21 checked facts

Cognitive bias

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

You judge other people using your own internal state.
The 'False Consensus Effect', an example of egocentric bias, is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which other…
You find it impossible to imagine not knowing something.
The curse of knowledge prevents you from accurately predicting the perspective of someone who lacks your expertise.…
You trust vague descriptions that seem specifically about you.
A 1948 experiment showed that people rate generic personality assessments as highly accurate when they believe they ar…
You prefer things just because they are familiar.
A 1968 study by Robert Zajonc demonstrated that participants rated stimuli more favorably as their exposure frequency …
You value an object more because you own it.
The endowment effect describes a persistent discrepancy between willingness-to-accept (WTA) and willingness-to-pay (WT…
You value items more just because they are rare.
A 1975 study showed that participants rated cookies as more desirable when they were presented in a nearly empty jar.…
You want to believe that bad things are deserved.
A 1966 study found that people tend to derogate victims of misfortune to preserve the belief that the world is inheren…
You judge a stranger's intelligence by their physical attractiveness.
The halo effect is a cognitive bias where one trait influences the overall perception of a person, which Thorndike fir…
You believe your past predictions were more accurate than reality.
Hindsight bias makes you rewrite your own memory to align with outcomes you could not have known.…
You value your own possessions more than the market does.
In a 1990 experiment, participants demanded more money to sell a mug they were given than they were willing to pay to …
A random number changes what you pay today.
In a 1974 study, people asked if the percentage of African nations in the UN was higher or lower than 10% guessed lowe…
Your choice depends entirely on how options are phrased.
In the 1981 study, 72% of participants chose a certain outcome of saving 200 out of 600 lives over a risky option with…
Your memory of an event ignores most of its duration.
The peak intensity and the final moments of an experience define your entire retrospective evaluation.…
Confidence is often a poor proxy for actual competence.
The overconfidence effect is the tendency for people to overestimate the accuracy of their own knowledge and the succe…
The first number you hear dictates your future estimates.
A 1974 study showed that initial, irrelevant numbers significantly bias subsequent numerical estimations.…
You are not as good a driver as you think.
Svenson (1981) found that 93% of the U.S. student sample believed they were in the top 50% of driving skill.…
You judge decisions by the result, not the process.
A 1988 study found that observers rate a high-risk decision as more intelligent if it leads to success than if it resu…
Thinking about an object makes its importance grow.
In a 1998 study published in Psychological Science, Schkade and Kahneman demonstrated that people fall victim to a 'fo…
We overvalue things simply because we helped build them.
A 2011 study showed that participants valued self-assembled furniture as highly as items built by experts.…
Repetition bypasses our ability to spot lies.
A 2015 study showed that repeating a false statement increases its perceived credibility, even when participants alrea…
Your memory of an event ignores its duration.
In a landmark 1996 study, patients rated a longer, painful medical procedure as less unpleasant simply because the fin…