Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".
Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying ...
Accusations of postdiction can be avoided if the claimant follows some simple guidelines:
Make one prediction per event.
Structure the prediction so there is a brief summary, a detailed description, followed by any notes.
Make the summary and description as unambiguous and specific as possible - state the nature of the event, the date, the location and other information plainly and clearly.
Use plain language, not verse, allegory, flowery or other incoherent or non-obvious language. A prediction should ...
Bias arises from various life, loyalty and local risk and attention concerns that are difficult to separate or codify. They were first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as a foundation of behavioral economics. Tversky and Kahneman claim that they are at least partially the result of problem-solving using heuristics, including the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic.
Recently, some scientists (David Funder and Joachim Krueger) have raised doubt as to whether all of the 'biases' are in fact errors. T ...
A cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings. Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. Social biases, usually called attributional biases affect our everyday social interactions. And biases related to probability and decision making significantly affect the scientific method which is deliberately designed to minimize such bias fr ...
The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases
Hindsight bias sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable
Fundamental attribution error the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
Confirmation bias the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms o ...
