Other Biases

• Action Bias - the tendency to prefer action when faced with a problem even when inaction would be more effective or to act when no evident problem exists

  • It can be attributed to a perception that a a lack of action is inherently wrong. In fact, our tendency towards action appears to be an automatic impulse.
  • Action tends to be rewarded and inaction unrewarded (or even punished)
  • Activity makes us feel as though we have the capacity to change things, while passivity makes us feel like we’ve given up and have accepted that we can do nothing more.

• Additive Bias - the cognitive tendency to add resources instead of taking or subtracting

• Attribute Substitution - an individual has to make a judgment for a target attribute that is computationally complex ,and instead substitutes a heuristic attribute.

• Curse of Knowledge - better informed people find it difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser informed people. Experts assume others have information that is only available to an expert.

• Declinism - viewing the past favorably and the future negatively

  • We are more sensitive to negative things than positive things.
  • We are more likely to remember positive experiences from the past than negative ones.

• End-of-history illusion - the belief one will change less in the future than one has in the past. That is, people believe that they will not grow in the future even though they also believe that they have grown significantly compared to the past.

• Exaggerated Expectation - predicting more extreme outcomes than those that might actually happen

• Fundamental Pain Bias - the tendency to belief that people accurately report their own pain levels while holding the belief that others exaggerate it

• Hedonic Recall Bias - people who are satisfied with their wages overestimate how much they earn. People who are unsatisfied with their wages underestimate it

• Hindsight Bias - the tendency to see past events as having been more predictable than they were

  • Happens because new information changes our recollection of a past experience.
  • There are three main variables that are related to this
    • Cognitive - we selectively remember information that we collectively know to be true in a process of sensemaking. It’s a form of Confirmation Bias.
    • Metacognitive - it is easier to understand why an event happened in retrospect because of the Availability Heuristic. We confuse an easy-to-remember thought or truth with certainty.
    • Motivational - we perceive the world as ordered and so unpredictable events are perceived as predictable

• Impact Bias - the tendency to overestimate the length or intensity of the impact of future emotional states

  • It happens due to affective forecasting — which is bound to fail since we overestimate the effects of emotional experiences.
  • It can be attributed to focalism - we focus on a single future event while overlooking other things that will happen in our lives around the same time.
  • We also have immune neglect where we underestimate how quickly we can recover emotionally from negative events.  We overestimate the emotional impact of past events on our happiness.

• Information Bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action

• Interoperative bias - the tendency for sensory input to affect one’s judgment about unrelated circumstances

• Mere Exposure Effect- expressing undue liking for things merely because of familiarity or repeated exposure.

  • The effect is even more powerful if we are unaware of the stimulus.
  • One reason why it happens is because increased exposure reduces uncertainty about something.
  • Another reason is that exposure makes it easier to understand or interpret something.

• Money Illusion - the tendency to concentrate on money’s face value than its purchasing power

• Moral Credential Effect - someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.

• Non-adaptive Choice Switching - After experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, the tendency to avoid the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again, even though the choice was optimal.

• Omission Bias - judging harmful actions as worse or less moral than equally harmful inactions

  • Although in many cases actions are more harmful than corresponding inactions, this is a heuristic and not always the case.
  • If there is a greater weight to harmful actions, we can feel unbothered by the harms inflicted by our omissions.
  • It can also be viewed as a form of loss aversion because failure to act is seen as a loss and failure due to inaction is seen as merely a missed opportunity for gain.

• Optimism Bias - the tendency to be over—optimistic. We underestimate the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimate the probability of favorable outcomes

  • Optimism prevents us from lingering too long in possible negative outcomes.
  • We have the tendency to update our beliefs regarding positive information much more than we do with negative information

• Ostrich Effect - Ignoring an obvious negative situation.

  • It can be attributed to loss aversion
  • It can also be attributed to being biased towards positive things.
  • It is also driven by a need to protect the ego by feeling good about ourselves.
  • It is also driven by Cognitive Dissonance and refusing to change our beliefs.

• Outcome Bias - an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known.

• Pessimism Bias - people exaggerate the likelihood that negative things will happen to them.

• Present Bias - in a trade-off situation, humans favor a smaller present reward rather than wait for a larger future reward.

• Probability Matching - predictions of class membership are proportional to the class base rates.

• Pro-Innovation Bias - the tendency to have excessive optimism about an innovation’s usefulness throughout society while failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses

• Projection Bias - the tendency to overestimate how much our future selves will share our current preferences, thoughts and values.

  • One explanation for this is that our current state becomes an anchor for our own beliefs.

• Proportionality Bias - the tendency to assume that big events have big causes.

• Recency Illusion -the illusion that a phenomenon noticed recently is itself recent

• Risk Compensation - the tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.

• Surrogation - a measure of a construct of interest evolves to replace that construct (i.e., believing a survey score for actually is rather than a measurement of it)

• Turkey Illusion - the surprise resulting from a break in a trend if one does not know how the trend works.

• Value Selection Bias - the tendency to rely on existing numerical data when reasoning even when calculation is required

• Weber-Fechner Law - the difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.