Salience bias

What it is

Overweighting what stands out (vivid, unusual, emotional) and underweighting what is dull but important.

Related

• Anecdotal fallacy fallacy
  Vivid stories stand out; dull data doesn't, so stories dominate judgment.
• Appeal to emotion fallacy
  Vivid, emotional images and stories stand out, which is why they persuade without evidence.
• Availability heuristic bias
  What is salient is easy to recall, which is why vivid events are overweighted.
• Inattentional blindness bias
  We attend to what stands out and miss the rest, while believing we see everything.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#83: Salience effect

References

• Wikipedia: Salience 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 “What we notice: filtering too much information”