Bias number 36 is known as curse of knowledge. This is a cognitive bias that affects the depth of information shared and the attitude taken towards students, novices or audiences who are less familiar with the topic than the communicator.

How does it work? The information sharer makes assumptions about the level of knowledge available to their audience. Because the assumption is incorrect, they fail to communicate appropriate information to get their audience up to speed.

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Bias number 35 is known as cryptomnesia. This bias affects our recall and interpretation of memory. 
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In particular, a person is subject to cryptomnesia when he has a thought that he believes is original when, in fact, it is a memory that he has forgotten. In certain circles, this might be labelled plagiarism, but in reality, it is an error in labelling a memory as a new thought or inspiration.

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Bias number 34 is known as the cross race effect. This bias explains the tendency for people to recognise faces of others who share their racial heritage.

While studies show that the cross race effect exists, scientists have not been able to identify precisely why this bias occurs with regularity. Several theories, including social cognition and perceptual expertise hypothesis, are suggested as possible reasons for the presence of this bias.

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Bias number 33 is known as the courtesy bias. This is a cognitive bias that affects the way a person responds to a request for feedback on goods and services.

In short, people will hold back on giving their full opinion of a product, a service or an experience to avoid offending the person or organisation requesting the feedback. Instead, they opt for what they consider to be a polite or more socially acceptable response over sharing their true thoughts and feelings about the offering.

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Bias number 32 is known as the contrast effect. First observed by philosopher John Locke in the 17th century, this bias demonstrates how perception is determined by the individual’s pre-existing state.

Let’s take Mr. Locke as an example. He noticed that the experience of an object as hot or cold correlated with the temperature of his hand. If he soaked his hand in cold water, the object felt warm. If he soaked his hand in hot water, the object felt cold.

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Bias number 31 is known as the continued influence effect. This cognitive bias suggests that falsehoods of beliefs or information persist in our thinking, even when we know them to be untrue.

Common beliefs that fall in this category include superstitions and old wives’ tales. Once a belief is internalised and entrenched, it is difficult to shift, despite evidence to the contrary.

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Bias number 30 is known as the context effect. This cognitive bias illustrates the ways in which a person’s environment affects perception of a stimulus such as an image, sound or object.

The context effect uses a top-down approach to analysing environmental information, meaning that people will base analysis on prior knowledge to make assessments on their experience of their surroundings. In essence, people are drawing on past experiences to infer conclusions about their present encounter with the stimulating object.

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Bias number 29 is known as the consistency bias. This is a cognitive bias that influences our ability to make decisions in the present by referring to past decisions.

This bias lies at the source of our tendency to double-down on decisions we’ve made in the past under the belief in the importance of consistency. Committing to the decision for the sake of being consistent, even when we have doubts, constricts our decision-making, often guiding us to adhere to bad decisions.

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Bias number 28 is known as the conservatism bias. This is a bias that affects the way in which people alter their beliefs when given new pieces of information.

In short, people have a tendency to be slow, or conservative, in changing their beliefs when presented with evidence that challenges the held belief. People usually shift their existing belief insufficiently in accordance with new pieces of evidence, giving more weight to their currently-held beliefs than is appropriate. Some psychologists believe this is an extension of the anchoring bias that influences people to make decisions by continually referring back to a core belief, whether it is sound or not.

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Bias number 27 is known as the conjunction fallacy. This is a cognitive bias that arises when we make assumptions about the occurrence of more than one condition, such as a personality trait.

For the statisticians amongst us, this is an interesting cognitive bias because it assumes that specific conditions are more probable when they occur together over the occurrence of a single condition. This is statistically improbable, and yet our thought processes, relying less on fact and more on assumption, will infer otherwise.

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