#Hindsight bias definition psychology how to

Backfire effect, a tendency to react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.

There are multiple other cognitive biases which involve or are types of confirmation bias:

Well travelled road effect, the tendency to underestimate the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.Ĭonfirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Survivorship bias, which is concentrating on the people or things that 'survived' some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility.

Selection bias, which happens when the members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population.

Salience bias, the tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards.

Implicit association, where the speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.

It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned. The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of selection bias).

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

Attentional bias, the tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.

The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception, a type of objectification.

Anthropomorphism or personification, the tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.

Anthropocentric thinking, the tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.

The availability heuristic includes or involves the following: The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater 'availability' in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. For example, loss aversion has been shown in monkeys and hyperbolic discounting has been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.

Īlthough this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some findings that demonstrate bias have been found in non-human animals as well. However, this kind of confirmation bias has also been argued to be an example of social skill a way to establish a connection with the other person. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person.

There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. Both effects can be present at the same time. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ('cold') bias, such as mental noise, or motivational ('hot') bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Įxplanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought.

Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processing ).

#Hindsight bias definition psychology how to

Īlthough the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics. For common errors in logic, see List of fallacies.Ĭognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment.