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These are biases that rely on immediate examples that come to a person’s mind when evaluating a topic. That is, it is the biased belief that if it can be recalled, it must be important than information not readily recalled.
- It is important to realize that our memories are not necessarily good models for forecasting future events
- Another contributing factor to this bias is how certain memories are easier to recall than others. Hence, simply relying on recall does not give us the full picture.
- Our memories can be primed, which also makes them unreliable.
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Anthropocentric Thinking - the tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning.
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Anthropomorphism - the tendency to characterize non-human things as possessing human-like traits. It involves making use of one’s schemas about other people as a basis for inferring the properties of non-human entities.
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Attentional Bias - perception is affected by recurring thoughts. It may help explain failure to consider alternative possibilities when already occupied with an existing train of thought.
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Frequency Illusion - once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed
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Implicit Association - the biased belief that the speed at which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated. Faster implies more strongly associated concepts based on past experiences.
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Isolation Effect - when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered.. Some explanations include:
- Isolated items are rehearsed for a longer time in working memory compared to non-isolated items
- Subjects could consider the isolated items to be in their own special category in a free-recall task, making them easier to recollect.
- The contextual incongruity of the isolate is what leads to the differential attention to this item. Thus, giving context removes this effect.
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Salience Bias - individuals focus on or attend to items that are more prominent, visible, or emotionally striking. Thus, more salient information is favored.
- It can be attributed to a sudden contrast between items and their surroundings .
- It manifests itself in the psychological process of cognitive ease where we make use of heuristics to reduce the time needed to think and process stimuli. This ease comes by making decisions based on salient features
- Some elements may become salient over time as we gain the habit of noticing them only at a particular moment. Thus, saliency and this bias depends on context.
- Saliency is also dependent on our personal interests.
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Selection Bias - the bias introduced by the non-representative selection of data for analysis. This leads to faulty statistical analysis. This comes from:
- Sampling biases
- Early termination of trials at a time when the results support the desired conclusion.
- Susceptibility bias - when people who are susceptible to the development of an outcome are also prone to be exposed
- Cherry picking
- Attrition Bias - discounting subjects that did not participate until the end of the experiment.
- Observer Selection - data are filtered not only by study design but also by the precondition that someone is observing the data. Another way to phrase it is, the universe seems to be finely tuned for life but this is necessarily true (for us) since we are intelligent life
- Self-Selection or Volunteer Bias .
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Survivorship Bias - concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This leads to incorrect conclusions due to incomplete data.
- This comes from mistaking a subgroup as being representative of the whole population.
- This can be attributed to the fallacy of “correlation implies causation”.
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Well travelled road effect - frequently travelled routes are assessed as taking a shorter time than unfamiliar routes.