Wade Alliance

Leadership Consulting with a DEI lens

Biases Pertinent to Business
Affinity Bias - The preference or tendency to appreciate people like us. We are more likely to get along with others who are the same as us.
Anchoring - Relying on one piece of information when making decisions.
Attribution Bias - The way in which people explain their own behavior and that of others. We may attribute the cause of our own and others’ behavior to internal or external circumstances.
Authority Bias - The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and to be more influenced by that opinion.
Availability Heuristic - Overestimating the likelihood of events seen more often. (The flu is the “go to” diagnosed during flu season.) 
Bandwagon Effect/Groupthink - Doing or believing things because many other people do or believe the same. 
Classism - Prejudicial thoughts and discriminatory actions based on differences in socio‐economic status; income; or class, usually by upper classes against lower classes.
Colorism - Discrimination based on skin color in which people are treated differently based on the social meanings attached to skin color.
Confirmation Bias - The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Default Effect - When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default.
Dunning–Kruger Effect - The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their abilities, and the tendency for experts to underestimate their abilities. 
Endowment Effect - The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to spend on it.
False Consensus Effect - The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Halo/Horns Effect - Believing that a person's positive or negative traits "spill over" from one area to another.
Hindsight Bias - Seeing past events as being predictable when they happened.
Hostile Attribution Bias - Interpreting others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign. 
Illusory Correlation - Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
Implicit Bias - The attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Take the Harvard Implicit Association Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html 
In‐Group Bias - The tendency for groups to “favor” themselves by rewarding group members economically, socially, psychologically and emotionally in order to uplift one group over another.
Loss Aversion – The preference to keep something over gaining something else.  
Negativity Bias or Negativity Effect - Humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.
Not Invented Here - Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group.
Risk Compensation/Peltzman Effect - The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Self-Generation Effect - Information generated by the user is better recalled than information generated by others. 
Spotlight Effect - Overestimating the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Status Quo Bias - Preferring things to stay relatively the same.
Sunk Cost Fallacy – Continuing to invest in a decision despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
Trait Ascription Bias - Viewing yourself as relatively complex in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
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