The next time someone mentions that humans are “rational” you might want to refer them to Wikipedia’s list of dozens of cognitive biases. How handy to have all of these biases listed in one place. The list includes each of the following biases, each of them liked to specific Wikipedia articles.
Decision-making and behavioral biases
Bandwagon effect
Base rate fallacy
Bias blind spot
Choice-supportive bias
Confirmation bias
Congruence bias
Contrast effect
Denomination effect
Distinction bias
Endowment effect
Experimenter’s or Expectation bias
Extraordinarity bias
Focusing effect
Framing
Hyperbolic discounting
Illusion of control
Impact bias
Information bias
Interloper effect
Irrational escalation
Just-world phenomenon
Loss aversion
Mere exposure effect
Money illusion
Moral credential effect
Need for Closure
Negativity bias
Neglect of probability
Normalcy bias
Omission bias
Outcome bias
Planning fallacy
Pseudocertainty effect
Reactance
Restraint bias
Selective perception
Semmelweis reflex
Status quo bias
Von Restorff effect
Wishful thinking
Zero-risk bias
Biases in probability and belief
Ambiguity effect
Anchoring effect
Attentional bias
Authority bias
Availability heuristic
Availability cascade
Belief bias
Clustering illusion
Capability bias
Conjunction fallacy
Disposition effect
Gambler’s fallacy
Hawthorne effect
Hindsight bias
Illusory correlation
Neglect of prior base rates effect
Observer-expectancy effect
Optimism bias
Ostrich effect
Overconfidence effect
Positive outcome bias
Pareidolia
Pessimism bias
Primacy effect
Recency effect
Disregard of regression toward the mean
Stereotyping
Subadditivity effect
Subjective validation
Survivorship bias
Well travelled road effect
Social biases
Actor–observer bias
Bystander effect
Dunning–Kruger effect
Egocentric bias
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect)
False consensus effect
Fundamental attribution error
Halo effect
Herd instinct
Illusion of asymmetric insight
Illusion of transparency
Illusory superiority
Ingroup bias
Just-world phenomenon
Outgroup homogeneity bias
Projection bias
Self-serving bias
Self-fulfilling prophecy
System justification
Trait ascription bias
Ultimate attribution error
Memory errors
Further information: Memory bias
Consistency bias
Cryptomnesia
Egocentric bias
False memory
Hindsight bias
Reminiscence bump
Rosy retrospection
Self-serving bias
Suggestibility
Telescoping effect
And still counting no doubt 😉
The difficult task, is recognizing these biases in ourselves.
Bias is not always a bad thing. At times when there is insufficent information to make a rational choice, it can help us from being indecisive.
These cognitive heuristics and other rough and ready strategies, as imperfect as they are, got the human race this far. I don't mean to demean them by noting them. There are times, though, when we would be wise to note these often-useful strategies because they are sometimes impediments to truly rational decision-making. Some of them, for instance, are self-serving and they often do not encourage self-critical analysis of a problem.
This is GREAT, but you might want to add anomaly-hunting in there, as that certainly entails a cognitive pit-trap.
Capability Bias is the one that really gets my attention. I know in the army we look at a lot of charts and metrics, and the tendency is to assume that the charted averages are the reality, but let me tell you, I can’t count the times when the distribution of the data was all over the place, but the metrics looked just fine.