You Won’t Believe Every Bias You Have!

Helen
5 min readJul 4, 2024
https://unsplash.com/photos/white-plastic-toy-on-white-table-me0o9oqz9iU

Bias Blind Spot: The tendency to think that oneself is less affected by cognitive biases compared to others.

Gambler’s Fallacy: The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.

Omission Bias: The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse or less moral than equally harmful inactions.

Proportionality Bias: Our innate tendency to assume that big events have big causes, which may also explain our tendency to accept conspiracy theories.

Moral Credential Effect: When someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future.

Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures.

Framing Effect: The tendency to draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how that information is presented. This includes the contrast effect, which is the enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’s perception when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.

Actor-Observer Bias: The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation, and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to…

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Helen

I’m a board member for the Harvard Creative Writing Collective and an outreach associate director for Harvard Women in Computer Science.