Hypothesis Assessment
Psychological Biases
🔬 Hypothesis Assessment
15 biases in this category
Biases that affect how we evaluate evidence, test theories, and update our beliefs.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.
Belief Perseverance
The tendency to maintain beliefs even after the evidence supporting them has been completely refuted—once formed, beliefs are remarkably resistant to change.
Semmelweis Reflex
The reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms—named after Ignaz Semmelweis, whose evidence about hand-washing was rejected by the medical establishment.
Backfire Effect
The phenomenon where corrections to misinformation can actually strengthen the original false belief rather than weaken it, particularly when the misinformation is tied to identity.
Motivated Reasoning
The unconscious tendency to fit evidence to conclusions rather than conclusions to evidence, driven by emotional stakes in particular outcomes.
Congruence Bias
The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing rather than testing alternative hypotheses—seeking to confirm rather than disconfirm.
Experimenter's Bias
The tendency for researchers to unconsciously influence the outcomes of experiments in the direction of their expectations and hypotheses.
Observer-Expectancy Effect
The phenomenon where a researcher's expectations about the outcome of an experiment unconsciously influence the subjects' behavior, producing the expected results.
Selection Bias
The error introduced when the sample studied is not representative of the population one is trying to understand, leading to conclusions that don't generalize.
Survivorship Bias
The logical error of concentrating on the entities that passed some selection process and overlooking those that did not, leading to false conclusions about what causes success.
Information Bias
The tendency to seek more information even when it cannot affect action, valuing information gathering over decision-making.
Illusion of Validity
The tendency to have high confidence in predictions even when the factors generating confidence (coherent story, confidence of source, etc.
Pareidolia
The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random or ambiguous stimuli—seeing faces in clouds, hearing words in noise, finding meaning in coincidences.
Clustering Illusion
The tendency to see patterns in random events, interpreting inevitable streaks and clusters as meaningful when they're expected by chance.
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
The fallacy of determining a pattern after the fact and then claiming the pattern was predicted—like shooting at a barn and then drawing a target around the bullet holes.