Clustering Illusion
A cognitive bias where people see patterns in random data. Important for designers to improve data interpretation and avoid false conclusions based on perceived random patterns.
160 topics found for:
“cognitive processes”
Extension Neglect
A cognitive bias where people ignore the relevance of sample size in making judgments, often leading to erroneous conclusions. Crucial for designers to account for appropriate sample sizes in research and analysis.
Escalation of Commitment
A cognitive bias where individuals or organizations continue to invest in a failing project or decision due to the amount of resources already committed. Important for designers to recognize and mitigate their own risks of continuing unsuccessful initiatives.
Visual Fluency
The ease with which visual information can be processed and understood by the viewer. Important for creating intuitive and accessible interfaces.
Category Size Bias
A cognitive bias where people judge the likelihood of an event based on the size of its category rather than its actual probability. Crucial for designers to understand how category size influences user perception and decision-making processes.
Law of the Instrument
Also known as "Maslow's Hammer," a cognitive bias where people rely too heavily on a familiar tool or method, often summarized as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.". Important for designers to recognize and avoid over-reliance on familiar methods in problem-solving and design.
Pessimism Bias
A cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes. Important for understanding user risk perception and designing systems that address irrational pessimism.
Serial Position Effect
A cognitive bias where people tend to remember the first and last items in a series better than those in the middle, impacting recall and memory. Crucial for designing information presentation to optimize user memory and recall.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. Crucial for understanding cognitive biases that affect user decision-making and designing interventions to mitigate them.
Expectation Bias
A cognitive bias where individuals' expectations influence their perceptions and judgments. Relevant for understanding how expectations skew perceptions and decisions among users.
Wizard
A step-by-step guide that helps users complete a complex task by breaking it down into manageable steps. Crucial for improving usability and ensuring users can successfully complete multi-step processes.
Decision Theory
The study of how individuals make choices among alternatives and the principles that guide these choices. Important for designing decision-making processes and interfaces that help users make informed choices.
Information Bias
A cognitive bias where people seek out more information than is needed to make a decision, often leading to analysis paralysis. Crucial for designing decision-making processes that avoid information overload for users.
Optimism Bias
A cognitive bias that causes people to believe they are less likely to experience negative events and more likely to experience positive events than others. Crucial for understanding user risk perception and designing systems that account for unrealistic optimism.
Omission Bias
A cognitive bias where people judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions). Important for understanding user decision-making and designing systems that mitigate this bias.
Hyperbolic Discounting
A cognitive bias where people disproportionately prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, later rewards. Important for understanding and designing around user decision-making and reward structures.
Neuroaesthetics
The study of how the brain perceives and responds to art and design, exploring the neural basis for aesthetic experiences. Important for understanding the neurological underpinnings of aesthetic preferences and enhancing design impact.
Conjunction Fallacy
A logical fallacy where people assume that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one. Important for understanding and addressing cognitive biases in user behavior.
Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Decision-making strategies that use simple heuristics to make quick, efficient, and satisfactory choices with limited information. Important for designing user experiences that support quick and efficient decision-making.
Mnemonic Device
A memory aid that helps individuals recall information through associations, patterns, or acronyms. Important for designing educational content and interfaces that enhance memory retention.
Reification
A key aspect of Gestalt psychology describing the mind's ability to fill in gaps to create a whole object from incomplete elements. Crucial for designing creative and engaging visuals that are both pleasing to the eye and cleverly satisfying to the mind.
Regret Aversion
A tendency to avoid making decisions that might lead to regret, influencing risk-taking and decision-making behaviors. Crucial for understanding decision-making processes and designing systems that minimize regret.
Certainty Effect
A cognitive bias where people give greater weight to outcomes that are certain compared to those that are merely probable. Important for designers to consider how users weigh certain outcomes more heavily in their decision-making.
Opportunity Cost Neglect
A cognitive bias where individuals overlook or underestimate the cost of opportunities they forego when making decisions. Crucial for understanding user decision-making behavior and designing systems that highlight opportunity costs.
Semmelweis Reflex
A cognitive bias where new evidence or knowledge is automatically rejected because it contradicts established norms or beliefs. Important for recognizing resistance to change and designing strategies to encourage openness to new ideas among designers.
Contrast Effect
The enhancement or diminishment of perception, cognition, or related performance as a result of exposure to a stimulus of greater or lesser value in the same dimension. Useful for designing interfaces that leverage contrasting elements to guide user attention and behavior.
Negativity Effect
The tendency for negative information to have a greater impact on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive information. Important for understanding and mitigating the impact of negative information.
Assumed Similarity Bias
A cognitive bias where people assume others share the same beliefs, values, or preferences as themselves. Important for helping designers avoid projecting their own biases and assumptions onto users during research and design.
Cold States
Emotional states where individuals are calm and rational, often contrasted with hot states where emotions run high. Important for understanding decision-making processes and designing experiences that accommodate both states.
Myopic Loss Aversion
A cognitive bias where individuals tend to avoid risks when they perceive potential losses more acutely than potential gains. Important for understanding decision-making behavior in users and designing systems that mitigate risk aversion.
Google Effect
The tendency to forget information that can be easily found online, also known as digital amnesia. Important for understanding how access to information impacts memory and designing experiences accordingly.
Allais Paradox
A decision-making paradox that shows people's preferences can violate the expected utility theory, highlighting irrational behavior. Important for understanding inconsistencies in user decision-making and designing better user experiences.
Choice-Supportive Bias
The tendency to attribute positive qualities to one's own choices and downplay the negatives, enhancing post-decision satisfaction. Useful for understanding user satisfaction and designing experiences that reinforce positive decision outcomes.
Regressive Bias
A cognitive bias where individuals overestimate the likelihood of extreme events regressing to the mean. Crucial for understanding decision-making and judgment under uncertainty.
Zero-Risk Bias
A cognitive bias where people prefer the option that seems to eliminate risk entirely, even if another option offers a greater overall benefit. Important for understanding decision-making and designing risk communication for users.
Reference Dependence
A cognitive bias where individuals evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point rather than on an absolute scale. Essential for understanding decision-making and consumer behavior.
Egocentric Bias
A cognitive bias where people rely too heavily on their own perspective and experiences when making decisions. Important for designers to recognize and mitigate their own perspectives influencing design decisions.
Learning Theory
The study of how people acquire knowledge, skills, and behaviors through experience, practice, and instruction. Useful for creating educational content and interactive tutorials that enhance user learning.
Decoy Effect
A cognitive bias where consumers change their preference between two options when presented with a third, less attractive option. Useful for designers to create choice architectures that effectively influence user decisions.
Paradox of Choice
The phenomenon where having too many options leads to anxiety and difficulty making a decision, reducing overall satisfaction. Important for designing user experiences that balance choice and simplicity to enhance satisfaction.
Suffix Effect
The phenomenon where people have a reduced ability to recall the last items in a list when additional, unrelated information is added at the end. Crucial for designing information presentation to optimize memory retention.
State-Dependent Memory
A phenomenon where people are more likely to remember information when they are in the same state of consciousness as when they learned it. Important for understanding how context affects memory recall and designing experiences that facilitate better retention.
Illusory Truth Effect
A cognitive bias where repeated statements are more likely to be perceived as true, regardless of their actual accuracy. Crucial for understanding how repetition influences beliefs and designing communication strategies for users.
Self Reference Effect
Also known as Self Relevance Effect, the tendency for individuals to better remember information that is personally relevant or related to themselves. Important for designing personalized user experiences and enhancing memory retention.
Hindsight Bias
A cognitive bias where people perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were. Important for understanding and mitigating biases in user feedback and decision-making.
Negativity Bias
The tendency to give more weight to negative experiences or information than positive ones. Crucial for understanding user behavior and designing systems that balance positive and negative feedback.
Satisficing
A decision-making strategy that involves choosing an option that meets the minimum requirements rather than seeking the optimal solution, balancing effort and outcome. Important for designing user experiences that accommodate decision-making under constraints.
Multistability
A key aspect of Gestalt psychology that explains the tendency for ambiguous images to pop back and forth unstably between alternative interpretations in the mind. Important for understanding visual perception and designing interfaces that avoid ambiguity.
Fallacy of Composition
A logical fallacy that occurs when one assumes that what is true for a part is also true for the whole. Important for avoiding incorrect assumptions in design and decision-making.
Affect Heuristic
A mental shortcut where current emotions influence decisions, often bypassing logic and reasoning. Important for understanding how emotions impact user decisions, aiding in more effective design and marketing.
Loss Aversion
A cognitive bias where the pain of losing is psychologically more powerful than the pleasure of gaining. Important for designing user experiences that account for and mitigate loss aversion.
Irrational Escalation
The phenomenon where people continue a failing course of action due to the amount of resources already invested. Important for recognizing and mitigating biased decision-making.
Testing Effect
The phenomenon where taking a test on material improves long-term retention of that material more than additional study sessions. Crucial for designing educational tools and methods that enhance learning and retention.
Priming
A psychological effect where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. Crucial for designing experiences that subtly guide user behavior and decision-making.
Survivorship Bias
A cognitive bias that occurs when conclusions are drawn from a non-representative sample, focusing only on successful cases and ignoring failures. Crucial for making accurate assessments and designing systems that consider both successes and failures.
Information Foraging
The theory that users search for information in a manner similar to animals foraging for food, aiming to maximize value while minimizing effort. Important for designing efficient and user-centered information retrieval systems.
Overchoice
The phenomenon where having too many options leads to decision-making paralysis and decreased satisfaction. Crucial for understanding and designing user interfaces that avoid overwhelming users with choices.
Illusory Superiority
A cognitive bias where individuals overestimate their own abilities, qualities, or performance relative to others. Important for understanding user self-perception and designing systems that account for inflated self-assessments.
Shared Information Bias
A cognitive bias where group members tend to discuss information that everyone already knows rather than sharing unique information, leading to less effective decision-making. Important for understanding group dynamics and improving the quality of collaborative decision-making among designers.
Creative Block Strategies
Methods and techniques used to overcome mental blocks that hinder creative thinking and problem-solving. Crucial for maintaining productivity and fostering innovation in design.