cognitive bias cards · 2020-05-21 · the list of co˜nitive biases is lon˜ and looks scary to a...

Cognitive biases are psychological thought mechanisms and tendencies thatcause the human brain to draw incorrect conclusions.

For better or worse, you can use them in many di�erent ways to influence user behaviour in your products and services. These biases will also impact collaboration between team members, meetings, and behaviors durig° your user tests.

The list of cognitive biases is long and looks scary to a lot of people. To make it easier to digest, Laurence Vagner and Stéphanie Walter selected 52 out of the complete list and organized them into 5 categories.

Cognitive bias CaRdsThe detk of 52 UX Cards

What are those cards?

Who created the cards

Cards created by Laurence Vagner & Stephanie Walter -- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The cards, explainations and more tools can be found on:https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/52-ux-cards-to-discover-cognitive-biases/

https://stephaniewalter.design/


https://www.redisdead.net/


https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/52-ux-cards-to-discover-cognitive-biases/


The cards

We organized the cards into 5 categories. Each category is represented by a colour and a symbol.

Decision-making & behavior

Thinking & problem solving

Memories & recalling

Interview & user testing

Team work, social & meetings

Anchoring

The tendency for people to depend too heavily on an initial piece of information o�ered (considered to be the "anchor")when making decisions. Those objectsnear the anchor tend to be assimilatedtoward it and those further away tend tobe displaced in the other direction.

DECISION-MAKING & BEHAVIOR

This work is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)



https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

These cards were created for teaching purposes. They help team members become aware of their own biases and the di�erent biases they can induce, whether on purpose or not, to users.

They can also be used as a cheat sheet and as “reminder cards” while designing. You can use them in small workshops with your coworkers to raise awareness among your team.

How to use them?


1.1 DiscoveryDistribute the cards to groups (or individuals). Ask the people in the group to work together to recall examples of projects, interfaces or work related situations where they might have faced those biases. (10 minutes)

1.2 SharingEach group presents 1 or 2 of the biases with an example to all participants in the workshop. At the end of the sharing session, depending on how many groups, people “know” at least 10 biases. (2-3 minutes per group)

1. Discover and recall



How to use them?

2.1 Let’s be evil!The people in the group (or individuals) will now imagine the most manipulative experience possible. They need to use as many biases as possible: those from the cards, those they already know. They can also check uxinlux.github.io/cognitive-biases for more ideas. You can ask them to build an interface, but also a non-digital experience, or even make an advertisement, a TV spot, etc. (15/20 minutes)

2.2 Sharing Each group then presents their own evil experience by listing the di�erent biases used. Count the points and discover which group is the most evil and manipulative! (2-3 minutes per group)

2. Build an experience




Availability heuristic

The belief that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. Subsequently people tend to heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.


Anchoring

The tendency for people to depend too heavily on an initial piece of information o�ered (considered to be the "anchor") when making decisions. Those objects near the anchor tend to be assimilated toward it and those further away tend to be displaced in the other direction.


Denomination effect

The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g.) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).


Default effect

When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.


Forer / Barnum Effect

The tendency for individuals to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This e�ect can provide a partial some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, some types of personality tests, etc.


Loss aversion

The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it. People have a tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose 5€ than to find 5€.


Illusory truth effect

The tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity.


IKEA Effect

The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end product.


Money illusion

The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (value on the bills) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.


Mere exposure effect

The tendency to preferer or like some things merely because of familiarity with them.


Unit bias

The tendency to want to finish a given unit of tasks or items. The individual perceives the standard suggested amount of consumption to be appropriate and will want to consume it all even if it’s too much. This applied to food portions, finishing a movie even if it’s bad, etc.


Status quo bias

The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same and be reluctant to any change. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.


Authority bias

The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.


Decision-making & behavior

These biases a�ect people's decision-making abilities, behaviour and the decisions they make based on the di�erent information they get.

Curse of knowledge

When better-informed people find it extremely di�cult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people. Those better-informed people unknowingly assume that the others have the background to understand.

THINKING & PROBLEM SOLVING

Confirmation bias

The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.


Bandwagon effect

The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people already do (or believe) the same. The bandwagon e�ect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so.


Automation bias

The tendency for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it this information was in fact correct.


Pro-innovation bias

The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.


Law of the instrument

An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."


Rhyme as reason effect

The tendency to perceive rhyming as more truthful. For example, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”.


Hyperbolic discounting

The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payo�s relative to later payo�s. When faced with a choice between two rewards, the people will prefer the immediate reward even if it’s lower than a reward that will come in the future.


Fear of Missing out

The fear experienced by individuals when faced with the thought that they might miss out on a social occasion, a new experience, a profitable investment or a satisfying event. This social anxiety is characterized by a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.


Thinking & problem solving

These biases can change the way people think or solve problems and lead them to come up with wrong conclusions..

The tendency to seek information even when it cannot a�ect action. People tend to believe that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.

Information bias

The tendency to interpret a vague (and random) stimulus as something known to the observer and significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Pareidolia

MEMORIES & RECALLING MEMORIES & RECALLING

Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

Bizarreness effect

That cognition and memory are dependent on context. Out-of-context memories are more di�cult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).

Context effect


The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.

Google effect

Humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones.

Humor effect


Concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.

Picture superiority effect

Items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.

Primacy effect


Information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one. For study lessons for instance, this e�ect shows that you will remember more when you space out your study then cramming last minute for a test the night before.

Spacing Effect

The "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording. This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.

Verbatim effect


An item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.

Restorff (isolation) effect

MEMORIES & RECALLING

These biases can influence choices by either enhancing or impairing the recall of a memory or altering the content of a reported memory.

Memories & recalling

The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid o�ending anyone.

Courtesy bias

INTERVIEW & USER TESTING

The tendency for people to perceive events that have already occurred as having been more predictable than they actually were before the events took place (also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon).

Hindsight bias


The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.

Blind spot bias


The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses. In an experiment, a subject will test their own usually naive hypothesis again and again instead of trying to disprove it.

Congruence bias


When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it.

Observer-expectancy effect


Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.

Stereotyping


The tendency for people to overestimate their ability to interpret and predict accurately the outcome when analyzing a set of data, in particular when the data analyzed show a very consistent pattern—that is, when the data "tell" a coherent story.

Illusion of validity


Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.

Negativity bias


The tendency for people to judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. The e�ect occurs regardless of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.

Peak-end rule


These biases can directly influence designer, during interviews or user testing, and may change the outcome of our research. They influence the behaviour of people we interview or people who will test your products and services.

Interview & user testing

The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.

Dunning–Kruger effect

TEAM WORK, SOCIAL & MEETINGS

The tendency to draw di�erent conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented and who presented it.

Framing effect


Aversion to contact with or use of already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group because of their external origins and costs, such as royalties. Research illustrates a strong bias against ideas from the outside.

"Not invented here" NIH


The tendency to underestimate task-completion time, regardless of the individual's knowledge that past tasks of a similar nature have taken longer to complete than generally planned. The bias only a�ects predictions about one's own tasks.

Planning fallacy


The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants people to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain their freedom of choice or limit their range of alternatives.

Reactance


The tendency to devalue proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary or antagonist.

Reactive devaluation


The tendency to believe either that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, or that a group's decision outcome must reflect the preferences of individual group members, even when external information is available suggesting otherwise.

Group attribution error


The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. Individuals attribute successes to internal causes and failures to external causes.

Self-serving bias


The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

System justification


The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.

Cheerleader effect


These biases can change the way groups of people work collectively and interact with each other, whether in a meeting room or in their daily lives in general.

Team work, social & meetings

cognitive bias cards · 2020-05-21 · the list of co˜nitive biases is lon˜ and looks scary to a...

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