Psychological biases

Psychological biases in Life (and in Agile development too):

Confirmation bias

Favoring information that confirms our existing beliefs, leading to blind spots

Seeing what U want to see might lead to missed opportunities and rejections

Hick's law

The more choices that are available to the user, the longer it will take them to reach a decision

Challenge to make the right choice of manycan lead to procrastination

Loss aversion

Disliking losses more than enjoying gains

Hating to lose might lead to missed opportunities and risk-averse behavior

Planning fallacy

Underestimating required the time and effort

False belief it's just copy-pastemight lead to missed deadlines and overtimes

Decision fatigue

Quality of decisions declines with number of made choices, people get tired

Increasing quantity of decisionsmight lead to impulsive and poor choices

Anchoring effect

Relying too heavily on initial information

Initial anchormight limit exploration of better options and lead to suboptimal decisions

Cognitive dissonance

The mental discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs

Actions contradicting beliefslead to justifying behaviors and demotivation

Negativity bias

Paying more attention to negative information

Focusing on bad newscan hinder motivation, creativity, and problem-solving

Recency bias

Placing greater emphasis on recent information

Highlighting the fresh memoriespotentially overlooking past experiences or trends

Peak-end rule

Giving more importance to the peak and end of an experience

Judging peak and end experiencecan influence overall perception

Pattern matching

Identifying patterns, even if they are not actually there

Craving for pattern existencemight lead to misinterpretations and biases

Scarcity effect

The perceived value of something increases when it is seen as limited or in short supply

Deficitincreases the Fear Of Missed Opportunities

Social desirability bias

People desire to be seen favorably by others

Trying to look good in others eyescan lead to false beliefs and group mistakes

Endowment effect

Valuing own things more than things other’s even if the objective value is the same

Undervaluing otherscan lead misjudgement and negativity

Ego depletion

Using the limited energy of Ur willpower

Tired people are lazycan lead to whatever like decisions

Decoy effect

An easy to discard extra option changes the proposition value for the others

Unsuitable optionleads to decisions based on comparative values

Von Restorff effect

Users notice items that stand out among the rest more

Distinctive itemattracts more attention

Spark effect

People are more likely to take action when the effort is small

Small action is easier to accepttiny step boosts motivation to do it

Curiosity gap

Evolutionary, we desire to seek out for missing information

Brain fulfills missing partsattracts to wonder

Skeuomorphism

It’s easier to adapt to more familiar things

Things mimicking real-world onesare more familiar and require less cognitive load

Variable reward

We tend to enjoy the unexpected rewards more

Unexpected rewardsare more enjoyable

Survivorship bias

Focusing only on the “surviving” observations, excluding points that didn’t survive

Considering only success subgroupmistakenly makes the data set incomplete

Occam’s razor

Don’t create extra entities without necessity, the simplest one is usually the best

Any extra items U addincrease complexity and possibility of errors

Reactance

People are less likely to adopt a behavior when they feel forced

Forcing behaviour may backfirebe rejected & make opponent false-beliefs/beliefs stronger

Miller’s law

Humans can only keep ~7 items in their working memory

Keeping in mind ~7 items – more is exhausting and usually inefficient

”Imho, regardless of the job title, whole team would benefit from knowing these principles”