Contagion bias

What it is

Believing that a thing keeps the "essence" of what it touched, so objects associated with disliked people feel contaminated and those associated with admired ones feel special.

Related

• Stereotyping bias
  Both let a category's imagined qualities rub off on its members or objects.
• Association bias bias
  Contagion is a strong form of association: a thing seems to carry traces of what it touched.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#54: Contagion bias

References

• Wikipedia: Contagion bias en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “People and groups: social influence”