Decision-Making
Psychological Biases
⚖️ Decision-Making
22 biases in this category
Biases that influence how we make choices, evaluate options, and commit to decisions.
Loss Aversion
The psychological tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains—losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The tendency to continue investing in something because of previously invested resources (time, money, effort) rather than future returns, even when abandonment would be optimal.
Status Quo Bias
A preference for the current state of affairs, where any change is perceived as a loss even when objectively beneficial.
Endowment Effect
The tendency to value something more once you own it, demanding more to give it up than you would pay to acquire it.
Framing Effect
The principle that the way information is presented significantly affects decisions and judgments, even when the underlying facts are identical.
Choice Overload
The paradox that while choice is valued, too many options lead to decision paralysis, dissatisfaction, and regret.
Distinction Bias
The tendency to view two options as more different when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately, leading to overvaluation of minor differences.
Default Effect
The powerful influence of pre-selected options on final choices—people disproportionately stick with defaults rather than actively choosing alternatives.
Decoy Effect
The phenomenon where adding a third, asymmetrically dominated option makes one of the original options more attractive, even though the decoy itself is rarely chosen.
Hyperbolic Discounting
The tendency to prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later ones, with preference reversals as time passes—we value immediacy disproportionately.
Omission Bias
The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful omissions (failures to act), even when the consequences are identical.
Action Bias
The preference for action over inaction even when doing nothing would be more effective, driven by the need to feel in control and avoid regret from passivity.
Zero-Risk Bias
The preference for completely eliminating a small risk over a larger reduction in a bigger risk—people pay disproportionately to achieve certainty.
Denomination Effect
The tendency to be less likely to spend large-denomination bills than equivalent small denominations, treating money differently based on physical form rather than value.
Mental Accounting
The psychological tendency to treat money differently depending on its source, intended use, or the account it's assigned to, rather than treating all money as fungible.
Present Bias
The tendency to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time, leading to time-inconsistent preferences and self-control failures.
Unit Bias
The tendency to want to complete a defined unit of something regardless of its size—portion sizes, package sizes, and unit definitions affect consumption.
Hot-Cold Empathy Gap
The inability to accurately predict how we will behave or what we will want in different emotional states—"cold" rational states fail to anticipate "hot" emotional states and vice versa.
Affect Heuristic
The mental shortcut of making judgments based on current emotions rather than objective analysis—if something feels good, we judge it as lower risk and higher benefit; if it feels bad, we judge it as higher risk and lower benefit.
Mere Exposure Effect
The psychological phenomenon where people develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them, regardless of objective qualities.
Focusing Illusion
The cognitive bias that "nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it"—attention magnifies the importance of whatever is being focused on.
Scope Insensitivity
The failure of human emotions to scale appropriately with the magnitude of outcomes—we don't feel 10 times as much about 10,000 deaths as about 1,000 deaths.