Cognitive Bias

What Is... Series (Insights into Psychology)

What Is… the Illusion of Causality

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for …

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Insights into psychology series: What is the frequency illusion

What Is… the Frequency Illusion (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon)

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Do you ever find that once you start to notice something, all of a sudden, it’s happening a lot? There’s a name for that; it’s a type of …

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The Bizarre Spread of the COVID/5G conspiracy theory: cartoon of a train pulling a coronavirus particle and 5G symbol

The Bizarre Spread of the COVID/5G Conspiracy Theory

The COVID/5G conspiracy theory has been around since the early days of the pandemic. How did such an out-there idea become so widely known? The dumpster fire that is social media has a fair bit to do with it, with a combination of misinformation (wrong information spread without manipulative/deceptive intent) and disinformation (intentionally spreading wrong …

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Cognitive Biases that Can Feed into Social Anxiety

This post is a follow-up to a conversation that Winter Dragonflies and I were having about different mental errors that can feed into social anxiety. We all have a natural set of cognitive biases that can result in mental errors, so I wanted to take a look at what some of those might be. Cognitive …

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What Is... Series (Insights into Psychology)

What Is… the Dunning-Kruger Effect

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect was first described by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. It’s a type of cognitive bias that causes people to feel confident that they have greater knowledge or competence in an …

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modified Johari window of knowledge: from what you know to what you don't know you don't know

The Importance of What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

There’s a lot of knowledge out there in the world. We’ve all accumulated some of it, whether that’s by formal schooling, work, or life in general. Quadrants of knowledge There are several different ways in which we relate to the potential knowledge that’s out there in the world. This can be seen in the modified …

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What Is... Series (Insights into Psychology)

What Is… The Psychology Behind Conspiracy Theories

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re looking at the psychology behind conspiracy theories. This topic came up in a recent post by Andy of Eden in Babylon. In particular, the Q-Anon conspiracy theory has become quite popular, despite its utter absurdity. Then there’s the …

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What Is... Series (Insights into Psychology)

What Is… the Psychology of Advertising

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the psychology of advertising. A University of Southern California blog says that we see an average of 5000 ads a day and 2 million 30-second commercials a year. And all of that is carefully composed to take …

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