Memory
Psychological Biases
🧠Memory
18 biases in this category
Biases that affect how we encode, store, and retrieve memories.
Rosy Retrospection
The tendency to recall past events more favorably than they were actually experienced—we remember the good and forget the bad.
Nostalgia
A sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations, which involves selective memory and often idealization.
Misinformation Effect
The phenomenon where post-event information alters memory of the original event, creating false memories that feel genuinely remembered.
Source Confusion
The misattribution of a memory to a wrong source—remembering information but forgetting where you learned it, or confusing imagination with reality.
Cryptomnesia
A form of misattribution where a person believes they are producing an original thought when they are actually retrieving a forgotten memory—unconscious plagiarism.
False Memory
A phenomenon where a person recalls something that did not happen or remembers it differently from how it actually happened, with full subjective confidence that the memory is accurate.
Consistency Bias
The tendency to incorrectly remember one's past attitudes and behavior as more similar to present ones than they actually were, creating an illusion of personal consistency.
Hindsight Bias (Memory)
The memory component of hindsight bias—genuinely misremembering our predictions as having been more accurate than they were, not just claiming we knew.
Egocentric Bias
The tendency to recall the past in a self-serving manner, including taking more credit for joint outcomes, remembering one's contributions as larger, and placing oneself at the center of events.
Self-Serving Memory
The tendency to remember information in ways that favor oneself—remembering successes more than failures, remembering one's predictions as more accurate, remembering one's behavior as more virtuous.
Peak-End Rule
The psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense point and at its end, rather than based on the sum or average of every moment.
Duration Neglect
The psychological tendency to ignore the duration of an episode when evaluating it, related to the peak-end rule.
Telescoping Effect
A temporal displacement in memory where recent events are remembered as being more remote than they are (forward telescoping) or remote events are remembered as more recent (backward telescoping).
Fading Affect Bias
The psychological phenomenon whereby the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive memories.
Mood-Congruent Memory
The tendency to recall information consistent with one's current mood—when sad, we remember sad things; when happy, we remember happy things.
Positivity Effect
The age-related trend for older adults to favor positive over negative information in attention and memory—a relative preference for positive material that increases with age.
Choice-Supportive Bias
The tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected, remembering chosen alternatives as better and rejected alternatives as worse than they actually were.
Levels-of-Processing Effect
The observation that deeper, more elaborate processing of information leads to better memory than shallow processing.