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.
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.
