The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [148]
False-consensus effect: the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with their beliefs or that will go along with them in a behavior.
Halo effect: the tendency for people to generalize one positive trait of a person to all the other traits of that person.
Herd bias: the tendency to adopt the beliefs and follow the behaviors of the majority of members in a group in order to avoid conflict.
Illusion of control: the tendency for people to believe that they can control or at least influence outcomes that most people cannot control or influence.
Illusory correlation: the tendency to assume that a causal connection (correlation) exists between two variables; another form of patternicity.
In-group bias: the tendency for people to value the beliefs and attitudes of those whom they perceive to be fellow members of their group, and to discount the beliefs and attitudes of those whom they perceive to be members of a different group.
Just-world bias: the tendency for people to search for things that the victim of an unfortunate event might have done to deserve it.
Negativity bias: the tendency to pay closer attention and give more weight to negative events, beliefs, and information than to positive.
Normalcy bias: the tendency to discount the possibility of a disaster that has never happened before.
Not-invented-here bias: the tendency to discount the value of a belief or source of information that does not come from within.
Primacy effect: the tendency to notice, remember, and assess as more valuable initial events more than subsequent events.
Projection bias: the tendency to assume that others share the same or similar beliefs, attitudes, and values, and to overestimate the probability of others’ behaviors based on our own behaviors.
Recency effect: the tendency to notice, remember, and assess as more valuable recent events more than earlier events.
Rosy retrospection bias: the tendency to remember past events as being more positive than they actually were.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: the tendency to believe in ideas and to behave in ways that conform to expectations for beliefs and actions.
Stereotyping or generalization bias: the tendency to assume that a member of a group will have certain characteristics believed to represent the group without having actual information about that particular member.
Trait-ascription bias: the tendency for people to assess their own personality, behavior, and beliefs as more variable and less dogmatic than those of others.
Bias Blind Spot
The bias blind spot is really a meta-bias in that it is grounded in all the other cognitive biases. It is the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people but to be blind to their influence upon our own beliefs. In one study conducted by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues, subjects were randomly assigned high or low scores on a “social intelligence” test. Unsurprisingly, those given the high marks rated the test fairer and more useful than those receiving low marks. When asked if it was possible that they had been influenced by the score on the test, subjects responded that other participants had been far more biased than they were. Even when subjects admit to having a bias, such as being a member of a partisan group, this “is apt to be accompanied by the insistence that, in their own case, this status … has been uniquely enlightening—indeed, that it is the lack of such enlightenment that is making those on the other side of the issue take their misguided position,” said Pronin. In a related study at Stanford University, students were asked to compare themselves to their peers on such personal qualities as friendliness and selfishness. Predictably, they rated themselves higher. Yet, even when the