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Behavioural Bias

The biggest weakness is not being able to own up to weakness.

How can you set up systems to prevent falling victim of lazy thinking?

Heuristics

Why do we take mental shortcuts?

Study your biases so you can engineer systems to avoid failing pray to them.

Thoughts Systems

Thinking, Fast and Slow uses behavioural economics to explore the dichotomy between two modes of thought that often highlighting the gap between human perception and reality.

System 1 is quick, intuitive, and emotional with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 is deep focused mental activity that demands comprehension of chaotic variables.

Human decision-making is not always rational; whether through decision fatigue or laziness; humans tend to fall into traps of cognitive biases that lead to common errors of judgement.

Improvement

Study situations to recognise triggers then practice correcting behaviours and develop systems to avoid the circumstances that lead to poor decisions in the first place.

  1. Develop mantra as tools for clear thinking in times of chaos and pressure.
  2. Engineer systems that make it impossible to fall into habits of lazy thinking.

Biases

Action Bias

Why do we prefer doing something to doing nothing?

Affect Heuristic

Why do we rely on our current emotions when making quick decisions?

Ambiguity Effect

Why we prefer options that are known to us

Anchoring Bias

Why we tend to rely heavily upon the first piece of information we receive

Attentional Bias

Why do we focus more on some things than others?

Availability Heuristic

Why do we tend to think that things that happened recently are more likely to happen again?

Bandwagon Effect

Why do we support opinions as they become more popular?

Barnum Effect

Why do we believe our horoscopes?

Base Rate Fallacy

Why do we rely on specific information over statistics?

Bikeshedding

Why do we focus on trivial things?

Bottom-Dollar Effect

Why do we transfer negative emotions about being broke on items that we purchase?

Bounded Rationality

Why are we satisfied by "good enough"?

Bundling Bias

Why do we value items purchased in a bundle less than those purchased individually?

Bye-Now Effect

Why are we likely to spend more after reading the word “bye”?

Cashless Effect

Why does paying without physical cash increase the likelihood that we purchase something?

Category Size Bias

Why do we think we're more likely to win at the big casino versus the small one?

Choice Overload

Why do we have a harder time choosing when we have more options?

Cognitive Dissonance

Why is it so hard to change someone's beliefs?

Commitment Bias

Why do people support their past ideas, even when presented with evidence that they're wrong?

Confirmation Bias

Why do we favour our existing beliefs?

Decision Fatigue

Why do we make worse decisions at the end of the day?

Declinism

Why we feel the past is better compared to what the future holds

Decoy Effect

Why do we feel more strongly about one option after a third one is added?

Disposition Effect

Why do we tend to hold on to losing investments?

Distinction Bias

Why we tend to view two options as more distinctive when evaluating them simultaneously then separately.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

Why can we not perceive our own abilities?

Empathy Gap

Why do we misinterpret how much our emotions influence our behavior?

Endowment Effect

Why do we value items more if they belong to us?

Extrinsic Incentive Bias

Why do we think others are in it for the money, but we're in it for the experience?

Framing Effect

Why do our decisions depend on how options are presented to us?

Functional Fixedness

Why do we have trouble thinking outside the box?

Fundamental Attribution Error

Why do we underestimate the influence of the situation on people's behavior?

Gambler's Fallacy

Why do we think a random event is more or less likely to occur if it happened several times in the past?

Google Effect

Why do we forget information that we just looked up?

Halo Effect

Why do positive impressions produced in one area positively influence our opinions in another area?

Hard-easy Effect

Why is our confidence disproportionate to the difficulty of a task?

Hindsight Bias

Why do we see unpredictable events as predictable after they occur?

Hot-hand Fallacy

Why do we expect previous successful performance to lead to future successful performance?

Hyperbolic Discounting

Why do we value immediate rewards more than long-term rewards?

Identifiable Victim Effect

Why are we more likely to offer help to a specific individual than a vague group?

IKEA effect

Why do we place disproportionately high value on things we helped to create?

Illusion of Control

Why we believe we have more control over the world than we actually do

Illusion of Validity

Why are we overconfident in our predictions?

Illusory Correlation

Why do we think some things are related when they aren't?

Illusory Truth Effect

Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it's repeated many times?

In-group Bias

Why do we treat our in-group better than we do our out-group?

Incentivization

Why do we work harder when we are promised a reward?

Just-world Hypothesis

Why do we believe that we get what we deserve?

Lag Effect

Why does spacing out the repetition of information make one more likely to remember it?

Law of the Instrument

Why do we use the same skills everywhere?

Less-is-better Effect

Why do our preferences change depending on whether we judge our options together or separately?

Levelling and Sharpening

Why do we exaggerate some details of a story, but minimize others?

Levels of Processing

Why do we remember information that we attach significance to better than information we repeat?

Levels-of-processing Effect

Why repetition improve memory retention

Look-elsewhere Effect

Why do scientists keep looking for a statistically significant result after failing to find one initially?

Loss Aversion

Why do we buy insurance?

Mental Accounting

Why do we think less about some purchases than others?

Mere Exposure Effect

Why do we prefer things that we are familiar with?

Motivating Uncertainty Effect

Why rewards of unknown sizes tend to motivate us more than known rewards

Naive Allocation

Why we tend to prefer spreading limited resources evenly across options.

Negativity Bias

Why is the news always so depressing?

Noble Edge Effect

Why do we tend to favour brands that show care for societal issues?

Nostalgia Effect

How do our sentimental feelings for the past influence our actions in the present?

Observer Expectancy Effect

Why do we change our behavior when we're being watched?

Omission Bias

Why don't we pull the trolley lever?

Optimism Bias

Why do we overestimate the probability of success?

Ostrich Effect

Why do we prefer to ignore negative information?

Overjustification Effect

Why do we lose interest in an activity after we are rewarded for it?

Peak-end Rule

How do our memories differ from our experiences?

Pessimism bias

Why do we think we're destined to fail?

Planning Fallacy

Why do we underestimate how long it will take to complete a task?

Primacy Effect

Why do we only remember the first things on our grocery list?

Priming

Why do some ideas prompt other ideas later on without our conscious awareness?

Projection Bias

Why do we think our current preferences will remain the same in the future?

Reactive devaluation

Why is negotiation so difficult?

Regret Aversion

Why do we anticipate regret before we make a decision?

Representativeness Heuristic

Why do we use similarity to gauge statistical probability?

Response Bias

Why responses to a survey or experiment can be inaccurate due to the nature of the survey or experiment

Restraint Bias

Why do we overestimate our self-control?

Rosy Retrospection

Why do we think the good old days were so good?

Salience Bias

Why do we focus on items or information that are more prominent and ignore those that are not?

Self-serving Bias

Why do we blame external factors for our own mistakes?

Serial Position Effect

Why do we better remember items at the beginning or end of a list?

Sexual Overperception Bias

Why do men think that women are always flirting with them?

Social Norms

Why do we follow the behavior of others?

Source Confusion

Why we forget where our memories come from, and thereby lose our ability to distinguish the reality or likelihood of each memory.

Spacing Effect

Why do we retain information better when we learn it over a long time period?

Spotlight Effect

Why do we feel like we stand out more than we really do?

Status Quo Bias

Why do we tend to leave things as they are?

Suggestibility

Why is yawning contagious?

Survivorship Bias

Why do we misjudge groups by only looking at specific group members?

Take-the-best Heuristic

Why do we focus on one characteristic to compare when choosing between alternatives?

Telescoping Effect

Why do some things “seem like they just happened yesterday?”

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?

The Pygmalion effect

Why do we perform better when someone has high expectations of us?

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Why are we likely to continue with an investment even if it would be rational to give it up?

Zero Risk Bias

Why do we seek certainty in risky situations?