Not Enough
Meaning.
What we filter through is still mostly incomplete. Brains keep filling the gaps with stories — patterns, characters, causes. The biases below are the seams where our storytelling stitches incomplete reality into something that feels whole.
The connectors you should know.
Tap any card for the full entry. Pages marked coming soon are still being written.
Survivorship Bias
Studying only what survived hides the lessons of what didn't.
Halo Effect
One impressive trait makes us assume the rest is excellent too.
Clustering Illusion
Random patterns look meaningful when we squint hard enough.
Narrative Fallacy
We turn messy data into clean stories — and trust them too much.
Fundamental Attribution Error
We blame users' character; we excuse our own context.
Stereotyping
Group labels stand in for individuals — convenient and wrong.
In-group Bias
We design for people who look, think, and click like us.
Projection Bias
We assume tomorrow's user will want what today's designer wants.
Curse of Knowledge
Once we know something, we can't imagine not knowing it.
False Consensus Effect
We overestimate how much others share our opinions and behaviours.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
Novices overestimate their skill; experts underestimate theirs.
Hindsight Bias
Once we know the outcome, we believe we predicted it all along.
Optimism Bias
We systematically overestimate positive outcomes and underestimate risks to ourselves.
Self-Serving Bias
We credit successes to our skill and failures to bad luck or outside forces.
Gambler's Fallacy
We expect random sequences to self-correct — they don't.
Empathy Gap
We can't accurately predict how we or others will feel in a different emotional state.
Anecdotal Fallacy
A single vivid anecdote is mistaken for representative evidence of a broader truth.
Anthropomorphism
We attribute human traits, intentions, and emotions to non-human systems and objects.
Appeal to Probability Fallacy
We treat what could happen as if it will happen, overweighting unlikely outcomes.
Argument from Fallacy
We reject a conclusion because the argument supporting it was flawed — even when the conclusion holds.
Authority Bias
We overweight opinions from authority figures regardless of the underlying evidence.
Cheerleader Effect
Items appear more attractive in a group than when viewed individually.
Confabulation
We invent plausible explanations for behaviour and memories without realising the story is constructed.
Cross-Race Effect
People recognise and remember faces of their own racial group more accurately than others.
Declinism
We believe things are worse than before — past rose-tinted, present judged harshly.
Denomination Effect
We spend smaller denominations more readily than the same value in larger units.
Essentialism
We treat categories as having fixed essences — ignoring variation and context.
Extrinsic Incentive Error
We overestimate how much extrinsic rewards shape long-term motivation and underestimate intrinsic interest.
Functional Fixedness
We perceive objects and patterns only in their familiar function, blocking novel uses and solutions.
Group Attribution Error
We judge entire groups based on the traits or behaviour of a single salient member.
Hot-Hand Fallacy
We believe a person or process on a successful streak is more likely to succeed again — independent of actual odds.
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight
We believe we understand others better than they understand us — and better than they understand themselves.
Illusion of External Agency
We attribute human-like intent and agency to automated systems, coincidences, and non-agentic processes.
Illusion of Transparency
We overestimate how clearly our emotions, intentions, and knowledge are visible to others.
Illusion of Validity
We hold high confidence in predictions from weak evidence when those predictions feel coherent.
Illusory Correlation
We perceive relationships between variables that are unrelated or only weakly related.
Impact Bias
We overestimate the intensity and duration of emotional impact from future events.
Insensitivity to Sample Size
We treat small samples as representative, underestimating how much variance shrinks with scale.
Just-World Hypothesis
We believe people get what they deserve — so we blame victims of bad outcomes to preserve a fair-world belief.
Magic Number 7±2
Miller's 7±2 chunking limit is overgeneralised as a universal cap on menu items, choices, and list length.
Masked Man Fallacy
We treat an entity as unknown or distinct when only its description changes — confusing labels with identity.
Mental Accounting
We treat money and value differently depending on which mental account we assign it to.
Moral Credential Effect
Prior good deeds make us feel licensed to act less ethically or rigorously afterward.
Moral Luck
We judge the morality or quality of actions by their results, not only the intentions and process behind them.
Murphy's Law (bias)
We overweight the expectation that anything that can go wrong will go wrong — planning and judging from worst-case certainty.
Neglect of Probability
We disregard probability when making decisions under uncertainty, responding to vivid outcomes instead.
Normalcy Bias
We underestimate the likelihood and impact of disasters and disruptive change, assuming things will continue as usual.
Not Invented Here
We dismiss ideas, methods, or solutions that originated outside our group in favour of internal ones.
Out-Group Homogeneity Bias
We see members of other groups as more alike than members of our own group.
Outcome Bias
We judge a decision's quality by its outcome rather than by the information and process available at the time.
Pareidolia
We perceive familiar patterns — especially faces and agency — in random or ambiguous stimuli.
Pessimism Bias
We overestimate the likelihood and impact of negative events relative to positive or neutral ones.
Placebo Effect
Expectations of benefit produce real improvements in experience and performance independent of the intervention's objective power.
Positivity Effect
Older adults and retrospective recall overweight positive information relative to negative in memory.
Pro-Innovation Bias
We overvalue benefits of innovation and undervalue adoption costs, risks, and legitimate status quo advantages.
Reactive Devaluation
We devalue proposals and features because of who proposed them, not what they contain.
Recency Illusion
After noticing something recently, we believe it increased in frequency or is novel — when only our attention changed.
Restraint Bias
We overestimate our ability to resist temptation and impulses in future tempting situations.
Self-Consistency Bias
We maintain consistency with prior beliefs, statements, and choices despite new contradictory evidence.
Spotlight Effect
We overestimate how much others notice our appearance, errors, and performance.
Subadditivity Effect
We judge the whole as less than the sum of its parts — or misestimate combined value and probability.
Telescoping Effect
We misremember the timing of events — recent ones seem more distant, distant ones seem more recent.
Time-Saving Bias
We misjudge time savings — overweighting small gains at high baseline speed, underweighting gains at slow speeds.
Ultimate Attribution Error
We attribute negative out-group behaviour to disposition and positive in-group behaviour to situation — distorting research and support.
Well-Traveled Road Effect
We perceive familiar routes as shorter and faster than unfamiliar ones of equal objective length.
Zero-Sum Bias
We perceive situations as zero-sum — one party's gain must be another's loss — when positive-sum outcomes are possible.
Three other ways minds bend.
Too Much
Information
Too Much
Information
There's too much to process. We filter — and the filtering is where bias creeps in.
Need to
Act Fast
Need to
Act Fast
Decisions made before the picture is complete — and how to design for them.
What Should
We Remember
What Should
We Remember
Memory as reconstruction — peaks, endings, and the odd-one-out.