Attentional Bias
Our perception is affected by our recurring thoughts.
Attentional bias refers to how a person's perception is affected by selective factors in their attention. People who are anxious about spiders will notice spiders faster in a room than non-anxious people. Marketers exploit this by ensuring their brand appears in contexts where the target audience's attention is already primed.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Marketing Retargeting Ads After viewing a product, users notice its ads everywhere online — the ads haven't increased, but attentional priming makes them salient.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
A new parent becomes acutely aware of every child safety hazard in their home, noticing potential dangers they had never paid attention to before becoming responsible for a baby's wellbeing.
A person who just adopted a specific breed of dog starts seeing that breed everywhere in their neighborhood, even though the breed population in the area has remained completely stable for years.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
Get Debias on Google Play