Cognitive Biases
This bias makes people focus on information that confirms what they already believe.
What is confirmation bias?
The uncomfortable feeling when beliefs and actions don't match.
What is cognitive dissonance?
Name one of the three components of the model.
What is affective, behavioural, or cognitive?
Placing people into groups based on traits is called?
What is social categorisation?
Explaining behaviour by personality is this type of attribution.
What is personal/internal?
Believing others think the same way you do.
What is the false-consensus effect?
Dissonance is often reduced by changing this.
What is a belief or attitude?
The 'cognitive' component refers to this.
What do we know or believe about the object/person?
This effect describes favouring your own group.
What is in-group bias?
Explaining behaviour based on the situation.
What is situational/external?
After an event, people claim they "knew it all along."
What is hindsight bias?
Using this bias helps reduce dissonance by misremembering events.
What is the misinformation effect or hindsight bias?
This component is about how we act or intend to act.
What is behavioural?
Social categorisation often leads to this kind of oversimplified belief.
What is a stereotype?
Assuming someone's bad behaviour is due to who they are, not the situation.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
Believing bad things are less likely to happen to you.
What is optimism bias?
This type of thinking helps avoid dissonance by focusing only on certain details.
What is attentional bias?
"I feel nervous about public speaking, I avoid it, and I think it’s scary." — Identify all three components.
Affective: nervous; Behavioural: avoid; Cognitive: it's scary
Categorising helps reduce mental effort but increases this.
What is prejudice or bias?
The bias where we explain our successes as internal, but failures as external.
What is the self-serving bias?
A bias where people overestimate their competence due to lack of self-awareness.
What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
True or False: People often feel dissonance when their self-image is challenged.
What is true?
A student says they care deeply about climate change, they believe it’s a serious issue, but they regularly use single-use plastics and don’t recycle. What is this inconsistency called, and how might the student reduce it?
What is cognitive dissonance? They might reduce it by changing their behaviour (e.g., recycling), justifying it ("I don’t have time"), or downplaying the issue ("One person’s actions don’t matter").
Grouping based on age, gender, or occupation are examples of this.
What are social categories?
Actor-observer bias involves doing this.
What is attributing others' actions to personality, but your own to situation?