Cognitive bias

A systematic tendency for judgments or behavior to depart from a stated benchmark. The benchmark and task interpretation must be justified; a departure is not by itself a complete psychological mechanism.

An increase in the apparent quality of an explanation associated with neuroscience information that does not improve its logic. The original text-based experiment distinguishes this effect from a general claim that every brain image or biological explanation is misleading.^[ref]

A systematic tendency to resolve ambiguous information in a particular direction, such as threat. Task performance, current anxiety and durable clinical vulnerability are distinct variables.^[ref]

A pattern in which low observed performers overestimate their performance, often accompanied by hypotheses about deficits in evaluating their own answers. Task skill, comparison-group beliefs, measurement noise and grouping can all affect the observed relation; the pattern alone does not identify one cause.^[ref]

Let $X=A+\epsilon$ and $S=A+\eta$, where latent score $A$ has normal distribution with mean $\mu$ and variance ${\sigma }_A^2$, and the centred normal errors are independent of each other and $A$. Since $\mathrm{Cov}(S,X)={\sigma }_A^2$ and $\mathrm{Var}(X)={\sigma }_A^2+{\sigma }_{\epsilon }^2$, Gaussian conditional expectation gives $\mathbb{E}[S\mid X=x]=\mu +\lambda (x-\mu )$ with $\lambda ={\sigma }_A^2/({\sigma }_A^2+{\sigma }_{\epsilon }^2)$. Subtracting $x$ proves the formula. For $0<\lambda <1$, selecting scores below the mean creates positive expected self-assessment errors relative to those observed scores. This is a mathematical possibility, not an empirical estimate of any particular study's contribution from measurement error.

Judging probability through resemblance to a typical case or generating process. Resemblance need not incorporate prevalence or evidence reliability, so it can yield plausible-seeming but poorly calibrated probability judgments.

Underweighting an applicable class prevalence when evaluating case-specific evidence. Sensitivity to whether descriptions and prevalence conflict can survive even when a final answer underweights the statistical information.