Cognitive Biases

Ego depletion

• ​People have a limited supply of willpower, and it decreases with overuse. Willpower draws down mental energy – it’s a muscle that can be exercised to exhaustion.

• Ego depletion only exists in the context of lack of Now-Next integrity. To dissolve Ego depletion, see the NNI toolkit.

Empathy gap​

• ​The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.

Endowment effect​

• ​The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.

• "My house is worth much more than you're offering me."

  • This calculus can blind us to making good economic decisions.

Exaggeration expectation​

• ​The tendency to expect or predict more extreme outcomes than those outcomes that actually happen.

Expectation bias​

• The tendency to anticipate desired/undesired results to occur either one way or the other, without considering the risk of it turning out differently (either in the desired or undesired direction). This tendency includes the setup for an upset (and blame towards oneself, others, or the universe) if the anticipated desired results don't occur. Expectations allow us to blind ourselves to the risks of it not turning out the way we count on. They allow us to feeling safer, at the expense of putting us at more risk. They also allow us to indulge in "counting our chickens before they hatch." Ultimately, without expectations, we would never be upset and we would never feel betrayed or let down either by others or by ourselves.

• "I expected my girlfriend to be true to me. Then I caught her kissing my best friend. I was so betrayed."

  • By indulging in the expectation that he could count on his girlfriend to be loyal, he set himself up for betrayal. The Expectation bias could also be called the Hope bias, when related to positive expectations. See undoing expectations.

External Problem Bias

• This is our tendency to conflate an internal problem with an external problem, thinking there is only an external problem. An internal problem always involves suffering and an internal conflict, indicating a lack of Now-Next Integrity or Oneself-Others Integrity. We don't recognize that we have two distinct, although interrelated problems. As such, we miss the opportunity to resolve the internal problem first which is most often the most effective way to deal with whatever external problem may still remain.

  • This bias is so pervasive and fundamental that it causes more suffering than any other bias.

Fear of missing out (FOMO)

• An anxious feeling that can happen when you fear that other people might be having rewarding experiences that you’re missing. Many people have been preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, is having a better time, making more money, and leading a more exciting life.​

  • This bias is driven by the habit to compare yourself negatively to others, which is driven by the fear that others are comparing you negatively to themselves or others. Use undoing fear to zap this habit, step by step.

Focusing effect​

• ​The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.

Framing effect​

• ​Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.

• "If half the people who take this drug will die, then let's not do that. But, if half the people who take this drug will survive, we should go ahead."

  • Many salespeople are good at the framing effect (to influence you to buy).

Gambler's fallacy​

• ​The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.

• "My luck's got to change. I got four tails in a row."​

Giving-up bias (contrast with the Persistence bias)

• The tendency to give up when (from your Next's perspective) it would be best to keep going. ​

• "I'm not good at selling myself. I think I'll just get a regular job."

  • Giving up when it would be best to keep going is usually caused either by a resistance to fear (see undoing fear) or not having (or even looking for) a way for your Now to enjoy the process of going for what your Next wants (a lack of Now-Next integrity). See the NNI toolkit.

Good-Bad bias

• The (strong) tendency to add judgment (make wrong or make right) to assessment, often inhibiting our ability to make accurate assessments and more effective choices as well as our ability to create the best relationships both with ourselves and with others. Rumi pointed to the possibility of stepping outside this bias when he said, "Out beyond the ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there." The Victimhood bias is a subset of the Good-bad Bias.

• "My son's a good boy. I don't want to be a bad mother."

  • It's impossible to overstate the damages caused to ourselves and our relationships with others by our addiction to the Good-bad bias. However, it has some short-term benefits: it can reduce fear, it can help us feel like we belong, it can make us feel more in control, it can give us hope for a rescuer, and righteous anger can feel good in the moment. But the costs are enormous. It destroys discernment as to who and what contributes to both desirable results and undesirable results. We become willing to both bear and inflict deep wounds to prove ourselves "right" and others "wrong." We become willing to tolerate the war between our Now and our Next, constantly feeling guilty when our Now "wins." Use undoing shoulds to let go of the Good-bad bias.

Halo effect

• ​The tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them.

Hard-easy effect​

• ​The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks.​

Hedonic adaptation

• ​People quickly return to their original level of happiness, despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

Herd behavior

• ​The tendency for individuals to mimic the actions (rational or irrational) of a larger group. Individually, however, most people would not necessarily make the same choice.

Hindsight bias​

• ​Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.

Hostile attribution bias​

• ​The tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.

• "How could he be so disrespectful by showing up 20 minutes late?!"

  • This bias causes immense hurt and misunderstandings between peoples.

Hot-cold empathy gap

• We have trouble imagining how we would feel in other people’s shoes. We are also not good at imaging how other people would respond to things because we assume they would respond in the same way we would.

  • This bias is a subset of the Similarity bias.

Hot-hand fallacy​

• ​The belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

• "I'm on a roll, baby...no way I'm going to cash out."

  • The is the other side of the Gambler's fallacy.

Hyperbolic discounting​

• ​Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs.

• A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.

  • Creating Now-Next integrity is fundamental in reducing this bias.

Identifiable victim effect​

• ​The tendency to respond more strongly to a set of one or more easily identifiable people at risk than to a larger group of people at risk.

  • This effect partially explains why many people support trade and anti-immigration restrictions. Trade restrictions and anti-immigration restrictions can reduce the wages (or cost the jobs) of some already in-country workers (with them becoming "victims"). Two other much larger sets of victims are not so easily identified or singled out. For example (currently as of May, 2020), imported sneakers, or the materials used to make sneakers (think New Balance, Nike, Adidas) have to pay a 48% tariff. This makes every person in the USA who buys sneakers a victim of the higher prices they have to pay for sneakers (did you ever wonder why they cost so much in the USA?). The other set of victims are all the employees in foreign companies (usually employees who are poorer than their USA counterparts who would be threatened by the elimination of sneaker tariffs) who either lose their jobs or are not paid as well as they would be otherwise if they were able to compete in a open market with suppliers in the USA.

Identity bias

• The tendency to see ourselves in a way that make it difficult or impossible to make the better choices in circumstances where such a choice would conflict with that way of seeing ourselves.

• "I can't get a divorce. I'm a person who can always be relied upon."

  • Typical identities include "being a good guy," "not a quitter," "being a friendly person," "being a positive person," "keeping my word," "a loyal person," "a Democrat or Republican," "a good parent," "a good student," and "always tells the truth." Identities can also seem negative, for example, "unreliable," "will hurt others," and "will always give up." One tool to loosen up our identity when it would be helpful to do so is undoing fear. Initiating a divorce with my former wife was my biggest courage of my life because I was going head-to-head with my identity of "being a good guy."

IKEA effect​

• ​The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.

Illusion of asymmetric insight

• ​People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.

Illusion of control​

• ​The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over external events.

• "I got this one...you can count on it."

  • This is one aspect of expectations/projections made (usually automatically) without considering the likelihood that something won't happen the way you expect. See undoing expectations.

Illusory correlation​

• ​Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.

Illusory truth effect​

• ​A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity.​

I'll-remember-it bias

• The tendency to unreasonably believe that we'll surely remember something at the time or in the circumstance that we'll need to remember it without recording it in the appropriate place in order to remind us later.

• "I'll bring the documents with me next week when we meet."

Impact bias

• ​The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

Information bias​

• ​The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

• "I just have to know why he left me."

  • This bias creates a lot of cost and grief. I have learned to ask myself a question about my questions, "If I get the answer to this question, will that likely make any difference in my current or future decisions?"

In-group favoritism​

• The tendency to favor people who exist in similar groups as themselves. These groups could be formed by gender, race, ethnicity, or a favorite sports team. We tend to overwhelmingly favor people who are similar to us and who belong to these similar groups.​

Insensitivity to sample size​

• ​The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.​

Intentionality bias

• ​Tendency to judge human action to intentional rather than accidental.

Internal problem bias​

• The tendency to see our problems as outside of ourselves and as something to fix in the outside world, at the expense of not noticing how much of the problem is an inside problem (an issue within ourselves). It includes the tendency to not address that inside problem first before trying to address any outside problem that may still exist once that is done.​

• "I'm so fed up with my sister taking advantage of me. I'm going to give her a piece of my mind."

  • Have you given yourself the right to say "no" to your sister and maintain the boundaries needed to take care of yourself? Have your dissolved any guilt you might feel in doing that by using undoing guilt? Have you asked yourself which of your behaviors may have allowed or stimulated your sister to "take advantage of you"? Have you used undoing fear to let go of any feelings of defensiveness with your sister? All these are possible inside problems to be addressed before deciding what different outcomes you'd like to have with your relationship with your sister.

Interoceptive bias​

• ​The tendency for sensory input about the body itself to affect one's judgement about external, unrelated circumstances. (As for example, in parole judges who are more lenient when fed and rested.)

• "I'm at my best any time of day."

  • Time of day can make a big difference in test scores and in making the best decisions. Most people will make lower scores on a test given in the afternoon in contrast with one given in the morning.

It's-about-me bias​

• The tendency to personalize another's response to us, either negatively (we're bad) or positively (we're good). This personalization diminishing our ability to be curious about and understand the other's person's behavior and appropriately adjust our own to more likely get the results we want.

• For example, if you are handing out flyers to people on the sidewalk and someone refuses to accept your flyer, you will think/feel, "I feel bad; they rejected me." Or alternatively, they accept the flyer, you will think/feel, "That feels good; they accepted me and I got the result I wanted." Or consider an example with more drama: "My husband slept with my best friend. I feel so betrayed and I wonder what's wrong with me."

  • You might find it hard to imagine if you would still be human if you didn't personalize things. Your identity is attached to the idea that it means something (either good or bad) about you depending upon how others respond to you. In many cases, their response may be independent of anything you did; they are just that way with everybody or they're just having a bad day. They are just "raining" on you and it means nothing about you. Other times there is something that you did that stimulated their response: you fired them, you blamed them, you praised them...and they responded in a way that you liked or didn't like. Regardless, it still means nothing good or bad about you; you are always magnificent.

Knowledge bias​

• The tendency for us to think we know more than we do or to have more confidence in what we think we know than is warranted.​ The Expectation bias is a subset of the Knowledge bias.

• "It's hard to get a good job in this market." 

  • How many jobs have you applied for? How much time have you spent per day searching for a job and how many weeks have you being doing that for? What innovative approaches have you researched or applied in order to get a job? Have you honed your skills to do well in job interviews? It's unlikely that the person who says, "it's hard to get a good job in this market" has taken the actions suggested by these questions. They are suffering from the knowledge bias.

Law of the instrument​

• ​An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

• "Whoops, it looks like your cholesterol is high. I'll prescribe you one of the new statins," says your doctor.

  • Medical doctors are trained in the knowledge, skills, and techniques to try to rescue people after they have fallen off the cliff. They spend little time learning about how to prevent people from getting near the cliff. These are their "instruments." In their years of medical training doctors receive only 24 hours of training in nutrition. Nutrition knowledge is not their instrument. As such they typically ignore or under-value a nutritional approach to reversing or curing diseases. 

Less-is-better effect

• ​When low-value options are valued more highly than high-value options. For example, a person giving an expensive $45 scarf as a gift was perceived to be more generous than one giving a $55 cheap coat.

Life-is-hard bias​

• The tendency view going through different things in life as hard. For example: getting stuck in a traffic jam, studying for a test, worrying about your relationship, getting fired, being sick, a parent or child dying, going through a divorce. ​Add to this tendency our inclination to praise ourselves and others for their willingness to endure hard things, like a badge of honor. This bias blinds us to the fact that "hardness" never exists out in the world; it only exists in our resistant thoughts about it, in our beliefs about it. 

• "Going through my divorce was hard."

  • Did you blame yourself? Did you blame your spouse? That would make it hard. Did you indulge in an expectation of how the divorce should have gone? That would make it hard. Did you embrace the energy of your fear and honor yourself for your courage during the process of divorce? If you didn't, that would make it hard. Did you express any pain you felt freely and see that as one manifestation of your capacity to love? If not, that would make it hard.

Long-term bias (contrast with Short-term bias)

• The tendency to sacrifice taking care of now and being happy now for the sake of having a better future and hopefully being more happy in the future. This blinds us from looking for ways that both now and the future can win. It also excuses our never learning to be happy now...so that when the future becomes now, again we're sacrificing now for the future (until we die).

• "My job is really boring and unfulfilling, but I've got to have that paycheck."

  • The antidote to the Long-term bias is learning to put lifestyle first and results second, as well as becoming adept at creating integrity between your Now and your Next through the tools and approaches in the NNI toolkit.

Looking-good bias​

• Then tendency to be overly attached to looking good to others (and to avoid looking bad) in a way that interferes with out ability to make the best choices in both contributing to ourselves and to others, especially in the longer term.

  • Being responsible for how we might be occurring for others is important. But when we're driven by it, when we haven't made friends with the fear that we might not look good, when we don't honor ourselves for the courage for being willing to not look good, then we are trapped and we relinquish both our freedom and some of our power. See undoing fear and not caring what others think?

Loss aversion (see also sunk cost bias)

• ​People’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. It’s better not to lose $5 than to find $5. For example, scientists randomly divided participants into buyers and sellers and gave the sellers coffee mugs as a gift. They then asked the sellers for how much they would sell the mug and asked the buyers for how much they would buy it. Results showed that the sellers placed a significantly higher value on the mugs than the buyers did. Loss aversion was the cause of that contradiction.

Love bias

• The tendency to think that loving behavior (especially in the short-term) is all that is needed to support others in having a great life and to have the best relationships with others. The Love bias tends to discount (and blinds us to) the importance of showing respect to others (especially children, employees, and even spouses). It also discounts (and blinds us to) the importance of taking care of oneself (with appropriate boundaries, requests, and saying no) as necessary in both supporting others as well as having the best relationship with them. See also the Baby bias.

• "Honey, it's because I love you that I help you with your homework and insist that you do it."

  • The Love bias is often a cover for justifying our need to control others and to mess in their business.

Memorphism

• The tendency to assume that how another will think and feel in certain circumstances will be the same as how they, or people similar to them, will think and feel in those circumstances. The assumption often persists even in the face of clear evidence that it's not true. For example, many people, even after they know me fairly well, will still believe that I will blame them if they haven't kept some agreement with me. They continue to assume this even with evidence to the contrary because they would be that way with others and they have evidence that most others are that way also. Memorphism blinds us from really seeing and knowing another more deeply.

​Mental accounting​

• The tendency of people to divide their money into separate accounts based on subjective criteria, like the source of the money and the intent for each account. For example, people often have a special fund set aside for a vacation, while carrying substantial credit card debt, despite the fact that diverting funds from debt repayment increases interest payments and reduces net worth. Similarity, another study revealed that supermarket shoppers spent less money paying with cash than with credit cards. Comparing the price of goods to a smaller mental account (cash) than to a larger mental account (credit card) increased the pain of payment.

Mere exposure effect​

• ​The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.

Money illusion​

• ​The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.

Moral credential effect​ (also called licensing effect)

• ​This occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.

• "I've been so good with my eating. Time to have a pizza."

  • Once we're able to create consistent integrity between our Now and our Next, the "moral credential effect" will disappear.

Naive realism

• ​The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.

Negativity bias​

• ​Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

Neglect of probability​

• ​The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

• "I just knew my friend would be on time, but they showed up late."

  • We do this mostly to avoid the sense of risk or fear (and to be able to count our chickens before they hatch). To undo the "neglect of probability" bias we would have to learn to undo expectations.

Normalcy bias​

• ​The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

Not invented here​

• ​Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.

Observer-expectancy effect​

• ​When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it

Omission bias​

• ​The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).

Optimism bias​

• ​The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes. For example, smokers tend to feel they are less likely than other individuals who smoke to be afflicted with lung cancer. Similarity, motorists tend to feel they are less likely to be involved in a car accident than is the average driver.

• "I'm sure that many people were engaging in the optimism bias before COVID-19 started to affect their country."

Ostrich effect​

• ​Ignoring an obvious negative situation.

• "All her friends were aware that she was blinded by the Ostrich effect regarding her untenable marriage."

  • The Ostrich effect is mostly likely driven by resisted fear, an unwillingness (unconsciously driven) to feel the fear that they know they would feel if they took their head out of the sand. See undoing fear.

Outcome bias​

• ​The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

• "Hey, he was driving at 100mph, but he got us there in one piece. What's the big deal?!"

Outgroup homogeneity bias

• ​Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.

Overconfidence effect​

• ​Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time. It also turns out the experts suffer even more from the overconfidence effect than laypeople do. Studies have found that over 90% of US drivers rate themselves above average, 68% of professors consider themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability, and 84% of Frenchmen believe they are above-average lovers.​

Overjustification Effect

• The loss of motivation and interest as a result of receiving an excessive external reward (such as money and prizes). When being rewarded for doing something actually diminishes intrinsic motivation to perform that action. For example, researchers gave children reward for doing activities they already enjoyed, like solving puzzles. Then, the children were given an opportunity to engage in these same activities on their own, when no rewards would be forthcoming. The results: children engaged in these activities less often than they did before.

  • When students are rewarded for good grades, either by praise or physical rewards ("now you can have your mobile phone back"), they learn to respond to the external reward for "learning" and consequently become inured to the natural intrinsic joy of learning.

Persistence bias (contrast with Giving-up bias)

• The tendency to keep going in the face of not enjoying the process as well as ignoring new information or insights as to the benefits and costs associated with the original intention. Like the Long-term bias, the Persistence bias is willing to sacrifice enjoying now and enjoying the process for some projected future benefits. It perpetuates a lose-win relationship between Now and Next. It blinds us to the possible benefits of giving up or changing course. For many, the Persistence bias has become part of their identity. The Sunk Cost bias can also reinforce the Persistence bias.

• "I've been unhappy in this marriage for over ten years and I don't see how it can get any better, but I can't give up."

  • The persistence bias is usually just an identity bias. The idea of persistence has very good PR. Many of us have gotten attached to the idea of "being persistent," making it difficult to discern when it would be better to give up. Or, even if we do give up, we feel guilty about it instead of honoring ourselves for making the best choice.

Pessimism bias​

• ​The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.

• "Nobody's going to give me a job...I can't just feel it."

Plan continuation bias​

• ​Failure 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.

• "I need to stick with my plan I made at the beginning of the day instead of allowing any interruptions."

  • When you indulge in the habit of resisting your fear of how life and results can sometimes be unpredictable, then you'll want to keep pushing your plan even in the face of new circumstances or awareness that make your original plan unworkable.

Planning fallacy​

• ​The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.

• "At the end of the day I never get as much done as I thought I would."​​

  • When we're planning, we're in ego mode. We want to feel good about ourselves (and relieve our anxiety) by planning to do as much as possible. Consequently, we over promise (see under promising) and we neglect to schedule buffer time in our day (see buffer). No matter how many times we underestimate how long most tasks will take, we never learn. Deep learning would mean designing our day by putting process first (with the process working easily and with enjoyment), instead of putting results first ("more results is better"). See lifestyle first; results second.

Present bias​

• ​The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments.

  • This bias is exacerbated by our habit of putting results as a priority over enjoying the process. If we were being happy now in the process, then we'd be less likely to discount future payoffs.

Principles bias

• The tendency to believe in and follow a principle, while remaining unaware of or ignoring the costs incurred by the continued belief in and adherence to the principle.

• "Never give up" is a good example of such a principle. How much suffering has be caused by the unquestioned obedience to this idea, in wars, in jobs, in marriages. Here in China most people believe in the idea, "everyone should get married and have children." I see this idea promulgating by almost everyone, seemingly without awareness of the costs that are created in so many unhappy marriages.  ​

  • We need principles. It's impossible to live well (or even to live) without them. But when we absorb and follow principles without questioning them, without contextualizing them, without being clear as possible about their costs, benefits, and risks, both short-term and long-term, then the costs can quickly outweigh the benefits as we continue to follow our principles like an ostrich. 

Projection bias​

• ​The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one's current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.

• "I just know I'm going to love this woman forever. I might as well promise her that."

  • How many costly one-way decisions do we make because we don't appreciate the possibility/even likelihood that our desires, thoughts, and even values might be different in the future. Are you showing respect to your future self by not seriously considering that possibility?

Pseudocertainty effect​

• ​The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.