Information Processing
Psychological Biases
🌐 Information Processing
15 biases in this category
Biases that affect how we gather, filter, and interpret information.
Attentional Bias
The tendency for perception to be affected by recurring thoughts and emotions, causing selective attention to certain stimuli while ignoring others.
Selective Perception
The tendency to perceive what we want to perceive and ignore the rest—filtering reality through expectations, needs, and motivations.
Frequency Illusion
Also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—the illusion that something that has recently come to one's attention appears with improbable frequency thereafter.
Recency Bias
The tendency to weigh recent events more heavily than earlier events, giving disproportionate importance to the latest information.
Primacy Effect
The tendency for the first items in a series to be remembered and weighted more heavily than later items—first impressions dominate.
Belief Bias
The tendency to evaluate the logical strength of an argument based on the believability of the conclusion rather than on the validity of the reasoning.
Conservatism Bias
The tendency to insufficiently revise beliefs when presented with new evidence, failing to update as much as Bayesian norms would require.
Representativeness Heuristic
The mental shortcut of judging probability based on how representative a sample or instance is of a category, ignoring base rates and probability rules.
Recognition Heuristic
The mental shortcut of inferring that recognized items have higher criterion values than unrecognized items—if you've heard of it, it's probably important.
Take-the-Best Heuristic
A "fast and frugal" decision strategy where people consider criteria one at a time, ranked by how reliably each predicts the correct answer, and stop as soon as one criterion distinguishes between options.
Fluency Heuristic
The tendency to prefer and trust information that is processed easily—fluent processing is interpreted as truth, familiarity, liking, or confidence.
Effort Heuristic
The tendency to value things more when more effort was put into creating them—the labor theory of value applied to psychological perception.
Simulation Heuristic
The tendency to determine the likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to mentally simulate or imagine—more imaginable outcomes seem more probable.
Attribute Substitution
The cognitive process whereby people substitute a difficult judgment with an easier one—answering a simpler question than the one asked.
Peak-End Rule (Information)
When evaluating experiences retrospectively, we judge them based on the peak (most intense) moment and the end, not on the total or average—the same rule applied to information processing.