- Be open-minded. Deal with uncertainty. Welcome new evidence. Notice the limits of your knowledge. Probe your assumptions. What additional information could give you a more balanced viewpoint? Make your convictions explicit and take the opposite standpoint. Or put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
- Admit when you have been in the wrong.
- Imagine what if… Re-imagine key events. Consider eventualities and form hypotheses. It broadens your mind when grappling with the unexpected.
- Use checklists in complex situations.
- Recognize your bias.
Egoism and emotionalism
- Narcissism: rosy self-image; overrate your abilities; overrate your personal importance; take credit for desirable but not for undesirable outcomes.
- False pride: claim more responsibility for successes than for failures.
- False modesty: blame failures on yourself while attributing successes to circumstances or others.
- Narrow-mindedness: familiar is better.
- Puberty: doubt or ridicule the judgment of others; overrate your own judgment.
- Selective perception: focus on what you like - or on what you dislike.
- Avoidance of embarrassing questions and aspects.
- Overrate the control you have over events and conditions.
- Framing: overvalue presentation over facts.
- Sensationalism: focus on the most salient and emotionally-charged aspects.
- Embellishing: inflate recall and description.
- Justify actions already taken, like rationalize your purchases.
- Avoidance of extremes; prefer intermediate options.
- Professional conventionalism.
- Unwarranted assumptions: assume without evidence.
- Credulity: believe in something without reason or evidence.
- Dogmatism: protect your beliefs against evidence.
- Prejudice: assume qualities, attitudes and behavior from appearance.
- Joining the bandwagon: believe things because most other people believe the same; adopt opinions and follow behavior.
- Data-doctoring: manipulate an experiment or misinterpret data to confirm expectations.
- Group thinking: go for the comfort of commonality instead of the discomfort of the unknown, the ill-understood or the search for new evidence.
- Negative hallucination: not see what is. 'It didn't happen.'
- Nitpicking: focusing on insignificant details.
- Myopia: only see the immediate facts.
- Tunnel vision: interpret everything in line with earlier assumptions, earlier analysis or earlier conclusions; ignore alternative explanations; protect current investment. Often the result of group thinking.
- Pseudo-recall: imaginary recall or imprinted recall.
- Illusion: imagine patterns and cause-effect relationships where none exist.
- Believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve.
- See deeper meaning in random events.
- Positive hallucination: see what isn't there. 'It really happened.'
- See everywhere what you have just learned or noticed. (Like the 'medical disease.)
- Halo effect: generalize from one positive or negative trait.
- Barnum effect: mistake confection for individual profile.
- Wishful thinking: be over-optimistic.
- Worrying: be over-pessimistic.
- Planning optimism: underestimate task-completion times. (usually about 3x)
- Project present attitudes and behavior into the past.
- Hindsight: see the past through present knowledge: 'I-knew-it-all-along.' Harry S. Truman: ' A schoolboy's hindsight is better than a president's foresight.'
- Overrate the recent, the immediate, the remarkable.
- Conservatism: old is better.
- Progressiveness: new is better.
Lack of statistical thinking
- Generalization: underestimate the variety in people.
- Disregard probabilities, especially unknown and unwelcome probabilities.
- Assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones; judge the probability of the whole to be less than the probability of a part.
- Accept risk to avoid negative outcomes, but avoid risks if expecting positive outcomes.
- Preference to reduce a small risk to zero over greatly reducing a large risk.
- Action bias: overrate the harms of action compared to the harms of inaction; overrate the benefits of action compared to the benefits of inaction.
- Texas sharpshooter fallacy: select or adjust a hypothesis after the data are collected.
- Endowment effect: demand much more to give up an object than you would be willing to pay to acquire it.
- Anchoring: interpret new information by comparing it to accidental previous information.
The best system for vetting and limiting the consequences of bias is the scientific method: develop ideas from evidence and test them to new evidence. And in daily life? Return to the first advice: be open-minded.
