somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known-
Carl Sagan

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

More About Cognitive Biases

Memory errors


Further information: Memory bias

• Consistency bias – incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behavior as resembling present attitudes and behavior.

• Cryptomnesia – a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination.

• Egocentric bias – recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g. remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as being bigger than it was.

• False memory – confusion of imagination with memory, or the confusion of true memories with false memories.

• Hindsight bias – filtering memory of past events through present knowledge, so that those events look more predictable than they actually were; also known as the "I-knew-it-all-along effect."[30]

• Reminiscence bump – the effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods.

• Rosy retrospection – the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.

• Self-serving bias – perceiving oneself responsible for desirable outcomes but not responsible for undesirable ones.

• Suggestibility – a form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.

• Telescoping effect – the effect that recent events appear to have occurred more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.

• Von Restorff effect – the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

• Bounded rationality – limits on optimization and rationality

• Attribute substitution – making a complex, difficult judgement by unconsciously substituting an easier judgement

• Attribution theory, especially:

o Salience

• Cognitive dissonance, and related:

o Impression management

o Self-perception theory

• Heuristics, including:

o Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples

o Representativeness heuristic – judging probabilities on the basis of resemblance

o Affect heuristic – basing a decision on an emotional reaction rather than a calculation of risks and benefits
• Introspection illusion

• Adaptive bias

• Misinterpretations or misuse of statistics.

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