Behavioural Science Explained

The empathy gap is a psychological bias where individuals struggle to accurately predict or understand the emotions and behaviors of others, or their own future selves, when in different emotional or visceral states. It...

Effort justification is a psychological phenomenon where individuals enhance the perceived value of an achievement or outcome after investing significant effort, trouble, or pain to obtain it. This concept is deeply...

The denomination effect is a cognitive bias where individuals are less likely to spend money in large bills compared to an equivalent amount in smaller denominations or coins. Larger bills are often overvalued, acting...

The defensive attribution hypothesis describes an observer's tendency to attribute causes for a mishap in a way that minimises their fear of becoming a victim or being responsible in a similar situation. It stems from...

Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline, characterised by viewing the past more favourably and the present or future more negatively due to cognitive biases like rosy...

The Curse of Knowledge (CoK) is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals, having acquired knowledge, find it difficult to imagine what it's like not to know it, erroneously assuming others share their level of...

Cue-dependent forgetting, also known as retrieval failure, is the inability to recall information because the appropriate retrieval cues are absent, even though the memory trace itself is still available in storage...

The Cross-Race Effect (CRE) is a well-established phenomenon where individuals demonstrate superior accuracy in recognising faces from their racial group compared to those from other races. This has significant...

The contrast effect is a cognitive bias where the perception or judgment of a stimulus is influenced by the presence of other, contrasting stimuli, often leading to an exaggeration of perceived differences. This...

Contagion is the spontaneous spread of emotions, behaviours, or conditions within a group or network, often occurring unconsciously. Important learnings include:• Emotional contagion involves automatic mimicry of...

Commitment and self-consistency bias refers to the idea that people assume less change in their attitudes and beliefs than actually occurs. Also known as consistency bias, it means believing one’s past and present...

Conservatism in belief revision is defined as the human tendency to cling to prior beliefs or initial impressions, often revising views less than normatively predicted, even when presented with new, contradictory...

Congruence bias is the tendency for people to over-rely on testing their initial hypothesis (the most congruent one) while neglecting to test alternative hypotheses. This means individuals rarely attempt experiments...

Confabulation is generally defined as the unintentional production of false, distorted, or displaced memories or statements about oneself or the world, which the individual sincerely believes to be true, often filling...

The clustering illusion is a cognitive bias that leads individuals to mistakenly perceive non-random patterns or trends in truly random data or events. This common phenomenon is rooted in the innate human tendency to...