Principle of Efficient Language

The principle of efficient language states that the universe tends toward expressions that use minimal geometric symbolism for maximal meaning. And there are two general classes of meaning that it recognizes: geometric (physical) meaning, such as a triangle formed by three particles, and emergent virtually transcendent meaning, such as humor. The system is intelligent enough to register both types of meaning. And it can register meaning, via its sub-systems (sub-consciousnesses of the universal consciousness), such as humans.

Fundamental physics is a language – a code made of geometric symbol types (fundamental particles) and organizational/syntactical rules (force interactions allowing certain relationships between particles). And, as with all codes, there is freedom (particle degrees of freedom) within the syntax. This language expresses the geometric meaning of physical systems.

Geometric algorithms can evolve to high levels of complexity reminiscent of patterns in nature. This is the case with cellular automata (Wolfram). Such algorithms can be fully deterministic or have non-deterministic variable choices at certain steps (converting a mere algorithm into a code/language). We call these free choices “hinge variable” steps. A simple example of language and the hinge variable idea is this code: Take two moves forward on a checkerboard. Then choose one step right or left and then take two more steps forward and so on. The choosing of steps (right or left) at the hinge variable, can be done randomly or by the strategy of an intelligent code user.

It is generally presumed that the hinge variable degrees of freedom in the language of nature are operated randomly by an intrinsic randomness in nature. That is, wherever rules don’t force a particle’s position (e.g., two equally low energy wells that are each an equal distance from an approaching particle), pure randomness will determine it. And quantum mechanics goes even further, speculating that the appearance of all particles at any location is always random.

If nature is truly a language because it is non-deterministic and yet has rules and a finite set of object types, there are only two choices for how the decisions at the hinge variable free steps in a language can be made: Randomness or conscious strategic choice. The case for conscious choice “steering” of the hinge variable is made easily in situations with humans. For example, let’s say you creatively invent a reason to step to your right instead of left. By doing so, you orchestrate countless trillions of actions in the particle based physical code. Imagine that the hinge variable options of particles in your body are acted on by pure randomness. If so, when you creatively steer your body to walk right instead of left, you “break the symmetry” of the randomness and bias the system to your purposes – your freewill intention. The system of your body can no longer be said to have evolved as randomly as before you started making freewill choices. In other words, some of the previously random hinge variable choices in the physical particle language are now neither random nor algorithmically determined. Instead, they are steered or indirectly chosen by your freewill action to walk to the right.

However, it is difficult to conjecture that randomness ever existed in the code in the first place, even before you chose to walk right. There is no good experimental evidence for randomness. This fact is known by many scientists but not the public. However, there is reasonable scientific evidence for freewill.

So here we have an interesting idea. If we presume a natural code/language of physical reality exists, we can come to the conclusion that human freewill can hijack some of the hinge variable freedom within the code – taking it away from previously random influence.

There is no known upward limit on emergent consciousness and freewill. So, in principle, all of the matter and energy of the universe can self-organize into intelligent sub-systems, like humans, that are capable of hijacking every formerly random hinge variable code choice in the Planck scale building blocks of the fabric of spacetime. That is, of course, if the choices were ever random in the first place.

The takeaway so far in this story is this: If the universe operated according to a code, there are hinge variables in the code. A code is any algorithm with hinge variable degrees of freedom, such as English. For example, rules force you to use an adjective at the blank in the following sentence but give you hinge variable freedom of which adjective you can choose: “The dog ran _____”. The objective with codes is to use them efficiently in order to express maximal meaning with minimal symbolism or choices. A code of physical reality expresses geometric meaning. According to emergence theory, the base symbols at the pixilated substructure of space are geometric – regular tetrahedra. And they are organized according to a code. The actions of change in the code need to be conserved efficiently, according to the principle of efficient language, so that maximal physical meaning is achieved with minimal code actions. This idea mirrors the fundamental principle of least action in physics.

So, would the system ever make hinge variable choices by also registering meaning that is non-physical? That is, would non-geometric (non-physical) meaning, the transcendent meaning that humans are experts at creating, break the balance of an ordinarily pure geometric system of meaning? Yes, the double slit experiment is evidence of this. Humans are highly emergent sub-systems of this universal system. We ourselves ascribe meaning. We create it. More than any other known part of the universe, a human is exceptional at creating abstract emergent meaning. For example, consider just a few types of meaning an experimenter adds to realty as she conducts a double slit quantum experiment in her lab: (1) the significance of the meaning of the particle going through one slit versus the other, (2) the competing theories relating to quantum particles versus waves and (3) the delight at the thought of her supervisor seeing she was able to register that particular recording of a particle going through a given slit. There are many abstract meanings we ascribe to things that go beyond brute-simple physical meaning – that is, the pure geometric information or meaning of the code. When this extra meaning is “pumped” into the system of reality by an animal such as a human, the purely physical “symmetry” of the system is broken in some sense. An asymmetry of meaning occurs with respect to the hinge variable choices in the geometric quantum gravity code occurring around the two slits. The human is able to add additional meaning to reality itself about a particle going through one slit if he/she can devise an experiment that provides the meaning about the path of that particle through one of the slits. The hinge variable aspects of the code are then steered or directed in some sense by the human adding this new meaning into the system. But, mathematically, the collective consciousness based substrate of the code operates the actual hinge variable choices in the code. The purpose of any code/language is to convey meaning. And any good code user, whether nature, via the principle of least action, or a human code user, seeks to generate maximal meaning from minimal instances of symbol choices. A spoken language analogy of a system with an efficient ratio of symbols to meaning is a play on words, such as a double entendre or poem, where a small number of words can have multiple meanings. A physical example of a single symbol playing a rule in multiple instances of meaning is a quasicrystal. A change of an atomic position at one coordinate encodes information in multiple 1D Fibonacci chain strings of binary code.

 Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.^[1]

Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research,^[2][3] there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them.^[4] 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.^[5]

Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise,^[6] or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time.^[7][8]

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. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. 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.^[9]

Although this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some findings that demonstrate bias have been found in non-human animals as well. For example, loss aversion has been shown in monkeys and hyperbolic discounting has been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.^[10]

Contents

• 1Belief, decision-making and behavioral
• 2Social
• 3Memory
• 4See also
• 5Footnotes
• 6References

Belief, decision-making and behavioral[edit]

These biases affect belief formation, reasoning processes, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.

Name	Type	Description
Attribute substitution		Occurs when a judgment has to be made (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead a more easily calculated heuristic attribute is substituted. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system.
Curse of knowledge		When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[31]
Declinism		The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.[32]
Dunning–Kruger effect		The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.[38]
Empathy gap		The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.[40]
End-of-history illusion		The age-independent belief that one will change less in the future than one has in the past.[41]
Exaggerated expectation		The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.[6]
Form function attribution bias		In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot.[45]
Hard–easy effect		The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks[6][55][56][57]
Hindsight bias		Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[58] at the time those events happened.
IKEA effect		The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.[60]
Impact bias		The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[65]
Information bias		The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[66]
Interoceptive bias		The tendency for sensory input about the body itself to affect one's judgement about external, unrelated circumstances. (As for example, in parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.) [67][68][69][70]
Money illusion		The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[73]
Moral credential effect		Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.
Non-adaptive choice switching[75]		After experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, the tendency to avoid the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again, even though the choice was optimal. Also known as "once bitten, twice shy" or "hot stove effect".
Omission bias		The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).[76]
Optimism bias		The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[77][78]
Ostrich effect		Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Outcome bias		The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Pessimism bias		The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Present bias		The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments.[83]
Plant blindness		The tendency to ignore plants in their environment and a failure to recognize and appreciate the utility of plants to life on earth.[84]
Pro-innovation bias		The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Projection bias		The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.[85][86][87]
Proportionality Bias		Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.[88][89]
Recency illusion		The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is, in fact, long-established (see also frequency illusion.
Systematic Bias		Judgement that arises when targets of differentiating judgement become subject to effects of regression that are not equivalent.[91]
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect		The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Surrogation		Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
Parkinson's law of triviality		The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.[95]
Unit bias		The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.[96]
Weber–Fechner law		Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Women are wonderful effect		A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
Anchoring or focalism	Anchoring bias	The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).[12][13]
Conservatism bias (belief revision)	Anchoring bias	The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[6][27][28]
Functional fixedness	Anchoring bias	Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.[50]
Law of the instrument	Anchoring bias	An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Clustering illusion	Apophenia	The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[13]
Illusory correlation	Apophenia	Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[63][64]
Pareidolia	Apophenia	A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Anthropocentric thinking	Availability bias	The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.[14]
Anthropomorphism or personification	Availability bias	The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.[15] The opposite bias, of not attributing feelings or thoughts to another person, is dehumanised perception,[16] a type of objectification.
Attentional bias	Availability bias	The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.[17]
Availability heuristic	Availability bias	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.[19]
Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon	Availability bias	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).[46] 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.[47] The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is sometimes conflated with frequency illusion and the recency illusion.[48] It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned.[49]
Implicit association	Availability bias	The speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated.
Salience bias	Availability 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.
Selection bias	Availability bias	The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias.
Survivorship bias	Availability bias	Concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn't because of their lack of visibility.
Well travelled road effect	Availability bias	Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Normalcy bias	Cognitive dissonance	The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Backfire effect	Confirmation bias	The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs.[20] Note: the existence of this bias as a widespread phenomenon has been disputed in empirical studies
Confirmation bias	Confirmation bias	The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[25]
Congruence bias	Confirmation bias	The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[13]
Continued influence effect	Confirmation bias	The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.[29] cf. Backfire effect
Experimenter's or expectation bias	Confirmation bias	The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[43]
Observer-expectancy effect	Confirmation bias	When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Selective perception	Confirmation bias	The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex	Confirmation bias	The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[28]
Forer effect or Barnum effect	Egocentric bias	The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.[44]
Illusion of control	Egocentric bias	The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.[61]
Illusion of validity	Egocentric bias	Overestimating the accurracy of one's judgments, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.[62]
Overconfidence effect	Egocentric bias	Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[6][79][80][81]
Planning fallacy	Egocentric bias	The tendency to underestimate one's own task-completion times.[65]
Restraint bias	Egocentric bias	The tendency to overestimate one's ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect	Extension neglect	The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.[21]
Compassion fade	Extension neglect	The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones.[24]
Conjunction fallacy	Extension neglect	The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions. For example, subjects in one experiment perceived the probability of a woman being both a bank teller and a feminist as more likely than the probability of her being a bank teller.[26]
Duration neglect	Extension neglect	The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.[39]
Hyperbolic discounting	Extension neglect	Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.[59] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
Insensitivity to sample size	Extension neglect	The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Less-is-better effect	Extension neglect	The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Neglect of probability	Extension neglect	The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[74]
Scope neglect or scope insensitivity	Extension neglect	The tendency to be insensitive to the size of a problem when evaluating it. For example, being willing to pay as much to save 2,000 children or 20,000 children
Zero-risk bias	Extension neglect	Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Agent detection	False priors	The inclination to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent.
Automation bias	False priors	The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.[18]
Gender bias	False priors	A widely held[52] set of implicit biases that discriminate against a gender. For example, the assumption that women are less suited to jobs requiring high intellectual ability.[53] Or the assumption that people or animals are male in the absence of any indicators of gender.[54]
Stereotyping	False priors	Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Mere exposure effect	Familiarity principle	The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[72]
Contrast effect	Framing effect	The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus' perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[30]
Decoy effect	Framing effect	Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.[33]
Default effect	Framing effect	When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.[34]
Denomination effect	Framing effect	The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).[35]
Distinction bias	Framing effect	The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[36]
Framing effect	Framing effect	Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
Berkson's paradox	Logical fallacy	The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.[23]
Gambler's fallacy	Logical fallacy	The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads."[51]
Hot-hand fallacy	Logical fallacy	The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Illicit transference	Logical fallacy	Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Irrational escalation or Escalation of commitment	Logical fallacy	The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Plan continuation bias	Logical fallacy	Failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different than anticipated.[82]
Subadditivity effect	Logical fallacy	The tendency to judge the probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.[94]
Time-saving bias	Logical fallacy	Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Zero-sum bias	Logical fallacy	A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).
Ambiguity effect	Prospect theory	The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.[11]
Disposition effect	Prospect theory	The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.
Dread aversion	Prospect theory	Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring.[37]
Endowment effect	Prospect theory	The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[42]
Loss aversion	Prospect theory	The perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.[71] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Pseudocertainty effect	Prospect theory	The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[90]
Status quo bias	Prospect theory	The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[92][93]
System justification	Prospect theory	The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
Belief bias	Truthiness	An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[22]
Illusory truth effect	Truthiness	A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Rhyme as reason effect	Truthiness	Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense's use of the phrase "If the gloves don't fit, then you must acquit."
Subjective validation	Truthiness	Perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.

Social[edit]

Name	Type	Description
Group attribution error		The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
Pygmalion effect		The phenomenon whereby others' expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance.
Reactance		The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation		Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
Social comparison bias		The tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who don't compete with one's own particular strengths.[115]
Shared information bias		Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).[117]
Worse-than-average effect		A tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.[118]
Authority bias	Association fallacy	The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.[97]
Cheerleader effect	Association fallacy	The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.[102]
Halo effect	Association fallacy	The tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[107]
Actor-observer bias	Attribution bias	The tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Extrinsic incentives bias	Attribution bias	An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
Fundamental attribution error	Attribution bias	The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior[87] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[106]
Hostile attribution bias	Attribution bias	The "hostile attribution bias" is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.[108]
Intentionality bias	Attribution bias	Tendency to judge human action to intentional rather than accidental.[111]
Just-world hypothesis	Attribution bias	The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Moral luck	Attribution bias	The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Puritanical bias	Attribution bias	Refers to the tendency to attribute cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing by an individual to a moral deficiency or lack of self-control rather than taking into account the impact of broader societal determinants .[113]
Self-serving bias	Attribution bias	The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).[114]
Ultimate attribution error	Attribution bias	Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Ben Franklin effect	Cognitive dissonance	A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[100]
Availability cascade	Conformity bias	A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").[98]
Bandwagon effect	Conformity bias	The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.[99]
Courtesy bias	Conformity bias	The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.[103]
Groupthink	Conformity bias	The psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.
Social desirability bias	Conformity bias	The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[116] See also: § Courtesy bias.
Bias blind spot	Egocentric bias	The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[101]
Defensive attribution hypothesis	Egocentric bias	Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
Egocentric bias	Egocentric bias	Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
False consensus effect	Egocentric bias	The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.[104]
False uniqueness bias	Egocentric bias	The tendency of people to see their projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are.[105]
Illusion of asymmetric insight	Egocentric bias	People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.[109]
Illusion of transparency	Egocentric bias	The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others, and to overestimate how well they understand others' personal mental states.
Illusory superiority	Egocentric bias	Overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect", "better-than-average effect", or "superiority bias".)[110]
Naïve cynicism	Egocentric bias	Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
Naïve realism	Egocentric bias	The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Trait ascription bias	Egocentric bias	The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Third-person effect	Egocentric bias	A hypothesized tendency to believe that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves. As of 2020, the third-person effect has yet to be reliably demonstrated in a scientific context.
Sexual overperception bias / Sexual underperception bias	False priors	The tendency to over-/underestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself.
Ingroup bias	Ingroup bias	The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Not invented here	Ingroup bias	Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
Outgroup homogeneity bias	Ingroup bias	Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.[112]

Memory[edit]

Main article: List of memory biases

In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:

Name	Description
Bizarreness effect	Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias	The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.[119]
Conservatism or Regressive bias	Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.[120][121]
Consistency bias	Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[122]
Context effect	That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cross-race effect	The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia	A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.[123]
Egocentric bias	Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias	A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.[124]
False memory	A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect)	That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect	The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Humor effect	That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.[125]
Lag effect	The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also spacing effect.
Leveling and sharpening	Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[126]
Levels-of-processing effect	That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.[127]
List-length effect	A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items ("L30") and a list of 100 items ("L100"). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).[128][further explanation needed]
Misinformation effect	Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.[129]
Modality effect	That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias	The improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
Negativity bias or Negativity effect	Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.[130][87] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[106]
Next-in-line effect	When taking turns speaking in a group using a predetermined order (e.g. going clockwise around a room, taking numbers, etc.) people tend to have diminished recall for the words of the person who spoke immediately before them.[131]
Part-list cueing effect	That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.[132]
Peak-end rule	That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Picture superiority effect	The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.[133][134][135][136][137][138]
Positivity effect (Socioemotional selectivity theory)	That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Serial position effect	That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[139]
Processing difficulty effect	That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.[140]
Reminiscence bump	The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.[141]
Self-relevance effect	That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source confusion	Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.[142]
Spacing effect	That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect	The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Stereotypical bias	Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender).
Suffix effect	Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.[143][144]
Suggestibility	A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Tachypsychia	When time perceived by the individual either lengthens, making events appear to slow down, or contracts.[145]
Telescoping effect	The tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect	The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.[146]
Tip of the tongue phenomenon	When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[123]
Travis Syndrome	Overestimating the significance of the present.[147] It is related to chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.
Verbatim effect	That the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.[148] This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
von Restorff effect	That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.[149]
Zeigarnik effect	That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

See also[edit]

• Psychology portal
• Society portal
• Philosophy portal

• Affective forecasting – Predicting someone's future emotions (affect)
• Anecdotal evidence – Evidence relying on personal testimony
• Apophenia – Tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things
• Attribution (psychology) – The process by which individuals explain the causes of behavior and events
• Black swan theory – Theory of response to surprise events
• Chronostasis – Distortion in the perception of time
• Cognitive distortion – An exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset and perpetuation of psychopathological states
• Defence mechanism – Unconscious psychological mechanism that reduces anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful stimuli
• Dysrationalia – Inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence
• Fear, uncertainty, and doubt – Tactic used to influence opinion by disseminating negative, dubious, or false information
• Feedback – Process where information about current status is used to influence future status
• Impostor syndrome – Psychological pattern of doubting one's accomplishments and fearing being exposed as a "fraud"
• List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia list article
• List of fallacies – Types of reasoning that are logically incorrect
• List of maladaptive schemas
• List of memory biases
• List of psychological effects – Wikipedia list article
• iSheep#Behavioural patterns – Derogatory marketing term (references multiple cognitive biasses)
• Media bias – Real or perceived bias of journalists and news producers in mass media
• Mind projection fallacy – An informal fallacy that the way one sees the world reflects the way the world really is
• Motivated reasoning – Using emotionally-biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions
• Observational error, also known as Systematic bias
• Outline of public relations – Overview of and topical guide to public relations
• Outline of thought – Overview of and topical guide to thought
• Pollyanna principle – The tendency of people to remember pleasant events more than unpleasant ones
• Positive feedback – Destabilising process that occurs in a feedback loop
• Prevalence effect
• Propaganda – Form of communication intended to sway the audience through presenting only one side of the argument
• Publication bias – Higher probability of publishing results showing a significant finding
• Recall bias – Systematic error caused by differences in the accuracy or completeness of the recollections retrieved
• Self-handicapping – Cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem