BIAS AND HEURISTICS

Motivated Reasoning

The biased process we use to defend a position, ideology, or belief that we hold with emotional investment.

Cognitive Dissonance

The discomfort we feel when having two pieces of information that contradict each other.

Cognitive Biases

The cognitive processes that have helped our species survive can also sometimes lead us astray.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts we use to help us make the best guess decisions.

Gambler’s Fallacy

The belief that past events influence future events.

Hindsight Bias

The belief that we would have been able to predict an outcome once we already know the outcome. 

Availibility Heuristic

The tendency to overestimate the probability of events which you can easily think of.

Negativity Bias

We tend to remember bad things better than good things.

Representativeness Heuristic

The belief that someone or something belongs to a category if they have features typical of that category.

Base Rate Fallacy

Contributes to Representitive Heuristic, the tendency to ignore how likely something is to happen in general.

Conjunction Fallacy

Occurs when “one estimates a conjunctive statement (this and that) to be more probable than at least one of its componenet statements. 

Anchoring Heuristic

The tendency to base judgements or decisions on a reference point aka an anchor.

Survivorship Bias

A cognitive shortcut that occurs when a successful subgroup is mistaken as the entire group, due to the invisibility of the failure subgroup.

Confirmation Bias 

The tendency to seek out information that supports an existing belief.