45 checked facts

Judgment

Everything on this site about judgment — 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.…
Every decision you make is shaped by the first number.
The study was published in 'Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin', not 'Psychological Science'.…
You judge the morality of an action by its success.
Observers systematically rate the quality of a decision based on whether it produced a positive or negative outcome.…
Holding a warm drink makes you view people warmly.
A 2008 study reported that physical warmth might increase interpersonal warmth, but subsequent independent, higher-pow…
You assume people are consistent even when they are not.
The 'Correspondence Bias' leads you to attribute behavior to personality rather than the situation.…
Your desire for closure changes the way you process information.
A 1993 study found that individuals with a higher desire for closure form opinions faster and are more resistant to ch…
You judge side effects based on how much you like them.
In a 2003 study, participants were significantly more likely to label a side effect as 'intentional' when it was negat…
Your visual size perception is easily manipulated.
The Ebbinghaus illusion was popularized by Edward B. Titchener in his 1901 textbook.…
You interpret physical warmth as personal social acceptance.
A 2008 study reported that holding a hot beverage could lead to warmer social evaluations, but this effect has failed …
You judge an explanation as 'correct' if it includes neuroscience data.
The seductive allure of neuroscience makes people believe that explanations are logically sound, even when they contai…
Holding a warm drink makes you perceive people as kinder.
An initial 2008 study suggested that physical warmth might prime interpersonal warmth, though subsequent larger-scale …
You judge people by their actions but yourself by intentions.
The hypothesis of a foundational actor-observer asymmetry in attribution, while influential in early social psychology…
You assume that people act according to their nature.
The correspondence bias is the tendency to explain behavior as a function of personality rather than the situational c…
Your mood at this moment dictates your life evaluation.
The mood-as-information hypothesis suggests that you use your current affective state as a heuristic to judge your lif…
You judge people by your own hidden assumptions.
The trait-inference task demonstrates that you spontaneously label others with personality traits within milliseconds …
Your judgment is relative to what came before.
The sequential contrast effect shows that your evaluation of an object changes based on the quality of the item immedi…
Warm coffee makes you judge people more kindly.
A 2008 study reported this finding, but the effect has not been successfully replicated in later research.…
A smaller gift can feel more valuable than a larger one.
The less-is-better effect, described by Christopher Hsee in 1998, demonstrates that individuals often value smaller se…
You judge the morality of acts by the outcome.
Outcome bias makes people judge a decision by its eventual outcome rather than the quality of the decision at the time…
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 …
Your certainty in your beliefs outweighs their actual accuracy.
Research by Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1977) demonstrates that individuals consistently demonstrate overconf…
You judge a stranger's intelligence solely by their appearance.
Thorndike (1920) found that people consistently attribute positive traits to individuals who possess one unrelated pos…
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 overestimate risks that appear frequently in the news.
People judge the probability of an event by how easily they can recall similar instances from memory.…
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 believe a win is due after repeated losses.
The gambler's fallacy is a recognized statistical bias that has been studied since the 19th century; Tversky and Kahne…
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 judge strangers as kinder based purely on appearance.
The halo effect is the tendency for an overall impression of a person to influence your feelings about their character…
Your judgment is skewed by what you saw before.
The contrast effect describes how the perception of an object is changed by its comparison to a preceding object, a ph…
You systematically overestimate how much you know about topics.
The overconfidence effect is a bias where subjective confidence in judgments often exceeds objective accuracy, though …
You mistake others' circumstances for their personality traits.
The fundamental attribution error describes your tendency to blame others' actions on character rather than the enviro…
You judge objects differently based on what they are near.
The contrast effect describes how stimuli are perceived relative to contextual anchors, but the Kenrick and Gutierres …
Your mind is trapped by the first number you hear.
The anchoring effect causes individuals to rely too heavily on the initial piece of information offered when making su…
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…
You judge people's actions based on their internal character.
People tend to attribute others' behavior to character while attributing their own behavior to circumstances, a phenom…
You rate people as smarter based on their role.
A 1977 study found that participants rated 'questioners' in a quiz show as more intelligent than 'contestants'.…
Your opinion of quality depends on what you saw first.
The contrast effect suggests that your perception of a stimulus is heightened or diminished by the stimulus that prece…
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 make decisions based on the most easily recalled examples.
The availability heuristic leads you to judge the probability of events based on how easily specific instances come to…
Your judgment of quality is anchored to recent experience.
The contrast effect is a established psychological phenomenon where perceptions are influenced by preceding, contrasti…
You ignore the statistics to focus on the story.
People disregard general statistical information in favor of specific, anecdotal evidence.…
Nothing is as important as you think it is.
People misjudge the long-term impact of life events because they focus too heavily on them at the moment.…
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…
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…