Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Card Problem (Wason Selection Task)
The Card Problem demonstrates confirmation bias: people tend to test a rule by seeking confirming evidence rather than attempting to falsify it.
logic · psychology↗
ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Cognitive Biases
Recognize the shortcuts that quietly shape your judgment.
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Catalyst-as-Cause Confusion
A trigger can explain when a failure occurred without explaining why the system was vulnerable to it. Taleb argues that focusing on the final event can distract from the conditions that allowed a disruption to spread.
politics · philosophy↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causal Base Rates
A base rate can influence judgments more when it suggests a causal story. In Ajzen’s exam experiment, participants used class pass rates more strongly than statistically equivalent rates created by sampling students who had passed or failed.
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causal Conjunctions
The conjunction fallacy can also arise from a causal link between two events, where an event A provides a plausible cause for event B, leading people to judge the conjunction A&B as more probable than B alone, even when A is not representative of the broader context.
economics · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causal Mutability
When imagining alternatives to an unexpected cause–effect pairing, people may hold the presumed cause fixed and vary the effect. The weightlifting experiment tests this tendency by asking which of two surprising measurements participants would change.
psychology · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causal Stereotypes
Base rates are easier to use when they suggest a causal story about an individual. Kahneman examines how these stories form group stereotypes, and the tension between using group information to predict outcomes and treating individuals fairly.
psychology · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cause and Chance
The tendency to see patterns and causality in random events, leading to false beliefs about streaks and clusters. It illustrates how we misinterpret statistical fluctuations as meaningful signals.
education · sports↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causes Trump Statistics
People often neglect statistical base rates and instead rely on causal stories when making judgments, leading to systematic errors in probability estimation.
statistics · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Causes Trump Statistics (Base Rate Neglect)
People tend to ignore base rates and rely on specific, vivid information (like witness testimony) when making probabilistic judgments, leading to errors in Bayesian reasoning.
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Championship Selection Problem
A cognitive bias where people evaluate the fairness of playoff systems based on procedural details (like neutral vs. home venues) rather than statistical evidence of accuracy.
sports · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Change Bias (Noticing Variation Over Baseline)
Taleb argues that changing features attract attention while stable necessities recede into the background. This can make new technology seem more important than the infrastructure or resources on which it depends.
technology · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Change Blindness
Change blindness concerns failures to notice changes. Banasiewicz applies the idea to slow social shifts: decision-makers may focus on conspicuous events while overlooking changes that accumulate over time.
philosophy · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Changing Chances
People's decision weights for outcomes are not proportional to probabilities; small probabilities are overweighted (possibility effect) and near-certainties underweighted relative to certainty (certainty effect), challenging the expectation principle.
decision theory · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cheap Signals Just Got Cheaper: The Death of Style as Marker
Polished writing is cheap to imitate, including with large language models. Caulfield and Wineburg recommend checking independent coverage of a site, organization or claim instead of judging credibility from its tone and style.
sociology · technology↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Choice-supportive Bias
Choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to options we've chosen, downplaying their flaws and devaluing unchosen alternatives.
economics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Choosing Beliefs That Make Us Look Good
This concept describes how people adopt beliefs not for their truth but to project a desired social image, akin to choosing clothing. It involves impression management and signaling, where the goal is to appear a certain way to others, not to persuade them.
evolutionary psychology · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Choosing by Default
A cognitive bias where decisions are made by defaulting to a pre-established option without evaluating alternatives, often due to historical precedent, salience, or conspicuousness.
economics · behavioral economics↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Circularity of Statistics (Statistical Regress Argument)
The circularity of statistics arises when we need past data to determine the probability distribution, but we need the distribution to know how much data is sufficient. This regress is particularly problematic for heavy-tailed distributions (Extremistan) compared to Gaussian distributions.
philosophy · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cloudlike Defense (Tetlock's Belief System Defense)
The cloudlike defense dismisses a failed forecast as evidence that the subject is inherently unpredictable, while leaving the forecaster’s next confident prediction unchanged. Galef uses Spock’s reaction to an alien attack to show how this response blocks learning from a mistaken model.
politics · science↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Clustering Illusion
The tendency to see clusters and patterns in random data, often leading to false beliefs about causation and the misinterpretation of probability.
science · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Barriers to Collective Action on Climate Change
Climate action is harder when immediate costs attract more attention than future benefits, emissions are hard to see, and harms are uncertain or diffuse. Weak feedback and incentives to benefit from others’ efforts add collective-action problems to these psychological barriers.
politics · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic tendency in judgment that can produce departures from a relevant standard of evidence or reasoning. It differs from an isolated mistake, though a single decision may reflect both situational pressures and recurring habits. Recognizing a bias is a starting point for checking a judgment, rather than proof that a particular conclusion is wrong.
science · business↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Bias (Experimental Setup)
An experimental study of cognitive bias involving 120 female psychology students at Arizona State University, randomly assigned to conditions.
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Bias in Problem Solving
Human minds are influenced by unconscious emotions, mental shortcuts, pattern recognition, and hidden biases that distort rational analysis and decision-making. These traits, while often adaptive, can lead to flawed conclusions and poor judgments when left unchecked.
education · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, often caused by heuristics, emotions, and situational factors.
psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Cognitive Biases: The Four Mistakes We Make in Our Thinking
The book groups four common judgment problems: anchoring, confirmation bias, availability, and errors from accepting a quick intuitive answer without checking it. The examples suggest ways to question first impressions and look beyond readily available evidence.
economics · business↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Busyness and Dispositional Inference
People under cognitive load (e.g., rehearsing a number) initially fail to correct for situational constraints when making dispositional inferences about others. Without a reflective pause, this initial bias colors subsequent perceptions, making it difficult to undo even after corrective information becomes available.
psychology · social psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Busyness and Dispositional Inferences
In the experiment by Gilbert, Pelham, and Krull (1988), participants memorizing discussion topics used those topics less when judging a visibly anxious speaker’s personality, despite recalling them better. The authors interpret this as evidence that adjusting an initial trait judgment for the situation requires cognitive resources.
psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive Ease: The Mere Exposure Effect
Repeated exposure can make a word, image, or person feel more familiar and likable. This mere exposure effect is one way cognitive ease—the feeling that something is easy to process—can influence judgment, even without conscious recognition.
education · business↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Cognitive Illusions
Cognitive illusions in judgment under uncertainty arise from the same heuristics that produce accurate judgments, leading to systematic violations of probability rules such as the conjunction rule. This incoherence challenges both normative theories of rationality and descriptive models that assume coherence.
education · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotive Factors
Trust and social relationships help people share what they know, but group agreement can also discourage scrutiny. Organizational learning requires room for different perspectives, explicit discussion of assumptions, and a willingness to examine evidence that challenges the group’s view.
education · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Coherent Arbitrariness
An arbitrary starting anchor can set the overall level of later numerical judgments while their relative ordering remains consistent. The authors call this coherent arbitrariness and use it to explain how jurors can agree about relative punishment yet assign very different dollar awards.
law · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Coincidences and Miracles
Humans are pattern-seeking storytellers who often misinterpret coincidences and improbable events as meaningful, leading to cognitive biases in understanding probability and causality.
science · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Cold Reading
Cold reading is a technique used by psychics and mediums to convince others that they have supernatural powers by making vague, educated guesses and exploiting confirmation bias. It relies on the subject's tendency to remember correct guesses and forget mistakes.
science · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Comfort: Avoiding Unpleasant Emotions
This concept explains how people adopt comforting beliefs or denial to avoid negative emotions like fear, stress, and regret, often using rationalization such as sour grapes or sweet lemon reasoning.
philosophy · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Common Cognitive Biases and Thinking Errors
A list of natural mental biases and thinking errors that can lead anyone to accept wrong or dubious claims, emphasizing the need for skeptical awareness to avoid self-deception.
philosophy · science↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Comparative Luck
A performance comparison contains uncertainty in both the person’s result and the benchmark. Taleb argues that a large gap can reflect differences in luck, so the gap alone does not establish a difference in skill.
finance · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Compatibility Hypothesis
The compatibility hypothesis states that a predictor is given more weight when it matches the scale of the criterion (e.g., predicting grade using grade data rather than rank data). Studies show that people overweight compatible attributes even in choice tasks without numeric anchoring.
statistics · education↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Compatibility Principle
The way people are asked to answer can change which information they emphasize. For example, asking for a dollar estimate may give a dollar-denominated input more influence than the same information expressed as a rank.
business · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Competition Neglect
People focus on their own plans and skills while neglecting those of competitors, leading to overconfidence and excess entry into markets. This cognitive bias is driven by WYSIATI and the substitution of a difficult question with an easier one.
business · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Computing Instead of Thinking
Taleb criticizes the use of precise probability calculations when the rules and relevant risks are poorly understood. A model’s numerical answer can conceal uncertainty about its assumptions, while attribution bias can discourage learning from failure.
economics · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Concept Rigidity
The tendency for named concepts to become fixed and resistant to change, making it difficult to adopt new divisions or assemblies of ideas.
education · philosophy↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Conditioning (Support Theory)
Support theory models judged probabilities through the support people attach to descriptions. Unpacking evidence can change those judgments. Its enhancement assumption predicts that evidence compatible with every hypothesis can raise separate one-versus-rest judgments while leaving pairwise comparisons approximately unchanged.
law · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Conditions for Valid Expert Intuition
Expert intuition is trustworthy only in regular environments where the expert has had adequate opportunity to learn the cues. Subjective confidence is not a reliable indicator of accuracy, as false intuitions created by substitution can also be held with high confidence.
science · business↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Confidence in Knowledge
The authors propose that confidence depends too much on the apparent strength of evidence and too little on its reliability or weight. This can produce overconfidence from striking but weakly grounded impressions and underconfidence when extensive evidence provides a consistent, modest signal.
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek out evidence that confirms preexisting beliefs and to ignore or deny evidence that contradicts them, hindering the ability to find truth.
politics · education↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Confirmatory Drift
Confirmatory drift is the tendency for groups to become ideologically homogeneous over time, reducing viewpoint diversity. In social psychology, this has led to a political imbalance that biases research, prompting the formation of Heterodox Academy to promote viewpoint diversity.
politics · education↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Conformity
The tendency of people to adopt the behaviors, attitudes, and opinions of others, often overriding their own judgment, leading to uniform group behavior.
politics · education↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Confusing Absence of Evidence with Evidence of Absence
People often treat the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, a cognitive bias exacerbated by domain specificity—the tendency to apply logical reasoning differently across contexts. This leads to errors in medicine, statistics, and everyday decisions.
medicine · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Confusion of the Inverse (Prosecutor's Fallacy)
Confusion of the inverse means treating the probability of evidence given a hypothesis as the probability of that hypothesis given the evidence. A rare false-positive result can still identify mostly innocent people when the behavior being detected is rarer still.
technology · law↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Conjunction Error in Motive-Action Schemas
People often judge a conjunction of events (e.g., a crime with a plausible motive) as more likely than the simpler event alone, violating the probability principle that a conjunction cannot be more probable than its constituents. This bias is demonstrated in legal contexts where adding a nonobvious but plausible motive increases the perceived likelihood of an action.
law · decision-making↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Conjunction Fallacy
The conjunction fallacy occurs when people judge a conjunction of two events as more probable than one of its constituents, violating the conjunction rule of probability. This bias arises from the use of representativeness and availability heuristics, leading to intuitive but logically inconsistent probability judgments.
cognitive science · decision science↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Conjunction Fallacy (Linda Problem)
The conjunction fallacy is a cognitive bias where people judge a conjunction of two events as more probable than one of the events alone, due to representativeness. The classic Linda problem demonstrates this violation of probability logic.
decision science · statistics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Conjunction Fallacy (Representative Conjunctions)
The cited studies ask whether conjunction errors persist outside social stereotypes, when uncertainty comes from chance, when experts judge, or when financial incentives are offered.
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Conjunction Fallacy (Wimbledon Example)
The conjunction fallacy is a cognitive bias where people judge a conjunction of two events as more likely than one of the constituent events, violating probability rules. This entry illustrates the bias with an experiment where subjects predicted outcomes of a Wimbledon match, ranking a specific conjunction (lose first set but win match) as more probable than the simpler event (lose first set).
statistics · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Connect My Dots (Creating a False Sense of Research)
Connect My Dots is a manipulation technique where context is stripped from facts, then the audience is invited to verify those facts themselves, creating a false sense of independent research while actually being led to a predetermined conclusion.
technology · politics↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Conservatism bias
Conservatism bias is the tendency to favor existing evidence or prior beliefs over new information, leading to a resistance in updating one's views despite contradictory evidence.
science · economics↗
Cognitive Biasesintermediate
Consistency Bias
Once we make a commitment, we tend to remain consistent with it to maintain a positive self-image and avoid the pain of loss, often leading to irrational decisions.
politics · sociology↗
Cognitive Biasesadvanced
Contagion (Law of Contagion)
The law of contagion describes a tendency to feel that contact transfers something of a person or object’s essence. A sweater may still feel tainted by a previous owner after cleaning, while a loved one’s possessions may feel special. The response can extend beyond any remaining physical contamination.
sociology · psychology↗
Cognitive Biasesbeginner
Contrast Effect (Contrast Comparison)
We judge stimuli—such as temperature, loudness, brightness, health, status, or prices—based on differences and changes from a reference point rather than absolute magnitudes. This reference point shifts with new experiences and context, influencing how we value things, perceive fairness, and make decisions.
marketing · business↗