Tu quoque fallacy- Appeal to hypocrisy (personal inconsistency)

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Tu quoque (Latin for “you also”), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent’s argument by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s). That is, it is claimed that the argument is flawed by pointing out that the persona making the argument is not acting consistently with the claims of the argument.

The logically fallacious tu quoque “argument” follows the pattern:

Person A makes claim X.
Person B asserts that A’s actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
Therefore, X is false.

An example would be

Peter: “Bill is guilty of defrauding the government out of tax dollars.”
Bill: “How can you say that when you yourself have 20 outstanding parking tickets?”

It is a fallacy because the moral character or actions of the opponent are generally irrelevant to the logic of the argument. It is often used as a red herring tactic and is a special case of the ad hominem fallacy, which is a category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of facts about the person presenting or supporting the claim or argument.

Example

In the trial of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie, the controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès tried to present what was defined as a Tu Quoque Defence—i.e., that during the Algerian War, French officers such as General Jacques Massu had committed war crimes similar to those with which Barbie was being charged, and therefore the French state had no moral right to try Barbie. This defense was rejected by the court, which convicted Barbie.

Further References

Walton, D. (1998). Ad hominem arguments. University of Alabama Press.

List of cognitive biases

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Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases

Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.

Name Description
Ambiguity effect The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown”.[10]
Anchoring or focalism The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).[11][12]
Anthropocentric thinking The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.[13]
Anthropomorphism or personification The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.[14]
Attentional bias The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.[15]
Automation bias The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.[16]
Availability heuristic The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.[17]
Availability cascade A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).[18]
Backfire effect The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs.[19] cf. Continued influence effect.
Bandwagon effect The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.[20]
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).[21]
Belief bias An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[22]
Ben Franklin effect A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[23]
Berkson’s paradox The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.[24]
Bias blind spot The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[25]
Bystander effect The tendency to think that others will act in an emergency situation.[26]
Choice-supportive bias The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.[27]
Clustering illusion The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[12]
Confirmation bias The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.[28]
Congruence bias The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[12]
Conjunction fallacy The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[29]
Conservatism (belief revision) The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[5][30][31]
Continued influence effect The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.[32] cf. Backfire effect
Contrast effect The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[33]
Courtesy bias The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.[34]
Curse of knowledge When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[35]
Declinism The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.[36]
Decoy effect Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.[37]
Default effect When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.[38]
Denomination effect The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).[39]
Disposition effect The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.[40]
Distinction bias The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[41]
Dunning–Kruger effect The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.[42]
Duration neglect The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.[43]
Empathy gap The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.[44]
Endowment effect The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[45]
Exaggerated expectation Based on the estimates,[clarification needed] real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[unreliable source?][5][46]
Experimenter’s or expectation bias The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[47]
Focusing effect The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.[48]
Forer effect or Barnum effect The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.[49]
Form function attribution bias In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot.[50]
Framing effect Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.[51]
Frequency illusion The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[52] This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.[53]
Functional fixedness Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.[54]
Gambler’s fallacy The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.”[55]
Hard–easy effect Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough.[5][56][57][58]
Hindsight bias Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[59] at the time those events happened.
Hostile attribution bias The “hostile attribution bias” is the tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.[60]
Hot-hand fallacy The “hot-hand fallacy” (also known as the “hot hand phenomenon” or “hot hand”) is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Hyperbolic discounting Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.[61] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
Identifiable victim effect The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.[62]
IKEA effect The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.[63]
Illicit transference Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Illusion of control The tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events.[64]
Illusion of validity Belief that our judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.[65]
Illusory correlation Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[66][67]
Illusory truth effect A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Impact bias The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[68]
Information bias The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[69]
Insensitivity to sample size The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Irrational escalation The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Law of the instrument An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Less-is-better effect The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Look-elsewhere effect An apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.
Loss aversion The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.[70] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Mere exposure effect The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[71]
Money illusion The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[72]
Moral credential effect The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Negativity bias or Negativity effect Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.[73][74] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
Neglect of probability The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[76]
Normalcy bias The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Not invented here Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
Observer-expectancy effect When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Omission bias The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).[77]
Optimism bias The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[78][79]
Ostrich effect Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Outcome bias The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Overconfidence effect Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[5][80][81][82]
Pareidolia A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Pessimism bias The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Placebo effect The belief that a medication works—even if merely a placebo.
Planning fallacy The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.[68]
Post-purchase rationalization The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pro-innovation bias The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation’s usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Projection bias The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one’s current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.[83][84][74]
Pseudocertainty effect The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[85]
Reactance The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
Recency illusion The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
Regressive bias A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.[5][86][87][unreliable source?]
Restraint bias The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Rhyme as reason effect Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense’s use of the phrase “If the gloves don’t fit, then you must acquit.”
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Selection bias The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias.
Selective perception The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[31]
Sexual overperception bias / sexual underperception bias The tendency to over-/underestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself.
Social comparison bias The tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who don’t compete with one’s own particular strengths.[88]
Social desirability bias The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[89]
Status quo bias The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[90][91]
Stereotyping Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Subadditivity effect The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.[92]
Subjective validation Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
Surrogation Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
Survivorship bias Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
Time-saving bias Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Third-person effect Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
Parkinson’s law of triviality The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.[93]
Unit bias The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.[94]
Weber–Fechner law Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Well travelled road effect Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Women are wonderful effect A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
Zero-risk bias Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Zero-sum bias A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

Name Description
Actor-observer bias The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Authority bias The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.[95]
Cheerleader effect The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.[96]
Defensive attribution hypothesis Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
Egocentric bias Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
Extrinsic incentives bias An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
False consensus effect The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.[97]
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect) The tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
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[74] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
Group attribution error The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
Halo effect The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[98]
Illusion of asymmetric insight People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.[99]
Illusion of external agency When people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents.
Illusion of transparency People overestimate others’ ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Illusory superiority Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as “Lake Wobegon effect”, “better-than-average effect”, or “superiority bias“.)[100]
Ingroup bias The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Just-world hypothesis The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Moral luck The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Naïve cynicism Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
Naïve realism The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Outgroup homogeneity bias Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.[101]
Self-serving bias The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).[102]
Shared information bias Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).[103]
System justification The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
Trait ascription bias The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Ultimate attribution error Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Worse-than-average effect A tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.[104]

Memory errors and biases

Main article: List of memory biases

In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:

Name Description
Bizarreness effect Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias In a self-justifying manner retroactively ascribing one’s choices to be more informed than they were when they were made.
Change bias After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one’s past performance as more difficult than it actually was.[105][unreliable source?]
Childhood amnesia The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Conservatism or Regressive bias Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.[86][87]
Consistency bias Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[106]
Context effect That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cross-race effect The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.[105]
Egocentric bias Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.[107]
False memory A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect) That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Hindsight bias The inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were; also called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
Humor effect That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.[108]
Illusion of truth effect That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Illusory correlation Inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.[5][67]
Lag effect The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also spacing effect.
Leveling and sharpening Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[109]
Levels-of-processing effect That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.[110]
List-length effect A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items (“L30”) and a list of 100 items (“L100”). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).[111][further explanation needed]
Misinformation effect Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.[112]
Modality effect That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias The improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.
Next-in-line effect People taking turns speaking in a group tend to have diminished recall for the words of others[clarify] who spoke immediately before them.[113]
Part-list cueing effect That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.[114]
Peak-end rule That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence The unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.[citation needed]
Picture superiority effect The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.[115][116][117][118][119][120]
Positivity effect (Socioemotional selectivity theory) That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect, recency effect & serial position effect That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[121]
Processing difficulty effect That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.[122]
Reminiscence bump The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.[123]
Rosy retrospection The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-relevance effect That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source confusion Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.[124]
Spacing effect That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Stereotypical bias Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender).
Suffix effect Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.[125][126]
Suggestibility A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Tachypsychia When time perceived by the individual either lengthens, making events appear to slow down, or contracts.[127]
Telescoping effect The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.[128]
Tip of the tongue phenomenon When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[105]
Travis Syndrome Overestimating the significance of the present.[129] It is related to the enlightenment Idea of Progress and chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.
Verbatim effect That the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.[130] This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
von Restorff effect That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.[131]
Zeigarnik effect That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggested that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes noisy information processing during storage and retrieval of information in human memory.[5]

Individual differences in decision making biases

People do appear to have stable individual differences in their susceptibility to decision biases such as overconfidence, temporal discounting, and bias blind spot.[134] That said, these stable levels of bias within individuals are possible to change. Participants in experiments who watched training videos and played debiasing games showed medium to large reductions both immediately and up to three months later in the extent to which they exhibited susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, projection bias, and representativeness.[135]

Debiasing

Debiasing is the reduction of biases in judgment and decision making through incentives, nudges, and training. Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Further References

Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee, J. Y., & Podsakoff, N. P.. (2003). Common Method Biases in Behavioral Research: A Critical Review of the Literature and Recommended Remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.88.5.879
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A.. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions.. Psychological Review

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.103.3.582
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Oechssler, J., Roider, A., & Schmitz, P. W.. (2009). Cognitive abilities and behavioral biases. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2009.04.018
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Griffiths, T. L., Chater, N., Kemp, C., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. B.. (2010). Probabilistic models of cognition: exploring representations and inductive biases. Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.05.004
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Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F.. (2008). On the Relative Independence of Thinking Biases and Cognitive Ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.4.672
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Hallion, L. S., & Ruscio, A. M.. (2011). A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Cognitive Bias Modification on Anxiety and Depression. Psychological Bulletin

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/a0024355
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Gigerenzer, G.. (1991). How to make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond “Heuristics and Biases”. European Review of Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/14792779143000033
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Roiser, J. P., Elliott, R., & Sahakian, B. J.. (2012). Cognitive mechanisms of treatment in depression. Neuropsychopharmacology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1038/npp.2011.183
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Haselton, M. G., Nettle, D., & Andrews, P. W.. (2015). The Evolution of Cognitive Bias. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1002/9780470939376.ch25
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Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D.. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3
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Croskerry, P.. (2003). The importance of cognitive errors in diagnosis and strategies to minimize them. Academic Medicine

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1097/00001888-200308000-00003
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Bertrand, M., & Morse, A.. (2011). Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing. Journal of Finance

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2011.01698.x
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Ioannidis, J. P. A., Munafò, M. R., Fusar-Poli, P., Nosek, B. A., & David, S. P.. (2014). Publication and other reporting biases in cognitive sciences: Detection, prevalence, and prevention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.02.010
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Montibeller, G., & von Winterfeldt, D.. (2015). Cognitive and Motivational Biases in Decision and Risk Analysis. Risk Analysis

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/risa.12360
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Douglas, C., Bateson, M., Walsh, C., Bédué, A., & Edwards, S. A.. (2012). Environmental enrichment induces optimistic cognitive biases in pigs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2012.02.018
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Greenwald, A. G.. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.35.7.603
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Bateson, M., Desire, S., Gartside, S. E., & Wright, G. A.. (2011). Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive biases. Current Biology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.05.017
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Peters, E. R., Moritz, S., Schwannauer, M., Wiseman, Z., Greenwood, K. E., Scott, J., … Garety, P. A.. (2014). Cognitive biases questionnaire for psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbs199
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Hoppe, E. I., & Kusterer, D. J.. (2011). Behavioral biases and cognitive reflection. Economics Letters

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2010.11.015
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Marshall, J. A. R., Trimmer, P. C., Houston, A. I., & McNamara, J. M.. (2013). On evolutionary explanations of cognitive biases. Trends in Ecology and Evolution

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.013
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Croskerry, P., Singhal, G., & Mamede, S.. (2013). Cognitive debiasing 1: Origins of bias and theory of debiasing. BMJ Quality and Safety

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs-2012-001712
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Das, T. K., & Teng, B. S.. (1999). Cognitive biases and strategic decision processes: An integratwe perspective. Journal of Management Studies

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/1467-6486.00157
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Gudmundsson, S. V., & Lechner, C.. (2013). Cognitive biases, organization, and entrepreneurial firm survival. European Management Journal

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2013.01.001
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Red Herring strategy/fallacy

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A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences towards a false conclusion. A red herring might be intentionally used, such as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or it could be inadvertently used during argumentation.

The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to divert hounds from chasing a hare.

“When I was a boy, we used, in order to draw oft’ the harriers from the trail of a hare that we had set down as our own private property, get to her haunt early in the morning, and drag a red-herring, tied to a string, four or five miles over hedges and ditches, across fields and through coppices, till we got to a point, whence we were pretty sure the hunters would not return to the spot where they had thrown off; and, though I would, by no means, be understood, as comparing the editors and proprietors of the London daily press to animals half so sagacious and so faithful as hounds, I cannot help thinking, that, in the case to which we are referring, they must have been misled, at first, by some political deceiver.”

–William Cobbett, February 14, 1807, Cobbett’s Political Register, Volume XI[10]

Trivium & Quadrivium

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The quadrivium (plural: quadrivia) is the four subjects, or arts, taught after teaching the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning four ways, and its use for the four subjects has been attributed to Boethius or Cassiodorus in the 6th century.  Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts (based on thinking skills), as distinguished from the practical arts (such as medicine and architecture).

Etymologically, the Latin word trivium means “the place where three roads meet” (tri + via); hence, the subjects of the trivium are the foundation for the quadrivium, the upper division of the medieval education in the liberal arts, which comprised arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time). Educationally, the trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity.[1]

Grammar teaches the mechanics of language to the student. This is the step where the student “comes to terms,” defining the objects and information perceived by the five senses. Hence, the Law of Identity: a tree is a tree, and not a cat.

Logic (also dialectic) is the “mechanics” of thought and of analysis, the process of identifying fallacious arguments and statements and so systematically removing contradictions, thereby producing factual knowledge that can be trusted.

Rhetoric is the application of language in order to instruct and to persuade the listener and the reader. It is the knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) and being transmitted outwards as wisdom (rhetoric).

One can utilise a computer analogy to conceptually explain the Trivium. Per analogiam, input (via input channels such as the senses/sensors, or any other form of information transmission ) refers to grammar, processing to logic (thought & analysis), and output to rhetoric (written words & spoken language).

Sister Miriam Joseph, in The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (2002), described the trivium as follows:

Grammar is the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; logic is the art of thinking; and rhetoric is the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.

. . .

Grammar is concerned with the thing as-it-is-symbolized. Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known. Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as-it-is-communicated.[4]

John Ayto wrote in the Dictionary of Word Origins (1990) that study of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) was requisite preparation for study of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). For the medieval student, the trivium was the curricular beginning of the acquisition of the seven liberal arts; as such, it was the principal undergraduate course of study. The word trivial arose from the contrast between the simpler trivium and the more difficult quadrivium.[5]

Quadrivium

The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These followed the preparatory work of the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the study of philosophy (sometimes called the “liberal art par excellence”)[5] and theology.

These four studies compose the secondary part of the curriculum outlined by Plato in The Republic and are described in the seventh book of that work (in the order Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music). [4] The quadrivium is implicit in early Pythagorean writings and in the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, although the term quadrivium was not used until Boethius, early in the sixth century.[6] As Proclus wrote:

The Pythagoreans considered all mathematical science to be divided into four parts: one half they marked off as concerned with quantity, the other half with magnitude; and each of these they posited as twofold. A quantity can be considered in regard to its character by itself or in its relation to another quantity, magnitudes as either stationary or in motion. Arithmetic, then, studies quantities as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics [astronomy] magnitude inherently moving.[7]

Medieval usage

At many medieval universities, this would have been the course leading to the degree of Master of Arts (after the BA). After the MA, the student could enter for bachelor’s degrees of the higher faculties (Theology, Medicine or Law). To this day, some of the postgraduate degree courses lead to the degree of Bachelor (the B.Phil and B.Litt. degrees are examples in the field of philosophy).

The study was eclectic, approaching the philosophical objectives sought by considering it from each aspect of the quadrivium within the general structure demonstrated by Proclus (AD 412–485), namely arithmetic and music on the one hand[8] and geometry and cosmology on the other.[9]

The subject of music within the quadrivium was originally the classical subject of harmonics, in particular the study of the proportions between the musical intervals created by the division of a monochord. A relationship to music as actually practised was not part of this study, but the framework of classical harmonics would substantially influence the content and structure of music theory as practised in both European and Islamic cultures.

Modern usage

In modern applications of the liberal arts as curriculum in colleges or universities, the quadrivium may be considered to be the study of number and its relationship to space or time: arithmetic was pure number, geometry was number in space, music was number in time, and astronomy was number in space and time. Morris Kline classified the four elements of the quadrivium as pure (arithmetic), stationary (geometry), moving (astronomy), and applied (music) number.[10]

This schema is sometimes referred to as “classical education”, but it is more accurately a development of the 12th- and 13th-century Renaissance with recovered classical elements, rather than an organic growth from the educational systems of antiquity. The term continues to be used by the Classical education movement and at the independent Oundle School, in the United Kingdom.[11]

see also: www.oundleschool.org.uk/Trivium-and-Quadrivium


Further References

Bugliarello, G.. (2003). A new trivium and quadrivium. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0270467603251296
DOI URL
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Etzkowitz, H., Ranga, M., & Dzisah, J.. (2012). Whither the university? The Novum Trivium and the transition from industrial to knowledge society. Social Science Information

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/0539018412437099
DOI URL
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Elaboration likelihood model

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The elaboration likelihood model (acronymised as ELM) of persuasion is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1986. The model aims to explain different ways of processing stimuli, why they are used, and their outcomes on attitude change. The ELM proposes two major routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.
File:Elm-diagram.jpg
Remark: An argumentum ab inconvenienti is one based on the difficulties involved in pursuing a line of reasoning, and is thus a form of appeal to consequences.


URL: www.psy.ohio-state.edu/petty/documents/1986ADVANCESsPettyCacioppo.pdf

References

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T.. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2
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O’Keefe, D. J.. (2013). Elaboration Likelihood Model. In The International Encyclopedia of Communication

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1002/9781405186407.wbiece011.pub2
DOI URL
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Petty, R. E., & Bri??ol, P.. (2012). The elaboration likelihood model. In Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology: Volume 1

Plain numerical DOI: 10.4135/9781446249215.n12
DOI URL
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Petty, R. E., & Wegener, D. T.. (1999). The Elaboration Likelihood Model: Current status and controversies. Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/S0022-4405(97)00003-4
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Kitchen, P. J., Kerr, G., Schultz, D. E., McColl, R., & Pals, H.. (2014). The elaboration likelihood model: Review, critique and research agenda. European Journal of Marketing

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1108/EJM-12-2011-0776
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Tam, K. Y., & Ho, S. Y.. (2005). Web personalization as a persuasion strategy: An elaboration likelihood model perspective. Information Systems Research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1287/isre.1050.0058
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Bhattacherjee, & Sanford. (2006). Influence Processes for Information Technology Acceptance: An Elaboration Likelihood Model. MIS Quarterly

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2307/25148755
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Sher, P. J., & Lee, S.-H.. (2009). Consumer skepticism and online reviews: An Elaboration Likelihood Model perspective. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2224/sbp.2009.37.1.137
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Cho, C. H.. (1999). How advertising works on the WWW: Modified elaboration likelihood model. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1080/10641734.1999.10505087
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Allison, T. H., Davis, B. C., Webb, J. W., & Short, J. C.. (2017). Persuasion in crowdfunding: An elaboration likelihood model of crowdfunding performance. Journal of Business Venturing

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2017.09.002
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Lien, N.-H.. (2001). Elaboration Likelihood Model in consumer research: A review. Proceedings of the National Science Council
Angst, & Agarwal. (2009). Adoption of Electronic Health Records in the Presence of Privacy Concerns: The Elaboration Likelihood Model and Individual Persuasion. MIS Quarterly

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2307/20650295
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Frewer, L. J., Howard, C., Hedderley, D., & Shepherd, R.. (1997). The elaboration likelihood model and communication about food risks. Risk Analysis

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.1997.tb01281.x
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Yang, S. F.. (2015). An eye-tracking study of the Elaboration Likelihood Model in online shopping. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2014.11.007
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Petty, R. E., Brinol, P., & Priester, J. R.. (2002). Mass media attitude change: Implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. ‏. In Media effects: Advances in theory and research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1038/mt.2008.127
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Morris, J. D., Woo, C., & Singh, A. J.. (2005). Elaboration likelihood model: A missing intrinsic emotional implication. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jt.5740171
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Bitner, M. J., & Obermiller, C.. (1985). THE ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL: LIMITATIONS AND EXTENSIONS IN MARKETING. Advances in Consumer Research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
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Douglas, S. C., Kiewitz, C., Martinko, M. I., Harvey, P., Younhee, K. I. M., & Jae, U. C.. (2008). Cognitions, emotions, and evaluations: An elaboration likelihood model for workplace aggression. Academy of Management Review

Plain numerical DOI: 10.5465/AMR.2008.31193490
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Zhou, T.. (2017). Understanding location-based services users’ privacy concern: An elaboration likelihood model perspective. Internet Research

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1108/IntR-04-2016-0088
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Fan, Y., & Miao, Y.. (2012). Effect of Electronic Word-of-Mouth on Consumer Purchase Intention : The Perspective of Gender Differences. International Journal of Electronic Business Management
Roberson, Q. M., Collins, C. J., & Oreg, S.. (2005). The effects of recruitment message specificity on applicant attraction to organizations. Journal of Business and Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/s10869-004-2231-1
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Gregory, C. K., Meade, A. W., & Thompson, L. F.. (2013). Understanding internet recruitment via signaling theory and the elaboration likelihood model. Computers in Human Behavior

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2013.04.013
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White, P. H., & Harkins, S. G.. (1994). Race of Source Effects in the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.67.5.790
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Fallis, A. .. (2013). THE ROLE OF ARGUMENT QUALITY IN THE ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
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Zhou, T.. (2012). Understanding users’ initial trust in mobile banking: An elaboration likelihood perspective. Computers in Human Behavior

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2012.03.021
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