Editable list of cognitive biases involved in smartphones and social media

(Note: This is a wiki post. You can edit and extend by clicking the small orange icon in top-right corner)


Hello guys, greetings from Germany.

I have found a nice List of cognitive biases on wikipedia. I would like to ask for your help to find all cognitive biases which are being used on smartphones or social media to get us hooked.

Below are the biases that are applicable. Please add your entries to this list!

Cognitive Biases in Social Media

Name Description Relation to social media
Anchoring Tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions News on feeds are more and more small and strong as message, to capture the attention of the viewer, who relies on a partial and biased information to make their political/social/ethic choices.
Confirmation bias Tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions Recommended contents on social media feeds tend to confirm user’s beliefs, typically pictures, videos, etc. that push the user belief to some extreme to maximize the chance of being consumed.
Information bias The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action People use to look for an issue on the web and in social media and are not able to interpret and give meaning to the huge mass of information that they can get.
Actor-observer bias The actor of an event tends to give more importance to the social situational elements, whereas the observer gives more importance to the actor personality People use to comment on social media post only on the basis of the few information contained in the post, many times judging the person who posted and making strong claims about his/her personality.
Social desirability bias The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable ones Social profiles are usually made collecting all positive pieces of user’s own personality, life, exterior aspect, etc., according to his/her own idea of sharable identity. LinkedIn is the perfect example of where this bias plays out.
Distinction bias A tendency to over-value the effect of small quantitative differences when comparing options (see also here) UX designers can entice you to make a choice which is not the best one for you, but benefits the service provider, by offering some trivial extras (freemiums) to the bad choice.
Availability cascade TODO TODO


Comments

This is the link to the picture from wikipedia:

@aschrijver: We are also very interested in this. Would be great if you posted your interests/experiences in this regards to the forum. We have thread where we collect these things: Collecting cognitive science patterns that are at play on social media

@aschrijver: I see a bunch of them that can be added to the list, like Availability cascade, which looks to be synonymous to a social media Echo chamber.

@aschrijver: Just encountered a new bias: The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics.

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The following article provides 50 cards with Biases (interesting to @micheleminno for An idea for gamifying lessons on cognitive biases in Digital Citizenship classes):

It was posted to LinkedIn by Abhay Johorey who highlighted a couple of new biases:

In the name of self-awareness, here’s a closer look at 3 recently discovered biases that we are most prone to exhibiting in the modern world.

Automation Bias :

AI-infused applications are becoming incredibly good at “personalizing” our content, but will there come a time when we let algorithms make all of our decisions?

Automation bias refers to the tendency to favor the suggestions of automated systems. Finding a new favorite series on platforms like Netflix may require some good old-fashioned human curiosity & not the algos.

The Google Effect :

Also known as “digital amnesia”, the aptly named Google Effect describes our tendency to forget information that can be easily accessed online.

Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.

The IKEA Effect :

This refers to our tendency to attach a higher value to things we help create.

Combining the Ikea Effect with other related traits, such as our willingness to pay a premium for customization, is a strategy employed by companies seeking to increase the intrinsic value that we attach to their products.

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Another wonderful site: