The Universe of Bias & Stereotyping : Part 1

23 min readApr 14, 2022

225+ Cognitive Biases that Affect, Impair and Sometimes Help Our Economics, Health, Justice & Management

Part one of three posts on bias and stereotypes, Author: Sean Moffitt

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” — Robertson Davies

It turns out that we are not very objective in our beliefs. It turns out that our perceptions and reasoning are heavily influenced by cognitive biases. We can dupe ourselves from the truth, and sometimes that’s useful, and sometimes it isn’t.

Bias: def. unconscious rules of thumb, heuristics and seemingly rational deviations in judgement or systematic errors in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them that affects the decisions and judgments that they make; disproportionates weights in favor of or against an idea or thing, sometimes in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. happen due to problems related to human limits and aspects of: memory, emotion, time, attention, social pressure, motivations and other cognitive influences. Different than logical fallacies as biases are mental, not logical errors

Stereotype def.: a type of bias, an often overgeneralized, long-standing unfair and untrue belief that many people have about all people or things with a particular characteristic, sometimes may be accurate; but frequently associate the individual with traits of a group; related to concepts of prejudice and discrimination, stereotype is the cognitive component, prejudice represents the emotional response, and discrimination refers to actions

Some of the Big Biases in Change & Innovation:

Some of the Big Biases in Politics:

Some of the Big Biases in the Workplace:

Some of the Big Biases in Media:

Cognitive Biases — The Universe:

#1 Action Bias — preferring doing something to doing nothing, even when inaction would be more effective, or to act when no evident problem exists

#2 Actor-Observer Bias — explaining other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation , and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite

#3 Additive Bias —solving problems through addition, even when subtraction is a better approach

#4 Adjustment Bias — associated with anchoring bias, all subsequent adjustments will be systematically biased toward the anchor and away from the truer value

#5 Affect Heuristic — relying on our current emotions when making quick decisions

#6 Agent Detection —presuming the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent

#7 Ambiguity Effect — preferring options that are known to us

#8 Anchoring Bias — tending to rely heavily upon the first piece of information we receive e.g. courtroom sentencing, setting a schedule or budget, considering portion sizes or pricing

#9 Anthropomorphism — characterizing animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions

#10 Apophenia — perceiving a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things

#11 Assumed Similarity Bias — assuming that others have more traits in common with them than those others actually do

#12 Attentional Bias - focusing more on some things than others

#13 Attribute Substitution —using an easily calculated heuristic attribute is substituted for a judgment should be making it computationally complex

#14 Automation Bias — depending on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions

#15 Authority Bias — attributing greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and be more influenced by that opinion

#16 Availability Cascade — self-reinforcement in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse

#17 Availability Heuristic —thinking things that happened recently are more likely to happen again; a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision, operates on the notion that if something can be recalled it must be important, new opinions are biased toward that latest news

#18 Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon (frequency illusion) — illusion where something that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appearing with improbable frequency shortly afterwards

#19 Backfire Effect — reacting to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs e.g. ehwen interventions go wrong

#20 Bandwagon Effect — aka herd behaviour, supporting opinions as they become more popular, rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others e.g. testimonial, influencers, transmedia

#21 Barnum Effect (Forer effect)— believing our horoscopes, individuals 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.

#22 Base Rate Fallacy — relying on specific information over general information, focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important

#23 Belief Bias — an effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion

#24 Ben Franklin Effect —performing favors for someone, are more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person

#25 Berkson’s Paradox — misinterpreting statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities

#26 Bias Blindspot — seeing oneself as less biased than other people, or being able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself

#27 Bikeshedding ( or triviality bias)— focusing on trivial things e.g. design of a big shed e.g Wadler’s law focuses on bikeshedding in software programming, Sayre’s law focused on bikshedding in academia

#28 Bizarreness Effect —remembering bizarre material better than common material

#29 Bottom-Dollar Effect — transferring negative emotions about being broke on items that we purchase

#30 Bounded Rationality — being satisfied by “good enough”

#31 Boundary Extension — remembering the background of an image as being larger or more expansive than the foreground

#32 Bundling Bias — valuing items purchased in a bundle less than those purchased individually

#33 Bye-Now Effect — likeliness to spending more after reading the word “bye”, acting on words that have the same sound, such as ‘buy’ or ‘weight’, especially when we’re tired

#34 Cashless Effect — paying without physical cash increase the likelihood that we purchase something

#35 Category Size Bias — believing you win at the big casino versus the small one

#36 Cheerleader Effect — appearing more attractive in a group than in isolation, the human visual system takes “ensemble representations” of faces in a group and averages them as attractive

#37 Choice Overload — a harder time choosing when we have more options

#38 Choice Supportive Bias — remembering one’s choices as better than they actually were

#39 Clustering Illusion — overestimating the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data or phantom patterns

#40 Cognitive Dissonance — seeking to get consistency in attitudes and perceptions, reaction to the mental discomfort or uneasy feelings that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes, dealt with by rejecting, debunking, or avoiding new information and thus why it’s hard to change someone’s beliefs

#41 Commitment Bias — support their past ideas, even when presented with evidence that they’re wrong

#42 Common Source Bias- combining or comparing research, facts and conclusions from the same source, or from sources that use the same methodologies or data

#43 Compassion Bias — behaving more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones

#44 Confabulation — creating false memories in the absence of intentions of deception, having no recognition that the information being relayed to others is fabricated because of impairment, dementia, amnesia, faulty or false memory or gaslighting

#45 Confirmation Bias —favoring our existing beliefs, searching for, interpreting, or recalling information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.

#46 Congruence Bias — testing only hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses

#47 Conjunction Fallacy- assuming that specific conditions are more probable than a more general version of those same conditions

#48 Consistency Bias — incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour

#49 Conservatism Bias (regression bias)— insufficiently revising one’s belief when presented with new evidence, overrate the prior evidence, remembering high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were

#50 Continued Influence Effect — misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected

#51 Context Effect — 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)

#52 Contrast Effect — enhancing or reducing of a certain stimulus’s perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object

#53 Courtesy Bias — giving an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone

#54 Cryptomnesia — memory is mistaken for novel thought or imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory

#55 Curse of Knowledge — better-informed people finding it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people

#56 Decision Fatigue — making worse decisions at the end of the day or event

#57 Declinism — feeling the past is better compared to what the future holds

#58 Decoy Effect — feeling more strongly about one option after a third one is added

#59 Defensive Attribution — attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases; avoids being frightened to believe that a misfortune could happen to anyone at random, and therefore attributing responsibility to the person(s) involved helps to manage this emotional reaction

#60 Denonination Effect — spending more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills)

#61 Disposition Effect — holding on to losing investments

#62 Distinction Bias — viewing two options as more distinctive when evaluating them simultaneously, rather than separately

#63 Dread Aversion — just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring

#64 Dunning–Kruger Effect - not perceiving our own abilities accurately , the loudest person in the room is usually the least competent

#65 Duration Neglect- neglecting the duration of an episode in determining its value

#66 Empathy Gap — not predicting how much our emotions influence our behavior

#67 End-of-History-Illusion -believing one will change less in the future than one has in the past

#68 Endowment Effect — valuing items more if they belong to us, much more than if they were to buy it

#69 Euphoric Recall — remembering past experiences in a positive light, while overlooking negative experiences associated with that event.

#70 Exaggerated Expectation Bias —expecting or predicting more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen

The Gartner Hype Cycle and peak of Exaggerated Expectations

#71 Experimenter/Expectation Bias —believing, certifying, and publishing data that agrees with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment; disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations

#72 Extrinsic Incentive Bias — thinking others are in it for the money and extrinsic reward, but we’re in it for the experience

#73 Fading Affect Bias — emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events

#74 False Consensus Bias — overestimating the degree to which others agree with them’

#75 False Memory — where imagination is mistaken for a memory.

#76 False Uniqueness Bias — seeing projects and themselves as more singular than they actually are

#77 Framing Effect — our decisions depending on how options are presented to us

#78 Functional Fixedness — having trouble thinking outside the box

#79 Fundamental Attribution Error — underestimating the influence of the situation on people’s behavior, over-emphasizing personality-based explanations for behaviors observed

Fundamental Attribution Error — illustration by: Lakshmi Mani

#80 Gambler’s Fallacy — thinking a random event is more or less likely to occur if it happened several times in the past

#81 Gender Bias — implicit biases discriminating against a gender. e..g. women are less able to drive, men don’t ask for directions

#82 Google Effect — forgetting information that we just looked up

#83 Group Attribution Error — believing the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, or a group’s decision outcome must reflect the preferences of individual group members

#84 Groupthink — desiring for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome, suppressing dissent and foregoing critical evaluation

#85 Halo Effect — positive impressions produced in one area positively influence our opinions in another area e.g. line extensions in marketing, well dressed/grooming = intelligence, attractiveness & height of political candidates (the opposite being the horn effect)

#86 Hard-Easy Effect — confidence rising or falling disproportionate to the difficulty of a task

#87 Heuristics — mental shortcuts, generalizations, or rules-of-thumb derived form previous experience, that reduce cognitive load, and can be effective for rushing to immediate judgments, although frequently in error

#88 Hindsight Bias — seeing unpredictable events as predictable after they occur, “I-knew-it-all-along”

#89 Hostile Media Effect (or hostile attribution bias) — individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue perceiving media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists’ point of view

#90 Hot-hand Fallacy — we expect previous successful performance to lead to future successful performance

Hot Hand Fallacy in Basketball Source: 100 Behaviors

#91 Humor Effect — remembered humorous items than non-humorous ones, due to its the distinctiveness , emotional arousal or decreased processing time

#92 Hyperbolic Discounting (or present bias)— immediate gratification, valuing immediate rewards more than long-term rewards, often found in promotions & economics, student procrastination and visceral and hedonic lifestyle states e.g. sexual behaviour, drug use

#93 Ideometer Effect — our thoughts making us feel real emotions e.g. actors envision terrible scenarios, such as the death of a loved one, in order to cry, cataloging what you’re grateful for improving our wellbeing.

#94 IKEA Effect (effort justification)— placing disproportionately high value on things we helped to create, or attribute greater value to an outcome if people had put effort into achieving it

#95 Identifiable Victim Effect — being more likely to offer help to a specific individual than a vague group

#96 Illicit Transference — 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

#97 Illusion of Asymmetric Insight —perceiving the knowledge of peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them

#98 Illusion of Control — believing we have more control over the world and external events than we actually do

#99 Illusion of Explanatory Depth- thinking we understand the world more than we actually do

#100 Illusion of Transparency- overestimating the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others, and to overestimate how well they understand others’ personal mental states

#101 Illusion of Validity — being overconfident in our predictions, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated

#102 Illusory Correlation — thinking some things are related when they aren’t, try this website for humour and evidence of this effect

#103 Illusory Truth Effect —truthiness, believing misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times

Illusory Truth Effect — Source: Cognitive Skew

#104 Immune Neglect — cushioning the effects of a negative event via ego defense, dissonance reductions or other self-serving biases

#105 Implicit Association — speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated, and thus may convey stereotypes, bias or esteem

#106 Imposter Syndrome — doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people

#107 Information Bias —seeking information even when it cannot affect action

#108 In-group Bias — treating our in-group’s opinions and work better than we do our out-group

#109 Incentivization — working harder when we are promised a reward

#110 Insensitivity to Sample Size Bias — insensitivity to sample size, under-expecting variation in small samples

#111 Intensity Bias — overestimating the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states, people may get the valence right but misconstrue or overly focus on the duration or emotional resonance

Intensity Bias Penguin-Style — Source: SMBC

#112 Intentionality Bias — judging human action to be intentional rather than accidental

#113 Interoceptive Effect (or hungry judge effect) — sensory input on the body itself affecting one’s judgement about external, unrelated circumstances (e.g. parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.)

#114 Just-World Hypothesis — believing that we get what we deserve, the world is just and victims deserve injustice inflicted on them; puritanical bias believe victims got their due because of some moral deficiency or lack of self-control

#115 Lag Effect — spacing out the repetition of information make one more likely to remember it, as opposed the same amount in a single time period

#116 Law of the Instrument — using the same skills everywhere, when we acquire a specific tool/skill, we tend to be to see opportunities to use that tool/skill everywhere — when all the world is a nail, let’s always use a hammer

#117 Less-is-Better Effect — preferences changing depending on whether we judge our options together or separately, prefereing the worse of two options, only when the options are presented separately.

#118 Leveling and Sharpening — exaggerating some details of a story, but minimizing others

#119 Levels of Processing — remembering information that we attach significance to better than information we repeat

#120 List Length Effect — remembering a smaller percentage of items in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases

#121 Look-elsewhere Effect —finding a statistically significant result after failing to find one initially , because do defined parameter observed — Higgs Boson particle theory has come under this scrutiny

#122 Loss Aversion — why do we buy insurance, believing we might experience losses asymmetrically more severely than equivalent gains

#123 Mental Accounting — thinking less about some purchases than others

#124 Moral Luck — ascribing greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event

#125 Mere Exposure Effect (or familiarity principle) — there is no place like home, preferring things that we are familiar with, having undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them e.g. domestic company investing, brand endorsement with ads we recognize

#126 Misinformation Effect — false memories becoming less and less accurate because of interference from post-event information e.g. vaccine safety, eyewitness testimony many years later

#127 Modality Effect — memory and bias is different when using different presentation methods or media e.g. echoic memory (associated sound), phonological loop (working emmory)

#128 Money Illusion — concentrating on the nominal value or face value of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power, so as not to account for inflation or to be very sticky to historical pricing

#129 Mood-Congruent Memory Bias — improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.

#130 Moral Credential Effect —after doing something good, giving oneself permission to be less good in the future e.g. drinking Diet Coke — with Quarter Pounders, going to the gym and riding the elevator to the second floor, installing tankless water heaters — then taking longer showers

#131 Motivating Uncertainty Effect — rewards of unknown sizes motivating us more than known rewards

Game Show — Deal or No Deal — Entertainment with Motivating Uncertainty

#132 Naive Allocation — tend to prefer spreading limited resources evenly across options

#133 Naïve Cynicism — expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself

#134 Naive Realism — we believe we have an objective understanding of the world

#135 Negativity Bias — news always so depressing, register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events, the sting of criticism > joy of praise

#136 Neglect of Probability — disregarding probability when making a decision under uncertainty

#137 Next-in-Line Effect — diminished recall of content for the words of people who spoke immediately before them (when taking turns speaking in a group using a predetermined order)

#138 Noble Edge Effect — favoring people or brands that show care for societal issues

#139 Non-adaptive Choice Switching Effect— once bitten, twice shy; after experiencing a bad outcome with a decision problem, avoiding the choice previously made when faced with the same decision problem again

#140 Normalcy Bias — refusing to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

#141 Nostalgia Effect — sentimental feelings for the past influence our actions in the present

#142 Not Invented Here — the aversion to use products or accept ideas that are developed outside of a group, manifest as an unwillingness to adopt an idea or product because it originates from another culture or place

Not Invented Here Bias Source: Mahesh Kumar

#143 Observer Expectancy Effect —changing our behavior when we’re being watched

#144 Occam’s Razor: when confronted with competing theories or explanations, the simpler one is preferred

#145 Omission Bias — not pull the bus or trolley lever when it’s our stop, favoring an act of omission (inaction) over one of commission (action)

#146 Optimism Bias (or positive outcome bias) — wishful thinking, overestimating the probability of success

#147 Ostrich Effect — preferring to ignore negative information e.g don’t read bill statements

#148 Outcome Bias — judging a decision by its eventual outcome instead of the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

#149 Outgroup Homogeneity Bias — seeing members of other groups as being relatively less varied than members of their own group

#150 Overconfidence Effect — having excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions

#151 Overjustification Effect - losing interest in an activity after we are rewarded for it

#152 Pareidolia —perceiving vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals clouds, the man in the moon, and hidden messages on records played in reverse

#153 Peak-End Rule —our memories differ from our experiences, perceiving 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

#154 Pessimism bias — thinking we’re destined to fail, overestimate the likelihood of negative things

#155 Picture Superiority Effect — learned and recall best achieved by viewing pictures versus their written word counterparts

#156 Placebo Effect — believing a treatment will work, having a positive physiological effect in the absence of efficiacy

#157 Plan Continuation Bias — failing 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

#158 Planning Fallacy — underestimate how long it will take to complete a task

#159 Primacy Effect (or serial position effect) — remembering the first things on a list, also recency effect and suffix effect

#160 Priming — some ideas prompting other ideas later on without our conscious awareness

#161 Pro-Innovation Bias — having excessive optimism towards invention or innovation’s usefulness, while failing to identify its limitations & weaknesses e.g. atomic power, paperless society

#162 Projection Bias — we think our current preferences will remain the same in the future e.g. campaign promises and political preferences

#163 Pseudocertainty Effect — make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes

#164 Pygmalion Effect — performing better when someone has high expectations of us

Pygmalion Effect Source: The Duna Diaries

#165 Reactance (or reverse psychology) —doing the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice

#166 Reactive Devaluation —negotiation so difficult, devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.

#167 Recency Bias — favoring recent events over historic ones e.g. the final lawyer’s closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate.

#168 Regression Bias — a potential independent variable — which is related to both the dependent variable and an included independent variable — is omitted from the evaluation, causing a difference in the estimated vs. real outcome

#169 Regret Aversion — anticipating regret before we make a decision

#170 Reminiscence Bump — the recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods

#171 Repetition Blindness — Unexpected difficulty in remembering more than one instance of a visual sequence

#172 Representativeness Heuristic — we use similarity to gauge statistical probability

#173 Response Bias — responses to a survey or experiment can be inaccurate due to the nature of the survey or experiment

#174 Restraint Bias — overestimating our self-control

#175 Rhyme & Reason Effect —rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful

Rhyme & Reason Effect — The O.J. Simpson Acquittal

#176 Risk Compensation Bias (or Peltzman effect) — taking greater risks when perceived safety increases

#177 Rosy Retrospection (or declinism) — thinking the good old days were so good, and the future very.negatively

#178 Salience Bias — focusing on items or information that are more prominent and ignoring those that are not

#179 Scope Neglect — being insensitive to the size of a problem when evaluating it

#180 Self-handicapping — avoiding effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem

#181 Self-Serving Bias — blaming external factors for our own mistakes, claiming more responsibility for successes, evaluating ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests; extends to a multiplee people as an in-group bias

#182 Selection Bias — members of a statistical sample are not chosen completely at random, which leads to the sample not being representative of the population, even though the conclusions may be expressed for the full population

#183 Selective Exposure — the active part of confirmation bias, choosing to focus on information in their environment that is congruent with and confirms their current attitudes in order to avoid or reduce cognitive dissonance

#184 Self-relevance Effect — memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others

#185 Semmelweis Reflex —rejecting new evidence that contradicts a paradigm, importance of scientific or medical fact has been punished e.g. earth moves around sun, hand washing helps prevent spread of disease

#186 Serial Position Effect — remember items at the beginning or end of a list

#187 Sexual Overperception Bias — men think that women are always flirting with them

#188 Shared Information Bias — spending more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with

#189 Social Comparison Bias — when making decisions, favoring potential candidates who don’t compete with one’s own particular strengths

#190 Social Desirability Bias — over-reporting socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-reporting socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.

#191 Social Norms — following the behavior of others, particularly the unwritten rules of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are considered acceptable

#192 Source Confusion — forgetting where our memories come from, and thereby losing our ability to distinguish the reality or likelihood of each memory.

#193 Spacing Effect — retaining information better when we learn it over a long time period

#194 Spotlight Effect — feeling like we stand out more than we really do

#195 Status Quo Bias — tending to leave things as they are

#196 Steroeotyping — expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual

#197 Subadditivity Effect- judging the probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts

#198 Subjective Validation (personal validation) —statements are perceived as true if a subject’s belief or where they place significance demands it to be true

#199 Suggestibility — yawning is contagious, ideas or behaviors of others are mistaken for our own, reshaping our own memories or experiences

#200 Sunk Cost Fallacy(escalation of commitment) — continue with an investment even if it would be rational to give it up

#201 Superiority Bias (Lake Wobegon Effect or illusory superiority) — overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people, similar to better-than-average and worse-than-average effects

#202 Surrogation — what gets measured becomes more important than the intent of measuring, a construct of interest evolves replacing that construct, losing sight of the big picture

#203 Survivorship Bias — misjudging groups by only looking at specific group members who survived or were visible vs. those that perished or were suppressed

#204 System Justification- defending and bolstering existing social, economic, and political arrangements, and disparage alternatives, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest

#205 Tachypsychia — time perceived by the individual lengthening or contracting, making events appear to slow down or speed up

#207 Take-the-Best Heuristic — focus on one characteristic to compare when choosing between alternatives

#208 Telescoping Effect — thinking some things “seem like they just happened yesterday?”, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.

#209 Testing Effect — more easily recalling and supporting information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it

#210 Third Person Effect — believing that mass-communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.

#211 Time Saving Bias —underestimating the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed, and overestimating the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed

#212 Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon — ability to recall parts of an item, or related information, but frustratingly unable to recall the whole item

#213 Trait Ascription Bias — viewing themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable

#214 Truth Bias — believing, to some degree, the communication of another person, regardless of whether or not that person is actually lying or being untruthful

#215 Travis Syndrome — overestimating the significance of the present, always making decisions based on current need and context

#216 Ultimate Attribution Error — believing an outgroup’s positive behaviour is a result of chance or circumstance and positive acts performed by ingroup members are as a result of their personality

#217 Unconscious Bias — underlying attitudes and stereotypes that people unconsciously attribute to another person or group of people that affect how they understand and engage with them

#218 Unit Bias — believing in the standard suggested amount of consumption e.g., food serving size is perceived to be appropriate regardless of size of person

#219 Verbatim Effect —the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.

#220 von Restorff Effect — an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items

#221 Weber-Fechner Law — difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities

#222 Well-travelled Road Effect — underestimating the duration taken to traverse oft-travelled routes and overestimate the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes

#223 Worse-than-Average Effect — believing ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult

#224 Zero Risk Bias — seeking certainty in risky situations e.g. money-back guarantees and risk-free trial offers.

#225 Zero Sum Bias — where a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game, a flat overall amount that people can benefit or win