

The more losses one experiences, the more loss averse they likely become. Many investors would rather not lose $2,000 than earn $3,000. Loss aversion is a tendency for investors to fear losses and avoid them more than they focus on trying to make profits. There are four main types: s elf-deception, heuristic simplification, emotion, and social bias. When they do this, they are being influenced by emotion, rather than by independent analysis. Herd mentality is when investors blindly copy and follow what other famous investors are doing. Many of us can recall times that we’ve done something and decided that if everything is going to plan, it’s due to skill, and if things go the other way, then it’s just bad luck. In other words, we attribute the cause of something to whatever is in our own best interest. Self-serving cognitive bias is the propensity to attribute positive outcomes to skill and negative outcomes to luck.


(The desirability effect is the belief that something will happen because you want it to.) #2 Self Serving Bias The most common manifestations of overconfidence include the illusion of control, timing optimism, and the desirability effect. It can be a dangerous bias and is very prolific in behavioral finance and capital markets. Overconfidence results from someone’s false sense of their skill, talent, or self-belief. This guide will cover the top 10 most important types of biases.īelow is a list of the top 10 types of cognitive bias that exist in behavioral finance. Cognitive errors play a major role in behavioral finance theory and are studied by investors and academics alike. It has been shown that examining possible alternatives may reduce the effects of this bias.A cognitive bias is an error in cognition that arises in a person’s line of reasoning when making a decision is flawed by personal beliefs. One explanation of the bias is the availability heuristic: the event that did occur is more salient in one’s mind than the possible outcomes that did not. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects also tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out correct. Hindsight bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings, including politics, games and medicine. Hindsight bias is the inclination to see events that have occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 552-564. Knowing with certainty: The appropriateness of extreme confidence. Psychology Inquiry, 14, 258-260.įischhoff, B., Slovic, P., & Lichtenstein, S. That’s your Florida Tech Psychology Science Minute, I’m Dr. Maintain a scientific mind to sift out facts from illusion. And sometimes studies show “common sense” is just not true.ĭoes this mean that we shouldn’t listen to Grandma’s words of wisdom and advice on life? Of course there is a lot of wisdom in the power of observation but the point to remember is to review the latest research and always be open to alternative hypotheses and realities. When you combine these two psychological phenomena it can lead us to overestimate our intuition. In addition, our tendency as humans is to be over confident in ourselves and what we know. Can we always trust our common sense and go with our gut? Psychological research has shown that common sense can describe what has happened much more easily than it can predict what will happen. However, psychologists at the Oregon Research Institute have delineated the “I knew it all along phenomenon” as the hindsight bias. Is psychology a science or is it merely documenting the obvious? Daniel Gilbert and colleagues note that “Good ideas in psychology usually have an oddly familiar quality and the moment we encounter them we feel certain that we knew that all along.”
