Conformity bias is the tendency to change one’s beliefs or behavior to fit in with others. Instead of using their own judgment, individuals often take cues from the group they are with, belong to, or seek to belong to about what is right or appropriate. They then adapt their own behavior accordingly.
Although conforming to social norms is not bad in and of itself, giving in to peer pressure can cause us to adopt opinions and behaviors that are unethical, illegal, or unfair to those who are not part of the group.
Unconscious bias refers to the automatic associations and reactions that arise when we encounter a person or group. Instead of maintaining neutrality, we tend to associate positive or negative stereotypes with certain groups and let these biases influence our behavior towards them.
Unconscious bias can lead to discriminatory behavior in healthcare, the workplace, educational settings, and beyond.
Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute our successes to internal, personal factors, and our failures to external, situational factors. In other words, we like to take credit for our triumphs, but we are more likely to blame others or circumstances for our shortcomings.
Self-serving bias prevents us from learning from our mistakes.This can distort our self-perception and significantly impair our ability to reflect on negative outcomes. Self-serving bias is evident when explaining our behavior in various contexts, such as job performance, sports, or even driving ability.
Outgroup bias is the tendency to dislike members of groups that we don’t identify with. We not only have negative feelings and ideas about people who are not part of our group, but we also tend to exhibit hostility towards them. This happens even if we know nothing about them as individuals.
Because of outgroup bias, we treat people differently depending on their group membership. As a result, we tend to unfairly reject members of outgroups, which can lead to prejudice and discrimination.
Ingroup bias is the tendency to favor one’s own group over other groups. Ingroup bias affects our perception of (and behavior towards) others, giving preferential treatment to the members of our own group while excluding other groups.
As a result, we tend to look down on people we don’t consider members of our group, even when we know nothing about them. Due to this, ingroup bias can lead to prejudice and discrimination.
Recency bias is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences or the latest information we possess when estimating future events. Recency bias often misleads us to believe that recent events can give us an indication of how the future will unfold.
As a result, we ignore important information that can affect our judgment in various contexts, such as performance appraisals, financial decisions, or relationships.
Hindsight bias is the tendency to perceive past events as more predictable than they actually were. Due to this, people think their judgment is better than it is. This can lead them to take unnecessary risks or judge others too harshly.
Because people feel that they “knew it all along,” they overestimate their ability to foresee the outcome of future events, such as medical errors, sport scores, or election results.
Negativity bias is the tendency to pay more attention to negative information than to positive information. Here, more weight is given to negative experiences over neutral or positive experiences. Due to negativity bias, we are much more influenced by negative events or information than by positive counterparts of equal significance.
Negativity bias causes us to dwell on the negative, making bad experiences seem much more important than they really are. This, in turn, can impact our decision-making and the opinions we form about others.
Optimism bias is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive events and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. Optimism bias causes most people to expect that things will work out well, even if rationality suggests that problems are inevitable in life.
Although optimism bias can motivate us to overcome obstacles, it can also cause us to ignore potential risks, resulting in poor decision-making.
Implicit bias is a collection of associations and reactions that emerge automatically upon encountering an individual or group. We associate negative or positive stereotypes with certain groups and let these influence how we treat them rather than remaining neutral.
This can lead to discriminatory behaviour in a wide range of contexts such as healthcare, the workplace, and education.