and negative outcomes to external factors (such as bad luck or task difficulty). The self-serving bias stems from a broader social psychology concept known as causal attribution, which refers to how we interpret and explain the causes of everyday events. Social psychologist Fritz Heider postulated attribution theory, which explains that people either attribute their results to ability and effort (internal) or to hardship and luck (external). Interestingly, research shows that self-interest is much more common in our competitive Western culture, where our self-esteem is often closely tied to our success or failure, while it is less common in Eastern cultures, where people tend to attribute success to luck. or occasion. People link outcomes in a way that serves their interests. nine0003

People do this for three reasons (besides cultural and demographic factors): Self-respect: Recognizing our successes and blaming others for our failures protects us from criticism. The selfish bias distorts how we perceive ourselves, allowing us to believe that we can't do anything wrong, thus preserving our self-worth. Self-presentation: We like to present ourselves in a positive way in order to promote a certain image of ourselves, whether it is self-defined or customized according to society's preferences and expectations. In addition, our self-esteem is influenced by other people's opinion of us, so we act favorably in order to maintain a socially desirable image that helps us feel good about ourselves. Optimism: Humans are inherently optimistic, meaning that negative outcomes are usually unexpected. This prevents us from associating negative results with personal causes. nine0003

Why is this cognitive bias important?

Artyom Ginevsky: While this common prejudice may seem harmless, it's important to be aware of it and its potential impact on your life. Recognizing this bias can help you recognize important mistakes that lead to adverse outcomes. After all, if you don't admit your mistakes, you won't be able to learn from them or correct them in the future. As we know, a big part of success is learning from your failures and then making improvements accordingly. But you will never get better if you don't know what you need to work on. The selfish bias certainly allows us to protect our self-esteem, but after we continually miss the opportunity to correct our own shortcomings, we become accustomed to looking at external factors to identify shortcomings. You will notice - especially in the first example below - how this fallacious reasoning is not malice. People sincerely turn away from the internal search for possible mistakes and assume that their failure is the result of something else. So when you are aware of the self-interest bias, you are less likely to inadvertently maintain this narrow mindset. nine0003

1. Victory / defeat. A person's performance in a sport is so closely related to a particular outcome that players often exhibit a self-serving bias. This is especially true in individual sports where there is a clearly defined single winner of the game. When an athlete wins a game, they are more likely to applaud themselves for their talent, practice, and dedication to their chosen sport. But if they lose the game, they may start questioning the referees' decisions. Comprehensive meta-analysis 69A 2020 study analyzing 10,515 athletes found that sports players exhibit a self-serving bias due to their tendency to attribute success to personal factors and failure to external factors.

2. Bad test results. A self-interested bias can help students maintain a sense of pride in their hard work after getting a good test score, as they can attribute their success to their learning habits and subject knowledge. However, the same acknowledgment of responsibility may not be available if the examination result is lower than expected. After receiving a low grade, the student may remember that the test was unfair or poorly written. Or maybe the student even perceives the questions as irrelevant to the material being taught. This does not mean that the student is being dishonest - in fact, she could devote herself to studying the material. But the student could use faulty logic when the thought of her inadequate study did not occur. nine0003

3. Teachers. As it turns out, research has shown that just like students, teachers can have self-serving biases when it comes to performance in their classroom. This creates the possibility of conflict between students and teachers when someone gets a bad grade because neither of them can take responsibility for a bad result. While a failing student may want to place the blame on the teacher, the teacher is more likely to hold him accountable for his own work, especially if other students get satisfactory grades. And, in turn, if the students do well, the teacher can praise himself for his excellent teaching skills. nine0003

4. Job search. How do you feel when you get offered a job after going through an (often tedious) interview? You can trust that your experience, qualifications, accomplishments, and hard-earned interview skills have really paid off. But when you get that awful letter from a hiring manager: "We're sorry to tell you...", you might be wondering if the interviewer didn't "like" you, or didn't ask the right questions to really highlight your skills. Research shows that employment is often explained by self-interest bias, since hiring is often explained by internal factors, while leaving a position (or being fired) is explained by external factors - be it a short-term layoff. nine0003

5. At work. You can probably think of a situation in your past work experience in which you witnessed a colleague exhibit a self-serving bias, even if you didn't know there was a name for it. Self-interest often arises in professional environments because employees want to present themselves in a positive light to their superiors and co-workers. Employees want to maintain a positive reputation for being competent, knowledgeable, skilled and accurate in their work. Selfish bias often occurs at work because employees want to present themselves positively to employers and colleagues. You may have the experience of working with a colleague who is always willing to credit any positive results or seek praise from others while denying any blame when a problem arises. This may be due to self-interest bias, which can lead to a toxic work environment where the guilty employees lack the self-awareness to realize their role in the problem. However, many studies have shown that the longer the relationship between employees and their colleagues, the more people blame others for workplace failures. This means that people who work closely on a single team are less likely to blame others for poor results than, say, colleagues working virtually on a one-time project. nine0003

6. Working group. This cognitive bias is so prevalent in the workplace that researchers have studied how and when self-interest bias has a negative impact that negatively impacts productivity. One example the researchers found was a workplace situation involving an accident. In these cases, the injured employee is more likely to blame external factors for the incident, while bystanders usually perceive the accident as the employee's fault. This suggests that self-serving bias can manifest itself in people who do not normally rely on this method of reasoning to maintain their ego - in some cases it can materialize in rational people who are usually balanced. So how can this affect performance? If teammates have foggy judgments and fail to properly respond to (or accurately analyze) unforeseen problems that arise, their rational decision-making skills can also be compromised when confronted with significant business milestones that can impede progress of any kind. nine0003

7. Car accident. I believe that many people who have been in car accidents are reluctant to admit they are at fault - and it turns out that 75% of people who have been in an accident do believe that they are not at fault and blame the other driver from the very beginning. This comes from self-prejudice because people naturally want to protect their self-esteem and prevent them from appearing careless. In today's world, research has been done on the relationship between selfish bias in the introduction of self-driving cars. While there are encouraging expectations for reducing car accidents using autonomous vehicles, the introduction of these vehicles on a limited basis cannot eliminate accidents caused by human-driven vehicles. So while the owner of an autonomous car may have a lower risk of being at fault for a crash, they are still exposed to the threat of a crash caused by human drivers. This study looked at the concept of selfish bias in the context of drivers' propensity to own self-driving cars. A survey of 531 drivers found that as selfish bias increases, there is a perceived reduction in the risk of owning a self-driving car (because the driver never thinks they are at fault for the accident anyway), which also reduces the desire to own one of these new cars. nine0003

How to avoid selfish bias?

Artyom Ginevsky: Although selfish bias is common, you can avoid it and reduce its impact on your daily decisions. Begin awareness to help you recognize situations in which you are subject to this prejudice, such as those described in my story. As you become aware of common cognitive biases, you will begin to notice them, which will empower you to manage yourself. Through mindfulness practice, you will also be able to identify potentially unpleasant thoughts about your guilt without judging them. You can also mitigate this bias by practicing self-compassion, which can help you reduce your defensiveness and accept constructive criticism when you are on the path to self-improvement. Self-compassion will also allow you to show kindness to yourself, especially in the face of setbacks. Researchers have found that being open to increasing self-compassion is especially beneficial for athletes. In sports, athletes who are self-compassionate have fewer negative thoughts and feelings, which helps athletes reject self-criticism and negative thoughts after they have taken a wrong step. In addition, self-compassion allows athletes to benefit from constructive criticism because they maintain realistic self-assessments and are able to recognize their weaknesses. nine0003

Artyom Ginevsky was with us - a blogger, author and leader of the marathon to achieve the goals "Achiever". You can find more information on Artem's blog at the link: https://instagram.com/ginevsky

Examples of cognitive distortions and cognitive...

Social - Examples of cognitive distortions and cognitive...

This is a continuation of a fascinating article about cognitive biases. nine0003

...

quantities.

nine0060

Social

Well traveled effect	Availability offset	Underestimate the duration of frequently used routes and overestimate the duration of less familiar routes.
Women wonderful effect		The tendency to associate more positive qualities with women than with men. nine0055
Zero risk bias	Extension neglected	Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a large reduction in a larger risk.
Zero sum offset	Logically delusion	A bias in which a situation is incorrectly perceived as a zero-sum game (i.e., one person wins at the expense of the other).

nine0060 nine0060

name	Type	Description
Actor-observer bias	Attribution bias	The tendency in explanations of other people's behavior to exaggerate the influence of their personality and underestimate the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and in explanations of one's own behavior to do the opposite (that is, to exaggerate the influence of our situation and underestimate the influence of our own personality). nine0055
Government bias	Association error	The tendency to attribute more accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (not related to its content) and to be more dependent on this opinion.
Availability Cascade	Compliance Bias	A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more credibility through more and more repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it becomes true"). nine0055
Winner effect	Compliance Bias	The tendency to do (or believe) something because many other people do (or believe) the same way. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Ben Franklin effect	Cognitive dissonance	A person who has done someone a favor is more likely to do another favor to that person than if he received a favor from this person.
Offset blind spot	Egocentric bias	The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or the ability to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
Cheerleader effect	Association error	The tendency of people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
Politeness bias	Compliance Bias	The tendency to express an opinion that is more socially correct than the true opinion, so as not to offend anyone.
Defensive attribution hypothesis	Egocentric bias	Place more blame on the harmer as the result becomes more serious, or as the personal or situational similarity to the victim increases. nine0055
Egocentric bias	Egocentric bias	Occurs when people take more responsibility for the results of joint action than an outside observer might believe.
External incentive bias	Attribution bias	Exception from fundamental attribution error when people consider other people to have (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for themselves. nine0055
False consensus effect	Egocentric bias	The tendency of people to overestimate the extent to which others agree with them.
False uniqueness offset	Egocentric bias	The tendency for people to see their projects and themselves as more unique than they really are.
Major attribution error	Attribution bias	The tendency for people to overestimate personal explanations for behavior observed in others while underestimating the role and strength of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
Group attribution error		The bias that the characteristics of an individual member of a group reflect the group as a whole, or the tendency to assume that the outcomes of group decisions reflect the preferences of group members, even when there is information that clearly suggests otherwise. nine0055
Groupthink	Compliance Bias	A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity within the group leads to an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus solution without critically evaluating alternative points of view, actively suppressing dissent and isolating themselves from outside influence. nine0055
halo effect	Association error	The tendency of a person's positive or negative traits to "flow" from one area of the personality to another in the perception of them by other people (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
Hostile attribution bias	Attribution bias	"Hostile attribution bias" is the tendency to interpret the behavior of others as having a hostile intent, even if the behavior is ambiguous or benevolent. nine0055
Illusion of asymmetric understanding	Egocentric bias	People perceive their knowledge of their peers in a way that exceeds their knowledge of them.
Illusion of transparency	Egocentric bias	The tendency of people to overestimate the extent to which their personal mental state is known to others and to overestimate how well they understand the personal mental states of others. nine0055
Phantom Superiority	Egocentric bias	Overestimation of desirable qualities and underestimation of undesirable qualities in comparison with other people. (Also known as the Lake Wobegon effect, above average effect, or superiority bias.)
Group Bias	Group Bias	The tendency of people to give preference to others whom they consider to be members of their groups. nine0055
Intention bias	Attribution bias	The tendency to regard human actions as deliberate rather than accidental.
Just World Hypothesis	Attribution bias	People's tendency to believe that the world is fundamentally just causes them to rationalize the otherwise inexplicable injustice that the victim(s) deserve. nine0055
Moral luck	Attribution bias	The tendency of people to attribute greater or lesser moral standing depending on the outcome of an event.
Naive cynicism	Egocentric bias	Expectation of a greater egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
Naive realism	Egocentric bias	The belief that we see reality as it really is - objectively and impartially; that the facts are obvious to the public; that rational people would agree with us; and those who don't are either uninformed or lazy or irrational or biased.
Not invented here	Group Bias	Aversion to contact with or use of products, studies, standards or knowledge developed outside the group. Associated with the IKEA effect. nine0055
Outgroup homogeneity error	Group Bias	Individuals see members of their own group as a relatively more diverse species than members of other groups.
Puritan bias	Attribution bias	Refers to the tendency to attribute the cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing on the part of a person to a moral defect or lack of self-control, rather than considering exposure to broader social determinants. nine0055
Pygmalion effect		A phenomenon in which other people's expectations of the target person affect their performance.
Reactivity		Striving to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do, due to the need to resist a perceived attempt to limit your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation		Devaluation of proposals only because they supposedly come from an opponent.
Selfish bias	Attribution bias	The tendency to take more responsibility for successes than for failures. It can also appear as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information according to their interests (see also group service bias).
Sexual prejudice overperception / prejudice Sexual underperception	False priors	Tendency to overestimate / underestimate another person's sexual interest in oneself.
Social comparison bias		The tendency in decision making to favor potential candidates who do not compete with your own strengths. nine0055
Social desirability bias	Compliance Bias	The tendency to overestimate socially desirable characteristics or behaviors in oneself and underestimate socially undesirable characteristics or behaviors. See also: § Politeness bias.
General information bias		Known as the tendency of group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information) and less time and energy discussing information that only some members know about (i.e., .uncirculated information). nine0055
Trait offset	Egocentric bias	The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively changeable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood, while others see themselves as more predictable.
Third person effect	Egocentric bias	The perceived tendency to believe that media messages have more influence on others than on themselves. As of 2020, the third person effect has yet to be reliably demonstrated in a scientific context. nine0055
Final attribution error	Attribution bias	Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error the person is more likely to internally attribute to the entire group rather than to individuals in the group.
Effect worse than average		The tendency to believe that we are worse than others in coping with difficult tasks.

memory size

List of memory distortions

In psychology and cognitive science, memory distortion is a cognitive distortion that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes to retrieve it, or both), or it changes the contents of the reported memory. There are many types of memory corruption, including:

nine0060 nine0054 The fact that it is easier for you to remember what you read by rewriting it rather than rereading it.

name	Description
Quirkiness	Fancy material is remembered better than ordinary material.
Choice bias	The tendency to remember one's choice as being better than it actually was.
Conservative or regressive bias	The tendency to remember high values and high probabilities/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were, and low values as higher than they actually were. Judging by the available data, memories are not enough. nine0055
Systematic error	It is wrong to remember one's past relationships and behavior as reminiscent of present relationships and behavior.
Context effect	Cognition and memory are context dependent, so out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e. g. work-related recall time and accuracy will be lower than at home, and vice versa).
Cross effect	The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia	Misattribution form in which the memory is mistaken for imagination because there is no subjective experience that it is a memory.
Egocentric bias	Remembering the past in a self-serving manner, such as remembering your test scores as higher than they were, or remembering a fish you caught was bigger than it actually was. nine0055
Bias damping	A prejudice in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories disappears faster than the emotion associated with positive events.
False memory	Form misattribution, misattributing imagination to memory.
Generation effect (self-generation effect)	Self-created information is remembered best. For example, people may remember statements they have made better than similar statements made by others. nine0055
Google effect	The tendency to forget information that can be easily found on the Internet using search engines.
Humorous effect	Humorous items are remembered more easily than non-humorous items, which can be explained by the peculiarities of humor, the increase in cognitive processing time for understanding humor, or the emotional arousal caused by humor.
Lag effect	A phenomenon in which learning increases when learning is spread over time, as opposed to learning the same amount of time in one session. See also spacing effect.
Dressing and sharpening	Memory distortions caused by the loss of detail in a memory over time, often concomitant with an exacerbation or selective recall of certain details that take on an exaggerated importance in relation to details or aspects of the experience lost as a result of the alignment. Both biases can increase over time, as well as repeated recall or retelling of the memory. nine0055
Effect of processing levels	That different methods of encoding information into memory have different efficiency.
List length effect	A smaller percentage of elements are remembered in a longer list, but as the list length increases, so does the absolute number of elements remembered. For example, consider a list of 30 elements ("L30") and a list of 100 elements ("L100"). A person can remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, while a person can remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percentage of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percentage of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15). nine0055
Disinformation effect	Memory becomes less accurate due to interference from post-event information .
Modality effect	This memory call is higher for the last elements of the list when the list elements were received by speech than when they were received by recording.
Mood memory offset	Improving the memorization of information in accordance with the current mood. nine0055
Negation bias or negation effect	A psychological phenomenon that makes people remember unpleasant memories better than positive ones. (See also subject-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect.)
Next in line effect	When people take turns speaking in a group in a predetermined order (such as going around the room clockwise, dialing numbers, etc.), people tend to have a poor memory of the words of the person who spoke directly in front of them. nine0055
Parts list hint effect	Displaying some items in a list and then retrieving one item makes it harder to retrieve other items.
Peak Rule	It seems that people perceive not the sum of experience, but the average of how it was at its peak (for example, pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Image superiority	The notion that concepts learned by looking at pictures are more easily and more frequently recalled than concepts learned by looking at their written counterparts of word forms.
Positivity effect (socio-emotional selectivity theory)	Older people prefer positive information in their memories.
Sequential position effect	The elements at the end of the sequence are easiest to recall, followed by the elements at the beginning of the sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered. nine0055
Processing difficulty effect	Information that needs to be read longer and more thought about (processed with more difficulty) is easier to remember.
Memory cone	Recollection of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other periods of life.
Relevance effect	Memories relating to oneself are remembered better than similar information about others. nine0055
Source of confusion	Confusion of episodic memories with other information, distortion of memories.
Interval effect	This information is best remembered if exposed to it over a long period of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect	The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your appearance or behavior. nine0055
Stereotypical prejudice	Memories are skewed towards stereotypes (eg race or gender).
Suffix effect	Reducing the recency effect by adding a sound element to the list that not needs to be remembered.
Suggestibility	A form of misattribution in which ideas proposed by the questioner are mistaken for memory. nine0055
Tachypsychia	When the time perceived by a person either lengthens, causing events to slow down, or shortens.
Telescoping effect	The tendency to move recent events back in time and distant events forward in time, so that recent events appear more distant and distant events appear more recent.
Test effect
Tip of the tongue phenomenon	When the subject can remember parts of an object or related information, but unfortunately cannot remember the whole object. This is thought to be an example of "blocking", where multiple identical memories are called up that interfere with each other.
Travis Syndrome	Overestimating the meaning of the present. This is due to chronological snobbery and perhaps an appeal to the logical fallacy of novelty, which is part of the bias. nine0055
Verbatim effect	That the "essence" of what someone said is remembered better than the verbatim formulation. This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
von Restorf effect	That an item that stands out is more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik Effect	That unfinished or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. nine0055

Practical implications Confirmation bias Implications

Many social institutions rely on humans to make rational judgments.

The securities regulatory regime largely assumes that all investors act as perfectly rational people. In truth, real investors face cognitive limitations due to biases, heuristics, and frame effects.

For example, a fair jury trial requires jurors to ignore non-essential features of a case, properly weigh relevant characteristics, consider various opportunities for open-mindedness, and resist fallacies such as appealing to emotion. The various biases demonstrated in these psychological experiments suggest that people often cannot do all of this. However, they cannot do this systematically, purposefully, and predictably. nine0003

Cognitive biases are also associated with the persistence of theory-of-everything thinking, with major social problems such as prejudice, and they also prevent public acceptance of scientific non-intuitive knowledge.

However, the study of bias is very popular in some academic disciplines. For example, bias is a widespread and well-studied phenomenon because most of the decisions that affect the minds and hearts of entrepreneurs are difficult to calculate. nine0003

Cognitive biases can create other problems in everyday life. One study has shown an association between cognitive bias, specifically approach bias, and inhibitive control over how much of an unhealthy snack a person will eat. They found that participants who ate more unhealthy snacks had less inhibitory control and relied more on approach bias. Others have also hypothesized that cognitive biases may be related to various eating disorders and how people view their body and their body image. nine0003

It has also been argued that cognitive biases can be used in destructive ways. Some believe that there are authority figures who use cognitive biases and heuristics to manipulate others to achieve their ultimate goals. Some medications and other treatments rely on cognitive biases to convince others who are susceptible to cognitive biases to use their products. Many see this as a use of the natural struggle of judgment and decision. They also believe that it is the government's responsibility to regulate these misleading advertisements. nine0003

Cognitive biases also seem to play a role in the selling price and value of real estate. Participants of the experiment were shown a residential object. Subsequently, they were shown another property that had nothing to do with the first. They were asked to say what they thought the value and price of the sale of the second property would be. They found that showing participants an unrelated property did affect how they valued the second property.

Reduction: mitigation of cognitive bias and cognitive bias modification

Since they cause biases, cognitive biases cannot be compensated for by applying the wisdom of the crowd, which consists in averaging responses from several people. Bias elimination is the reduction of bias in judgment and decision making through incentives, nudges, and learning. Cognitive bias reduction and cognitive bias modification are forms of smoothing that are specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their consequences. Prediction using a reference class is a method of systematically refuting estimates and decisions based on what Daniel Kahneman has called looking from the outside. nine0003

Like Gigerenzer (1996), Haselton et al. (2005) state that the content and direction of cognitive biases are not "arbitrary" (p. 730). Moreover, cognitive distortions can be controlled. One method of removing bias aims to reduce bias by encouraging people to use controlled processing over automated processing. In terms of FAE reduction, monetary incentives and informing participants that they will be responsible for their own attribution were associated with an increase in accurate attribution. Training also reduces cognitive distortions. Carey K. Morwedge and colleagues (2015) found that study participants who were exposed to one-time learning interventions, such as learning videos and de-distortion games that taught mitigation strategies, showed a significant reduction in committing six cognitive biases at once and up to 3 months. later. . nine0003

Cognitive bias modification refers to the process of modifying cognitive biases in healthy individuals, as well as to a growing field of psychological (non-pharmaceutical) treatments for anxiety, depression and addiction called cognitive bias modification therapy (CBMT). CBMT is a subgroup of therapies in the growing field of psychotherapy based on altering cognitive processes with or without concomitant medications and talk therapy, sometimes referred to as Applied Cognitive Processing Therapy (ACPT). Although cognitive bias modification may refer to alteration of cognitive processes in healthy individuals, CBMT is a growing field of evidence-based psychological therapy in which cognitive processes are modified to alleviate suffering from major depression, anxiety, and addiction. CBMT methods are technology-assisted therapies delivered through a computer with or without physician support. CBM combines data and theory from the cognitive model of anxiety, cognitive neuroscience, and attention models. nine0003

Cognitive bias modification has also been used to help those with obsessive-compulsive beliefs and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This therapy has been shown to reduce obsessive-compulsive beliefs and behaviors.

General theoretical causes of some cognitive distortions

Bias occurs due to various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These include:

Bounded rationality - restrictions on optimization and rationality nine0765
Prospect theory
Mental Accounting
Adaptive Bias - Limited Information Decision Making and Error Cost Bias

Attribute substitution - accepting a complex and difficult judgment by subconsciously replacing it with an easier judgment

Attribution theory

Visibility
Naive realism

nine0766 Cognitive dissonance and related:

Impression management
Self-perception theory

Fast ways of processing information (heuristics), including:

Availability heuristic - an estimate of what is more likely based on what is more available in memory that is biased towards vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples
Representativeness Heuristic - Probability Estimation Based on Similarity
Affect heuristic - decision based on emotional response rather than calculation of risks and rewards

Emotional and moral motives derived, for example, from:

Two factor theory of emotions
Somatic marker hypothesis

Illusion of Introspection

Misinterpretation or misuse of statistics; countless.

nine0766 Social influence

Limited ability of the brain to process information

Noisy information processing (distortions during storage and retrieval from memory). For example, an article in Psychological Bulletin from 2012 suggests that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be caused by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism. The article shows that noisy deviations in memory-based information processes that convert objective evidence (observations) into subjective assessments (decisions) can cause regressive conservatism, belief revision (Bayesian conservatism), illusory correlations, illusory superiority (above average) . effect) and worse than the mean effect, subadditivity effect, exaggerated expectation, overconfidence, and hard-light effect. nine0769

Individual Differences in Cognitive Bias

People do indeed have persistent individual differences in their susceptibility to decision making errors such as overconfidence, time discounting, and blind spot bias. However, these stable levels of bias within individuals can be changed. Experimental participants who watched educational videos and played addiction elimination games showed moderate to large decreases both immediately and up to three months later in the degree of susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, and fundamental attribution error. projection bias and representativeness. nine0003

Individual differences in cognitive bias have also been associated with different levels of cognitive ability and function. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been used to help understand the relationship between cognitive biases and cognitive abilities. When using the cognitive reflection test to determine ability, results were inconclusive. However, there seems to be a correlation; those who score higher on the cognitive reflection test have higher cognitive abilities and rational thinking skills. This, in turn, helps predict the performance of cognitive biases and heuristic tests. Those with higher CRT scores tend to be able to respond more correctly to various heuristic and cognitive tests and tasks. nine0003

Age is another individual difference that affects the ability to be susceptible to cognitive distortions. Older people are more prone to cognitive distortions and have less cognitive flexibility. However, older adults were able to reduce their predisposition to cognitive biases in ongoing trials. In these experiments, both young and old people completed the framing task. Young people had more cognitive flexibility than older people. Cognitive flexibility helps overcome pre-existing biases. nine0003

Criticism

Criticism of theories of cognitive biases is usually based on the fact that both sides of the debate often claim that each other's thoughts are human and the result of cognitive biases, while arguing that their own point of view is above cognitive biases and correct way to overcome the problem. This split is related to a more fundamental problem that stems from the lack of consensus in this area, thus creating arguments that can be unmistakably used to support any conflicting point of view. nine0003

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the main opponents of cognitive distortions and heuristics. Gigerenzer believes that cognitive biases are not biases, but rules of thumb or, as he puts it, "gut feelings" that can actually help us make the right decisions. Distortions and Cognitive Bias
Part 2 Distortions Associated with Memory Errors - Examples of Cognitive Distortions and...
Part 3 Social - Examples of cognitive distortions and cognitive biases
Part 4 See also - Examples of cognitive distortions and cognitive biases