134 checked facts

Bias

Everything on this site about bias — each one naming the study behind it.

You ignore information that contradicts what you already believe.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and favor information that validates your pre-existing opinions.…
You are remarkably good at ignoring what you do not want to see.
Selective perception allows individuals to interpret ambiguous actions differently to align with partisan interests, a…
You value things more just because you made them.
The IKEA effect demonstrates that people assign higher value to projects or products when they have personally contrib…
You ignore the most common outcome because it feels boring.
The conjunction fallacy occurs when you judge a specific scenario as more probable than a general one, despite mathema…
You make decisions based on the first thing you hear.
A 1974 experiment showed that asking participants if the population of a city was greater than 5 million or 200 thousa…
The first attribute you notice determines your entire assessment.
The 'primacy effect' in social judgment dictates that initial impressions weight more heavily than subsequent informat…
Your preferences change based on the choices you ignore.
Post-decision dissonance reduction causes you to overvalue your chosen option to maintain cognitive consistency.…
Your need for order makes you refuse new evidence.
A 1996 study measured 'need for closure' and found that those with high scores stop collecting information as soon as …
You are significantly worse at distinguishing faces of other races.
The 'own-race effect' is a well-documented psychological phenomenon where individuals are more accurate at recognizing…
You assume a physically attractive person is also inherently virtuous.
Thorndike's original 1920 study observed that military officers tended to rate their subordinates' specific traits (li…
You assume you influence things that are purely random.
People are more confident in their ability to win a game of chance if they feel a sense of personal involvement.…
The first number you hear dictates your entire decision.
People estimating the value of an item are consistently pulled toward the first number they are given, even if it is i…
You look more attractive when surrounded by other people.
A 2013 study found that faces are rated as more attractive in a group than when shown individually.…
You value things more just because you helped build them.
The effort you invest in a project creates an irrational attachment to the final result.…
You exaggerate the impact of any single factor.
Humans systematically overestimate the importance of whatever they are currently focusing on, like a new car or a job.…
You evaluate objects differently based on what you saw before.
The contrast effect suggests that human judgment is relative; we assess items based on the ones perceived immediately …
You believe you are safer from misfortune than everyone else.
The optimism bias leads people to underestimate their personal risk of experiencing negative events like divorce or il…
A rhyme makes a statement seem more truthful to you.
The rhyme-as-reason effect increases the perceived accuracy of a statement simply because it is phonologically pleasin…
You carry unconscious biases that contradict your explicit values.
A 1998 study found that participants were slower to associate positive words with non-white faces, even when they stat…
You claim personal credit for wins but blame luck.
A 1978 study showed that participants took credit for success but attributed failure to external variables like test d…
You see your group as diverse but others uniform.
A 1980 study by Quattrone and Jones titled 'The Perception of Variability Within and Across Groups' found that individ…
You believe your perception is the objective truth.
A 1996 study showed that people assume their perspective is rational, while disagreement implies others are biased or …
You think life changes more based on one factor.
People systematically overestimate the impact of a single variable on their overall life satisfaction.…
You react differently to the same information depending on delivery.
Decisions are systematically skewed by whether options are presented as potential gains or potential losses, a phenome…
Your certainty in your beliefs outweighs their actual accuracy.
Research by Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1977) demonstrates that individuals consistently demonstrate overconf…
Your memory is not a recording of past events.
In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, participants consistently remember seeing a word that was never actually pre…
You overestimate your ability to manage your future moods.
Projection bias is the tendency to assume your future self will have the same tastes, desires, and emotional states as…
You assume a person's current mood is their permanent nature.
The correspondence bias is a common, though not universal, tendency to infer stable personality traits from observed b…
You value things more just because you suffered for them.
Effort justification is a specific paradigm derived from cognitive dissonance theory, most notably demonstrated by Aro…
You choose the middle option because it looks balanced.
The compromise effect is the tendency to avoid extremes when choosing between items, favoring the option that sits in …
You see biases in others but never in yourself.
The bias blind spot is the tendency to identify the cognitive biases of others more readily than one's own.…
You expect good things to happen to you disproportionately.
The optimism bias is a cognitive illusion where you believe you are less at risk of negative events and more likely to…
You remember your past choices as better than they were.
Choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively attribute positive attributes to an option you selected and ne…
You see patterns in noise that are not actually there.
A 1967 study showed that clinicians perceived correlations between personality traits and drawing styles that were com…
You think you are more unique than you actually are.
A 1981 study found that most drivers rate themselves as safer and more skilled than the average driver.…
You see patterns in noise that aren't there.
Patternicity, a term coined by Michael Shermer, is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Rela…
You judge risk by what you recall easily.
While the availability heuristic was indeed defined by Tversky and Kahneman in 1973, the specific study comparing perc…
You overestimate how long your misery will last.
People consistently display an impact bias, overestimating the duration of their emotional responses to future events.…
You think you see the world exactly as it is.
Naïve realism is the conviction that your subjective perceptions are objective, factual accounts of reality.…
You mistake neutral interactions for deliberate slights.
The term 'hostile attribution bias' was coined by Nasby, Hayden, and DePaulo in 1980.…
You explain your errors with context, others with character.
The actor-observer asymmetry is a hypothesis suggesting that people attribute their own actions to situational factors…
You misremember why you chose what you chose.
Once a decision is made, you unconsciously amplify the positive aspects of your choice and ignore its downsides.…
You are far more certain than you are accurate.
Overprecision is the excessive certainty you feel regarding the accuracy of your own beliefs.…
You ignore statistical data for a single compelling story.
A 1973 study showed that even when given accurate probabilities, participants prioritized specific personality descrip…
You prefer things simply because you have seen them before.
Repeated exposure to an item generally increases liking up to an optimal point, after which boredom or habituation typ…
You rewrite history to make yourself seem clairvoyant.
Once an outcome is known, you experience hindsight bias, which makes you overestimate how predictable that event was.…
You believe you are less biased than your peers.
People consistently rate themselves as less susceptible to cognitive biases than the average person.…
You remember your contributions as disproportionately large.
Egocentric bias causes you to overstate your personal impact on group outcomes.…
You assume everyone agrees with your private opinion.
The false consensus effect leads you to overestimate how many people share your beliefs.…
You prioritize vivid information over statistical reality.
Saliency bias causes you to over-weight information that is visually striking or emotionally charged in your judgments…
You view your own mistakes as bad luck.
The claim attributes both halves of the actor-observer asymmetry to the Fundamental Attribution Error.…
You assume you are less likely than others to experience misfortune.
The optimism bias is your tendency to believe that your future will be more positive than the evidence supports.…
Your first impression of a price anchors every later decision.
The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias where the first piece of information offered influences all subsequent judgme…
You believe you are better than you actually are.
A 1981 study found that 93% of the US student sample surveyed rated their driving skills as above the median.…
Your brain actively ignores evidence that contradicts your view.
Confirmation bias involves selectively processing information to support existing beliefs.…
You subconsciously blame victims to preserve your sense of safety.
The just-world hypothesis suggests people blame victims to believe the world is inherently fair.…
A single positive trait tricks you into seeing perfection.
A 1920 study found that when soldiers were rated high in one physical area, they were systematically rated high in int…
You believe you possess more talent than the average.
The better-than-average effect is a widespread cognitive bias where individuals rate their abilities as superior to th…
Your brain processes positive concepts faster than negative ones.
The Pollyanna principle describes a systematic human tendency to favor positive information in memory and processing.…
You assume attractive people possess other positive traits.
The halo effect causes people to perceive physically appealing individuals as more intelligent and honest.…
You judge your actions by intent but others by outcomes.
The actor-observer hypothesis, proposed by Jones and Nisbett in 1971, posits that individuals attribute their own acti…
You filter reality to fit what you already know.
Humans systematically favor information that confirms their existing beliefs.…
You can remember events that never actually happened.
Leading questions can bias eyewitness testimony and retrospectively influence how events are reported.…
You feel less guilty when you choose inaction.
Humans assign more moral weight to active harm than passive neglect.…
You reach different conclusions depending on how options are presented.
The framing effect describes how your decision-making shifts based on whether an outcome is described in terms of gain…
You find personal meaning in descriptions written for everyone.
The Barnum effect is the psychological phenomenon where individuals believe that vague, generic personality descriptio…
You judge the actions of your group more leniently.
When a member of your own group fails, you attribute it to bad luck; when an outsider fails, you attribute it to their…
You believe you influenced an outcome that was random.
When individuals are given a choice in a game of chance, they rate their probability of success as higher than those w…
You value your possessions simply because you own them.
People demand more money to give up an item than they would have paid to acquire it.…
Your performance drops when you fear confirming a stereotype.
The awareness of a negative stereotype regarding your group can cause an involuntary decline in performance.…
You keep finishing the book you dislike reading.
The tendency to follow through on an investment is often driven by the cost already incurred.…
You ignore information that contradicts your existing world view.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with your pre-…
You believe you see the world exactly as it is.
Naive realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world objectively while others, who disagree, are biase…
You accept illogical arguments if the conclusion feels true.
Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion rather t…
You judge how common a risk is by how easily you recall it.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a …
You focus on one problem and ignore the broader reality.
The focusing illusion causes you to overestimate the importance of a single factor on your overall well-being.…
You confuse your current opinion with your past beliefs.
The hindsight bias creates the illusion that you knew something would happen, even when you had no evidence for it.…
You interpret early information as a fixed anchor.
The anchoring bias describes how the first number or piece of data you receive heavily influences all subsequent estim…
You believe you are safer than the average person.
Optimism bias is the tendency to rate your own risk of negative life events as significantly lower than that of your p…
You judge your own actions by intent, but others' by outcomes.
The actor-observer asymmetry was a widely cited hypothesis, but it has failed to replicate in broad meta-analyses.…
You rate your own work better than the same work.
A 2012 study demonstrated that people value their own creations significantly higher than neutral observers do, often …
You ignore past evidence when predicting your future speed.
The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions, regardless of past…
Evidence against your belief makes you hold tighter.
Belief perseverance is the cognitive tendency to maintain a position even when the evidence supporting it has been cle…
One visible flaw blinds you to everything else.
The horns effect is the negative manifestation of the halo effect, a phenomenon first described by Edward Thorndike in…
You subconsciously blame victims to preserve your sense of order.
The just-world hypothesis is the tendency to believe that people get what they deserve, even in cases of random misfor…
You believe your future is better than your present.
The optimism bias is a persistent cognitive error where you underestimate the likelihood of negative events and overes…
You judge the quality of a choice by its outcome.
Outcome bias is the tendency to evaluate the intelligence of a decision based on the final result rather than the qual…
You prefer things to stay exactly as they are.
Status quo bias describes a preference for the current state of affairs, even when changing it would provide a clear a…
You judge your behavior by your circumstances, not character.
Jones and Nisbett (1971) proposed the actor-observer asymmetry hypothesis, though subsequent meta-analyses have found …
You assume attractive people are also morally good.
While Thorndike identified the 'halo effect' as a general cognitive error in 1920, the systematic experimental finding…
You consistently underestimate the time tasks will take.
A 1994 study found that students predicted they would finish their thesis projects in 33 days, but actually took an av…
You want to believe the world is inherently fair.
A 1966 study by Lerner and Simmons found that observers are more likely to disparage an innocent victim when they feel…
You value things more simply because you own them.
A 1990 study found that participants required nearly twice as much money to part with a mug they owned (willingness to…
You only notice your own effort in group work.
When people are asked to estimate their contribution to a shared task, the sum of their estimates consistently exceeds…
You assume everyone shares your private opinions.
A 1977 study showed that people who agreed to wear a sandwich board were more likely to believe others would too.…
A random number drastically alters your next choice.
In a 1974 study, spinning a wheel of fortune influenced participants' subsequent estimates of geographical data.…
You ignore information that challenges your existing beliefs.
A 1979 study found that participants discounted evidence that contradicted their opinions while accepting flawed evide…
You assign positive character traits based on physical appearance.
A 1920 study by Edward Thorndike identified a general 'halo effect' in human judgment, where an overall positive impre…
You believe you see the world exactly as it is.
The study conducted by Pronin, Lin, and Ross on the bias blind spot was published in 2002.…
You react to the same information differently based on labels.
The original study used the 'Asian Disease' problem, which asked participants to choose between programs that would sa…
You prefer a sure gain, even when a gamble pays more.
The pseudocertainty effect leads people to choose an outcome perceived as certain over a probabilistic one, even when …
You over-allocate resources to eliminate a minor, symbolic risk.
The zero-risk bias leads people to prefer the complete elimination of a small risk over a greater total reduction in r…
You judge past decisions by their results, not their logic.
The outcome bias causes people to retrospectively evaluate a decision as poor if the result was unfavorable, even if t…
You think your future self will share your current tastes.
The projection bias is your systematic failure to predict how your future preferences will change based on your curren…
You take personal credit for wins but blame external luck.
The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute success to your internal character and failure to your environment.…
You consistently believe you are more capable than you are.
While researchers have found that individuals often rate themselves as above average in various domains, the 1977 stud…
You believe your future work will be faster today.
People consistently underestimate how long tasks take, even with past evidence.…
You assume a person's appearance reveals their inner character.
A single positive trait leads people to assume other unrelated positive qualities exist.…
You selectively interpret facts to protect your existing worldview.
A 1979 study found that participants shown balanced evidence on capital punishment were convinced their original stanc…
Random numbers influence your estimate of an unknown value.
A 1974 experiment demonstrated that participants' estimates for geopolitical statistics were significantly skewed by a…
You assume you are safer than everyone else.
A 1980 study by Neil D. Weinstein published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals…
Your brain ignores facts that contradict your beliefs.
Motivated reasoning and biased assimilation lead people to evaluate contradictory evidence more critically than suppor…
You believe you see the world objectively as it is.
Naive realism is the tendency to assume our perception of reality is the only accurate one.…
You roll dice harder to influence the outcome.
People believe they have influence over random outcomes when they are personally involved in the process.…
You defend your beliefs after seeing contrary data.
The 'backfire effect' refers to a proposed psychological phenomenon where contrary evidence strengthens existing belie…
You blame the victim to feel safer yourself.
People often assume that victims of misfortune deserve their fate to maintain a belief in a just world.…
You judge harmful inaction as less severe than action.
Research indicates that people rate harmful consequences resulting from inaction as more acceptable than identical har…
You are more likely to lie for a small reward.
A 1959 study showed that people are more willing to perform a dull task for a small incentive if they convince themsel…
If it sounds familiar, you assume it is true.
A 2015 study found that statements were rated as more accurate if they had been heard previously, even when the source…
You prefer strangers just because they are like you.
A 1970 study found that participants assigned to arbitrary groups awarded more money to their own team, even when grou…
You are convinced you are a better driver than most.
A 1981 study of student participants found that 93% of the U.S. sample rated their driving skills as being in the top …
Your initial estimate is a trap you set.
A 1974 study showed that people's final estimates for unknown quantities are heavily skewed by the first arbitrary num…
A rumor becomes truth if it is repeated enough.
The availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process in which an idea gains social momentum through the interaction …
Your mood depends entirely on what you track.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are currently thinking about it.…
You accept the status quo because it was chosen.
When presented with a default option, individuals are significantly more likely to stick with it than to choose an alt…
The pain of losing is stronger than the joy of winning.
Prospect theory demonstrates that losses are weighted more heavily than equivalent gains, a phenomenon known as loss a…
You judge your future self by your current needs.
Projection bias causes people to overestimate the degree to which their future tastes and preferences will resemble th…
You interpret luck as evidence of your own skill.
People who perceive a sense of control over a random event significantly overestimate their probability of success.…
You attribute your own poor choices to the situation.
This phenomenon is known as the actor-observer bias, not the fundamental attribution error.…
You take the credit and blame the world.
A 1975 study by Miller and Ross examined the self-serving bias, questioning whether the attribution of success to inte…
One positive trait blinds you to every other defect.
A 1920 study found that officers who rated a soldier highly in one category consistently rated them highly in all unre…
You judge others by their character, not their context.
A 1967 study found that people attributed views expressed in an essay to the writer's internal beliefs, even when told…
Ease of memory leads us to overestimate rare events.
A 1973 study showed that people judge the frequency of an event by how easily they can recall examples from memory.…
We consistently assume that others think like we do.
A 1977 study revealed that people are significantly more likely to assume others share their own beliefs and habits th…