Types of Bias - morgan-hanrahan/Tech-Journal GitHub Wiki

Motivational Bias

  • "Filter" that changes what you say/do from what you believe
  • Three examples of this would be:
    • "Salesperson's" Forecast: Altering assessments, forecasts, etc. in their best interest
    • Expert's Confidence: Creates bias against acknowledging the range of uncertainty
    • Certified Number: Attempting to reach an already established goal, date, etc.

Cognitive Bias

  • Unconscious factors that can distort beliefs
  • There are many different types of Cognitive Bias including:
  1. Anchoring Bias
  2. Availability heuristic
  3. Bandwagon effect
  4. Blind-spot bias
  5. Choice-supportive bias
  6. Clustering illusion
  7. Confirmation bias
  8. Conservation bias
  9. Information bias
  10. Ostrich effect
  11. Outcome bias
  12. Overconfidence

Nonverbal Bias

  • Scrap your own opinion in favor of the group's opinion.
  • Can occur when someone exhibits negative nonverbal behavior toward a specific group

Affinity Bias

  • Occurs when we see someone we feel we have an affinity with remind us of someone we know and like.
    • Attended the same college, grew up in the same town, etc.
  • Causes people to gravitate toward others who appear to be like them.
    • Similar interests, backgrounds, appearances

Halo/Horns Effect

Halo occurs when we focus on one exceptional quality in a person and allow the halo glow of that noteworthy quality to influence our perceptions of all other aspects of that person. Horns works in a similar way, but instead of focusing on a positive trait, we focus on a negative one.

Similarity Bias

  • We want to surround ourselves with people similar to us
  • Unconscious bias where people are naturally drawn to, and prefer, people similar to them.

Contrast Effect

Unconscious bias that occurs when two things or people are judged in contrast to one another, instead of being assessed individually.

Attribution Bias

  • Tendency to credit a person's personality for their actions rather than the circumstances.

Confirmation Bias

  • Inclination to seek out, understand, favor, and remember information that supports or confirms one's preexisting opinions or ideals

Conformity Bias

  • Occurs when a judgment is made about someone based on their body language, appearance, or personal style.
  • Biases in Programming:
    • IKEA Effect: Overvaluing your solutions to a problem and undervaluing other solutions.
    • Hyperbolic Discounting: Going for an immediate payoff instead of waiting for a larger one.
    • Premature Optimization: Optimizing before you know you need to
    • Recency Bias: Placing a higher value on recent events rather than past ones
    • Planning Fallacy: Underestimating the time required to finish a task.