Ostracism & social exclusion

Ostracism (Greek: ὀστρακισμός, ostrakismos) was an Athenian democratic procedure in which any citizen could be expelled from the city-state of Athens for ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the citizen, ostracism was often used preemptively. It was used as a way of neutralizing someone thought to be a threat to the state or potential tyrant though in many cases popular opinion often informed the choice regardless. The word “ostracism” continues to be used for various cases of social shunning.

Ostracism in the context of computer networks (such as the Internet) is termed “cyberostracism”. In email communication, in particular, it is relatively easy to engage in silent treatment, in the form of “unanswered emails” or “ignored emails”. Being ostracised on social media is seen to be threatening to the fundamental human needs of belonging, self-esteem, control and meaningful existence. Cyber-rejection (receiving “dislikes”) caused more threat to the need of belonging and self-esteem, and lead to social withdrawal.[30] Cyber-ostracism (being ignored or receiving fewer “likes”) conversely lead to more prosocial behavior, Ostracism is thought to be associated with social media disorder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism


Sebastian, C., Viding, E., Williams, K. D., & Blakemore, S. J.. (2010). Social brain development and the affective consequences of ostracism in adolescence. Brain and Cognition

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2009.06.008
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ONODA, K.. (2010). Why mind feels pain: Current status of studies on ostracism from social neuroscience. Japanese Journal of Physiological Psychology and Psychophysiology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.5674/jjppp.28.29
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Platt, B., Kadosh, K. C., & Lau, J. Y. F.. (2013). The role of peer rejection in adolescent depression. Depression and Anxiety

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1002/da.22120
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Cacioppo, S., & Cacioppo, J. T.. (2012). Decoding the invisible forces of social connections. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience

Plain numerical DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00051
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Deckman, T., DeWall, C. N., Way, B., Gilman, R., & Richman, S.. (2014). Can Marijuana Reduce Social Pain?. Social Psychological and Personality Science

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/1948550613488949
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Karos, K.. (2018). On the overlap between physical and social pain. In Social and Interpersonal Dynamics in Pain: We Don’t Suffer Alone

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78340-6_9
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Gutz, L., Küpper, C., Renneberg, B., & Niedeggen, M.. (2011). Processing social participation: An event-related brain potential study. NeuroReport

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e3283476b67
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Cacioppo, S., & Cacioppo, J. T.. (2016). Research in social neuroscience: How perceived social isolation, ostracism, and romantic rejection affect our brain. In Social Exclusion: Psychological Approaches to Understanding and Reducing Its Impact

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33033-4_4
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Williams, K. D., & Nida, S. A.. (2016). Ostracism, exclusion, and rejection. Ostracism, Exclusion, and Rejection

Plain numerical DOI: 10.4324/9781315308470
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Russell, M.. (2014). Parliamentary party cohesion: Some explanations from psychology. Party Politics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/1354068812453367
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Riva, P., & Eck, J.. (2016). Social exclusion: Psychological approaches to understanding and reducing its impact. Social Exclusion: Psychological Approaches to Understanding and Reducing Its Impact

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33033-4
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Russell, M.. (2014). Parliamentary party cohesion. Party Politics

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1177/1354068812453367
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McPartland, J. C., Crowley, M. J., Perszyk, D. R., Naples, A. J., Mukerji, C. E., Wu, J., … Mayes, L. C.. (2011). Temporal dynamics reveal atypical brain response to social exclusion in autism. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2011.02.003
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Mavromihelaki, E., Eccles, J., Harrison, N., Grice-Jackson, T., Ward, J., Critchley, H., & Mania, K.. (2014). Cyberball3D+: A 3D serious game for fMRI investigating social exclusion and empathy. In 2014 6th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, VS-GAMES 2014

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1109/VS-Games.2014.7012032
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Sunami, N.. (2015). Lonely brain: An ERP study on attentional bias to aggressive words following ostracism. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
Crowley, M. J., Wu, J., McCarty, E. R., David, D. H., Bailey, C. A., & Mayes, L. C.. (2009). Exclusion and micro-rejection: Event-related potential response predicts mitigated distress. NeuroReport

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e328330377a
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Maurage, P., Joassin, F., Philippot, P., Heeren, A., Vermeulen, N., Mahau, P., … De Timary, P.. (2012). Disrupted regulation of social exclusion in alcohol-dependence: An fmri study. Neuropsychopharmacology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1038/npp.2012.54
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Sturgeon, J. A., & Zautra, A. J.. (2016). Pain Management Social pain and physical pain: shared paths to resilience Overlap of physical & social pain. Pain Manag
Chester, D., & Riva, P.. (2016). Brain mechanisms to regulate negative reactions to social exclusion. In Social Exclusion: Psychological Approaches to Understanding and Reducing Its Impact

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33033-4_12
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Weir, K.. (2012). The pain of social rejection. Monitor on Psychology

Countering Criticism of the Warren Report (PSYCH 1967)

Weaponization of the term”conspiracy theory”


CIA record #104-10406-10110 on “Countering Criticism Of The Warren Report”, Uncovered by a 1976 FOIA request from the New York Times.



PSYCH

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy’s assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission’s published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission’s findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission’s report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

“Western European critics” see Kennedy’s assassination as part of a subtle conspiracy attributable to “perhaps even (in rumors I have heard) Kennedy’s successor [Johnson].” One Barbara Garson has made the same point in another way by her parody of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” entitled “MacBird,” with what was obviously President Kennedy (Ken O Dune) in the role of Duncan, and President Johnson (MacBird) in the role of Macbeth.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are

(I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in,

(II) politically interested,

(III) financially interested,

(IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or

(V) infatuated with their own theories.

In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein’s theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane’s book is much less convincing that Epstein’s and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attacks on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, A.J.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Van der Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent Q and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission’s records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy’s brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a “loner,” mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.

f. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticism.

g. Such vague accusations as that “more than ten people have died mysteriously” can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and reinterviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the “ten mysterious deaths” line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission’s Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

Attachment 1

4 January 1967

Background Survey of Books Concerning the Assassination of President Kennedy

1. (Except where otherwise indicated, the factual data given in paragraphs 1-9 is unclassified.) Some of the authors of recent books on the assassination of President Kennedy (e.g., Joachim Joesten, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy; Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment [sic]; Leo Sauvage, The Oswald Affair: An Examination of the Contradictions and Omissions of the Warren Report) had publicly asserted that a conspiracy existed before the Warren Commission finished its investigation. Not surprisingly, they immediately bestirred themselves to show that they were right and that the Commission was wrong. Thanks to the mountain of material published by the Commission, some of it conflicting or misleading when read out of context, they have had little difficulty in uncovering items to substantiate their own theories. They have also in some cases obtained new and divergent testimony from witnesses. And they have usually failed to discuss the refutations of their early claims in the Commission’s Report, Appendix XII (“Speculations and Rumors”). This Appendix is still a good place to look for material countering the theorists.

2. Some writers appear to have been predisposed to criticism by anti-American, far-left, or Communist sympathies. The British “Who Killed Kennedy Committee” includes some of the most persistent and vocal English critics of the United States, e.g., Michael Foot, Kingsley Martin, Kenneth Tynan, and Bertrand Russell. Joachim Joesten has been publicly revealed as a onetime member of the German Communist Party (KDP); a Gestapo document of 8 November 1937 among the German Foreign Ministry files microfilmed in England and now returned to West German custody shows that his party book was numbered 532315 and dated 12 May 1932. (The originals of these files are now available at the West German Foreign Ministry in Bonn; the copy in the U.S. National Archives may be found under the reference T-120, Serial 4918, frames E2564824. The British Public Records Office should also have a copy.) Joesten’s American publisher, Carl Marzani, was once sentence to jail by a federal jury for concealing his Communist Party (CPUSA) membership in order to hold a government job. Available information indicates that Mark Lane was elected Vice Chairman of the New York Council to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee on 28 May 1963; he also attended the 8th Congress of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (an international Communist front organization) in Budapest from 31 March to 5 April 1964, where he expounded his (pre-Report) views on the Kennedy assassination. In his acknowledgments in his book, Lane expresses special thanks to Ralph Schoenman of London “who participated in and supported the work”; Schoenman is of course the expatriate American who has been influencing the aged Bertrand Russell in recent years. (See also para. 10 below on Communist efforts to replay speculation on the assassination.)

3. Another factor has been the financial reward obtainable for sensational books. Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, published on 13 August 1966, had sold 85,000 copies by early November and the publishers had printed 140,000 copies by that date, in anticipation of sales to come. The 1 January 1967 New York Times Book Review reported the book as at the top of the General category of the best seller list, having been in top position for seven weeks and on the list for 17 weeks. Lane has reportedly appeared on about 175 television and radio programs, and has also given numerous public lectures, all of which serves for advertisement. He has also put together a TV film, and is peddling it to European telecasters; the BBC has purchased rights for a record $45,000. While neither Abraham Zapruder nor William Manchester should be classed with the critics of the Commission we are discussing here, sums paid for the Zapruder film of the assassination ($25,000) and for magazine rights to Manchester’s Death of a President ($665,000) indicate the money available for material related to the assassination. Some newspapermen (e.g., Sylvan Fox, The Unanswered Questions About President Kennedy’s Assassination; Leo Sauvage, The Oswald Affair) have published accounts cashing in on their journalistic expertise.

4. Aside from political and financial motives, some people have apparently published accounts simply because they were burning to give the world their theory, e.g., Harold Weisberg, in his Whitewash II, Penn Jones, Jr., in Forgive My Grief, and George C. Thomson in The Quest for Truth. Weisberg’s book was first published privately, though it is now finally attaining the dignity of commercial publication. Jones’ volume was published by the small-town Texas newspaper of which he is the editor, and Thomson’s booklet by his own engineering firm. The impact of these books will probably be relatively slight, since their writers will appear to readers to be hysterical or paranoid.

5. A common technique among many of the writers is to raise as many questions as possible, while not bothering to work out all the consequences. Herbert Mitgang has written a parody of this approach (his questions actually refer to Lincoln’s assassination) in “A New Inquiry is Needed,” New York Times Magazine, 25 December 1966. Mark Lane in particular (who represents himself as Oswald’s lawyer) adopts the classic defense attorney’s approach of throwing in unrelated details so as to create in the jury’s mind a sum of “reasonable doubt.” His tendency to wander off into minor details led one observer to comment that whereas a good trial lawyer should have a sure instinct for the jugular vein, Lane’s instinct was for the capillaries. His tactics and also his nerve were typified on the occasion when, after getting the Commission to pay his travel expenses back from England, he recounted to that body a sensational (and incredible) story of a Ruby plot, while refusing to name his source. Chief Justice Warren told Lane, “We have every reason to doubt the truthfulness of what you have heretofore told us” Q by the standards of legal etiquette, a very stiff rebuke for an attorney.

6. It should be recognized, however, that another kind of criticism has recently emerged, represented by Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest. Epstein adopts a scholarly tone, and to the casual reader, he presents what appears to be a more coherent, reasoned case than the writers described above. Epstein has caused people like Richard Rovere and Lord Devlin, previously backers of the Commission’s Report, to change their minds. The New York Times’ daily book reviewer has said that Epstein’s work is a “watershed book” which has made it respectable to doubt the Commission’s findings. This respectability effect has been enhanced by Life magazine’s 25 November 1966 issue, which contains an assertion that there is a “reasonable doubt,” as well as a republication of frames from the Zapruder film (owned by Life), and an interview with Governor Connally, who repeats his belief that he was not struck by the same bullet that struck President Kennedy. (Connally does not, however, agree that there should be another investigation.) Epstein himself has published a new article in the December 1966 issue of Esquire, in which he explains away objections to his book. A copy of an early critique of Epstein’s views by Fletcher Knebel, published in Look, 12 July 1966, and an unclassified, unofficial analysis (by “Spectator”) are attached to this dispatch, dealing with specific questions raised by Epstein.

7. Here it should be pointed out that Epstein’s competence in research has been greatly exaggerated. Some illustrations are given in the Fletcher Knebel article. As a further specimen, Epstein’s book refers (pp. 93-5) to a cropped-down picture of a heavy-set man taken in Mexico City, saying that the Central Intelligence Agency gave it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on 18 November 1963, and that the Bureau in turn forwarded it to its Dallas office. Actually, affidavits in the published Warren material (vol. XI, pp. 468-70) show that CIA turned the picture over to the FBI on 22 November 1963. (As a matter of interest, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment claims that the photo was furnished by CIA on the morning of 22 November; the fact is that the FBI flew the photo directly from Mexico City to Dallas immediately after Oswald’s arrest, before Oswald’s picture had been published, on the chance it might be Oswald. The reason the photo was cropped was that the background revealed the place where it was taken.) Another example: where Epstein reports (p. 41) that a Secret Service interview report was even withheld from the National Archives, this is untrue: an Archives staff member told one of our officers that Epstein came there and asked for the memorandum. He was told that it was there, but was classified. Indeed, the Archives then notified the Secret Service that there had been a request for the document, and the Secret Service declassified it. But by that time, Epstein (whose preface gives the impression of prolonged archival research) had chosen to finish his searches in the Archives, which had only lasted two days, and had left town. Yet Epstein charges that the Commission was over-hasty in its work.

The New York Times daily book reviewer has said that Epstein’s work is a “watershed book” which has made it respectable to doubt the Commission’s findings. This respectability effect has been enhanced by Life magazines 25 November 1966 issue, which contains an assertion that there is a “reasonable doubt,” as well as a republication of frames from the Zapruder film (owned by Life), and an interview with Governor Connally, who repeats his belief that he was not struck by the same bullet that struck President Kennedy.

8. Aside from such failures in research, Epstein and other intellectual critics show symptoms of some of the love of theorizing and lack of common sense and experience displayed by Richard H. Popkin, the author of The Second Oswald. Because Oswald was reported to have been seen in different places at the same time, a phenomenon not surprising in a sensational case where thousands of real or alleged witnesses were interviewed, Popkin, a professor of philosophy, theorizes that there actually were two Oswalds. At this point, theorizing becomes sort of logico-mathematical game; an exercise in permutations and combinations; as Commission attorney Arlen Specter remarked, “Why not make it three Oswalds? Why stop at two?” Nevertheless, aside from his book, Popkin has been able to publish a summary of his views in The New York Review of Books, and there has been replay in the French Nouvel Observateur, in Moscow’s New Times, and in Baku’s Vyshka. Popkin makes a sensational accusation indirectly, saying that “Western European critics” see Kennedy’s assassination as part of a subtle conspiracy attributable to “perhaps even (in rumors I have heard) Kennedy’s successor.” One Barbara Garson has made the same point in another way by her parody of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” entitled “MacBird,” with what was obviously President Kennedy (Ken O Dune) in the role of Duncan, and President Johnson (MacBird) in the role of Macbeth. Miss Garson makes no effort to prove her point; she merely insinuates it. Probably the indirect form of accusation is due to fear of a libel suit.

9. Other books are yet to appear. William Manchester’s not-yet-published The Death of a President is at this writing being purged of material personally objectionable to Mrs. Kennedy. There are hopeful signs: Jacob Cohen is writing a book which will appear in 1967 under the title Honest Verdict, defending the Commission report, and one of the Commission attorneys, Wesley J. Liebeler, is also reportedly writing a book, setting forth both sides. But further criticism will no doubt appear; as the Washington Post has pointed out editorially, the recent death of Jack Ruby will probably lead to speculation that he was “silenced” by a conspiracy.

10. The likelihood of further criticism is enhanced by the circumstance that Communist propagandists seem recently to have stepped up their own campaign to discredit the Warren Commission. As already noted, Moscow’s New Times reprinted parts of an article by Richard Popkin (21 and 28 September 1966 issues), and it also gave the Swiss edition of Joesten’s latest work an extended, laudatory review in its number for 26 October. Izvestiya has also publicized Joesten’s book in articles of 18 and 21 October. (In view of this publicity and the Communist background of Joesten and his American publisher, together with Joesten’s insistence on pinning the blame on such favorite Communist targets as H.L. Hunt, the FBI and CIA, there seems reason to suspect that Joesten’s book and its exploitation are part of a planned Soviet propaganda operation.) Tass, reporting on 5 November on the deposit of autopsy photographs in the National Archives, said that the refusal to give wide public access to them, the disappearance of a number of documents, and the mysterious death of more than 10 people, all make many Americans believe Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. The radio transmitters of Prague and Warsaw used the anniversary of the assassination to attack the Warren report. The Bulgarian press conducted a campaign on the subject in the second half of October; a Greek Communist newspaper, Avgi, placed the blame on CIA on 20 November. Significantly, the start of this stepped-up campaign coincided with a Soviet demand that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow stop distributing the Russian-language edition of the Warren report; Newsweek commented (12 September) that the Soviets apparently “did not want mere facts to get in their way.”

Attachment 2

The Theories of Mr. Epstein by Spectator

A recent critic of the Warren Commission Report, Edward Jay Epstein, has attracted widespread attention by contesting the Report’s conclusion that, “although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission,” President Kennedy and Governor Connally were probably hit successively by the same bullet, the second of three shots fired. In his book, Inquest, Epstein maintains (1) that if the two men were not hit by the same bullet, there must have been two assassins, and (2) that there is evidence which strongly suggests that the two men were not hit by the same bullet. He suggests that the Commission’s conclusions must be viewed as “expressions of political truth,” implying that they are not in fact true, but are only a sort of Pablum for the public, Epstein’s argument that the two men must either have been shot by one bullet or by two assassins rests on a comparison of the minimum time required to operate the bolt on Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle Q 2.3 seconds Q with the timing of the shots as deduced from a movie of the shooting taken by an amateur photographer, Abraham Zapruder. The frames of the movie serve to time the events in the shooting. The film (along with a slow-motion re-enactment of the shooting made on 24 May 1964 on the basis of the film and other pictures and evidence) tends to show that the President was probably not shot before frame 207, when he came out from beneath the cover of an oak tree, and that the Governor was hit not later than frame 240. If this is correct, then the two men would not have been hit longer than 1.8 seconds apart, since Zapruder’s film was taken at a speed of 18.3 frames per second. Since Oswald’s rifle could not have fired a second shot within 1.8 seconds, Epstein concludes that the victims must have been shot by separate weapons Q and hence presumably by separate assassins Q unless they were hit by the same bullet. Epstein then argues that there is evidence which contradicts the possibility of a shooting by a single bullet. In his book he refers to Federal Bureau of Investigation reports stemming from FBI men present at the Bethesda autopsy on President Kennedy, according to which there was a wound in the back with no point of exit; this means that the bullet which entered Kennedy’s back could not later have hit Connally. This information, Epstein notes, flatly contradicts the official autopsy report accepted by the Commission, according to which the bullet presumably entered Kennedy’s body just below the neck and exited through the throat. Epstein also publishes photographs of the backs of Kennedy’s shirt and coat, showing bullet holes about six inches below the top of the collar, as well as a rough sketch made at the time of the autopsy; these pictures suggest that the entrance wound in the back was too low to be linked to an exit wound in the throat. In his book, Epstein says that if the FBI statements are correct Q and he indicates his belief that they are Q then the “autopsy findings must have been changed after January 13 [January 13, 1964: the date of the last FBI report stating that the bullet penetrated Kennedy’s back for less than a finger-length .] .” In short, he implies that the Commission warped and even forged evidence so as to conceal the fact of a conspiracy. Following the appearance of Epstein’s Inquest, it was pointed out that on the morning (November 23rd) after the Bethesda autopsy attended by FBI and Secret Service men, the autopsy doctors learned that a neck wound, obliterated by an emergency tracheostomy performed in Dallas, had been seen by the Dallas doctors. (The tracheostomy had been part of the effort to save Kennedy’s life.) The FBI men who had only attended the autopsy on the evening of November 22 naturally did not know about this information from Dallas, which led the autopsy doctors to change their conclusions, finally signed by them on November 24. Also, the Treasury Department (which runs the Secret Service) reported that the autopsy report was only forwarded by the Secret Service to the FBI on December 23, 1963. But in a recent article in Esquire, Epstein notes that the final FBI report was still issued after the Secret Service had sent the FBI the official autopsy, and he claims that the explanation that the FBI was uninformed “begs the question of how a wound below the shoulder became a wound in the back of the neck.” He presses for making the autopsy pictures available, a step which the late President’s brother has so far steadfastly resisted on the grounds of taste, though they have been made available to qualified official investigators. Let us consider Epstein’s arguments in the light of information now available:

1. Epstein’s thesis that if the President and the Governor were not hit by the same bullet, there must have been two assassins:

a. Feeling in the Commission was that the two men were probably hit by the same bullet; however, some members evidently felt that the evidence was not conclusive enough to exclude completely the Governor’s belief that he and the President were hit separately. After all, Connally was one of the most important living witnesses. While not likely, it was possible that President Kennedy could have been hit more than 2.3 seconds before Connally. As Arlen Specter, a Commission attorney and a principal adherent of the “one-bullet theory,” says, the Zapruder film is two-dimensional and one cannot say exactly when Connally, let alone the President, was hit. The film does not show the President during a crucial period (from about frames 204 to 225) when a sign blocked the view from Zapruder’s camera, and before that the figures are distant and rather indistinct. (When Life magazine first published frames from the Zapruder film in its special 1963 Assassination Issue, it believed that the pictures showed Kennedy first hit 74 frames before Governor Connally was struck.) The “earliest possible time” used by Epstein is based on the belief that, for an interval before that time, the view of the car from the Book Depository window was probably blocked by the foliage of an oak tree (from frame 166 to frame 207, with a brief glimpse through the leaves at frame 186). In the words of the Commission’s Report, “it is unlikely that the assassin would deliberately have shot [at President Kennedy] with a view obstructed by the oak tree when he was about to have a clear opportunity”; unlikely, but not impossible. Since Epstein is fond of logical terminology, it might be pointed out that he made an illicit transition from probability to certainty in at least one of his premises.

b. Although Governor Connally believed that he and the President were hit separately, he did not testify that he saw the President hit before he was hit himself; he testified that he heard a first shot and started to turn to see what had happened. His testimony (as the Commission’s report says) can therefore be reconciled with the supposition that the first shot missed and the second shot hit both men. However, the Commission did not pretend that the two men could not possibly have been hit separately.

c. The Commission also concluded that all the shots were fired from the sixth floor window of the Depository. The location of the wounds is one major basis for this conclusion. In the room behind the Depository window, Oswald’s rifle and three cartridge cases were found, and all of the cartridge cases were identified by experts as having been fired by that rifle; no other weapon or cartridge cases were found, and the consensus of the witnesses from the plaza was that there were three shots. If there were other assassins, what happened to their weapons and cartridge cases? How did they escape? Epstein points out that one woman, a Mrs. Walther, not an expert on weapons, thought she saw two men, one with a machine gun, in the window, and that one other witness thought he saw someone else on the sixth floor; this does not sound very convincing, especially when compared with photographs and other witnesses who saw nothing of the kind.

d. The very fact that the Commission did not absolutely rule out the possibility that the victims were shot separately shows that its conclusions were not determined by a preconceived theory. Now, Epstein’s thesis is not just his own discovery; he relates that one of the Commission lawyers volunteered to him: “To say that they were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.” This thesis was evidently considered by the Commission. If the thesis were completely valid, and if the Commissioners Q as Epstein charges Q had only been interested in finding “political truth,” then the Commission should have flatly adopted the “one-bullet theory,” completely rejecting any possibility that the men were hit separately. But while Epstein and the others have a weakness for theorizing, the seven experienced lawyers on the Commission were not committed beforehand to finding either a conspiracy or the absence of one, and they wisely refused to erect a whole logical structure on the slender foundation of a few debatable pieces of evidence.

2. Epstein’s thesis that either the FBI’s reports (that the bullet entering the President’s back did not exit) were wrong, or the official autopsy report was falsified. a. Epstein prefers to believe that the FBI reports are accurate (otherwise, he says, “doubt is cast on the accuracy of the FBI’s entire investigation”) and that the official autopsy report was falsified. Now, as noted above, it has emerged since Inquest was written that the FBI witnesses to the autopsy did not know about the information of a throat wound, obtained from Dallas, and that the doctors’ autopsy report was not forwarded to the FBI until December 23, 1963. True, this date preceded the date of the FBI’s Supplemental Report, January 13, 1964, and that Supplemental Report did not refer to the doctors’ report, following instead the version of the earlier FBI reports. But on November 25, 1966, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover explained that when the FBI submitted its January 13 report, it knew that the Commission would weigh its evidence together with that of other agencies, and it was not incumbent on the FBI to argue the merits of its own version as opposed to that of the doctors. When writing reports for outside use, experienced officials are always cautious about criticizing or even discussing the products of other agencies. (If one is skeptical about this explanation, it would still be much easier to believe that the author(s) of the Supplemental Report had somehow overlooked or not received the autopsy report than to suppose that that report was falsified months after the event. Epstein thinks the Commission staff overlooked Mrs. Walther’s report mentioned above, yet he does not consider the possibility that the doctors’ autopsy report did not actually reach the desk of the individuals who prepared the Supplemental Report until after they had written Q perhaps well before January 13 Q the draft of page 2 of that report. Such an occurrence would by no means justify a general distrust of the FBI’s “entire investigation.”) b. With regard to the holes in the shirt and coat, their location can be readily explained by supposing that the President was waving to the crowd, an act which would automatically raise the back of his clothing. And in fact, photographs show the President was waving just before he was shot. c. As to the location of the hole in the President’s back or shoulder, the autopsy films have recently been placed in the National Archives, and were viewed in November 1966 by two of the autopsy directors, who… [The last page released ends here.]

Dispatch To: Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases From: Chief, Subject:

Warren Commission Report: Article on the Investigation Conducted by District Attorney Garrison

Date: 19 July 1968

1. We are forwarding herewith a reprint of the article “A Reporter At Large: Garrison”, published in THE NEW YORKER, 13 July, 1968. It was written by Edward Jay Epstein, himself author of a book (“Inquest”), critical of the Warren Commission Report.

2. The wide-spread campaign of adverse criticism of the U.S., most recently again provoked by the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, appears to have revived foreign interest in the assassination of his brother, the late President Kennedy, too. The forthcoming trial of Sirhan, accused of the murder of Senator Kennedy, can be expected to cause a new wave of criticism and suspicion against the United States, claiming once more the existence of a sinister “political murder conspiracy”. We are sending you the attached article Q based either on first-hand observation by the author or on other, identified sources Q since it deals with the continuing investigation, conducted by District Attorney Garrison of New Orleans, La. That investigation tends to keep alive speculations about the death of President Kennedy, an alleged “conspiracy”, and about the possible involvement of Federal agencies, notably the FBI and CIA.

3. The article is not meant for reprinting in any media. It is forwarded primarily for your information and for the information of all Station personnel concerned. If the Garrison investigation should be cited in your area in the context of renewed anti-U.S. attacks, you may use the article to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders, and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter such attacks) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy. In this context, assets may have to explain to their audiences certain basic facts about the U.S. judicial system, its separation of state and federal courts and the fact that judges and district attorneys in the states are usually elected, not appointed: consequently, D.A. Garrison can continue in office as long as his constituents re-elect him. Even if your assets have to discuss this in order to refute Q or at least weaken Q anti-U.S. propaganda of sufficiently serious impact, any personal attacks upon Garrison (or any other public personality in the U.S.) must be strictly avoided.


Warren Commission Report. (1964). The Science News-Letter

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2307/3947618
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Oswald, L. H.. (2016). The warren commission reports. ABA Journal
JOHNSTON, J. H.. (2019). The Warren Report. In Murder, Inc.

Plain numerical DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvhrd0vs.28
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Fetzer, J. H.. (2004). Disinformation: The Use of False Information. Minds and Machines

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1023/B:MIND.0000021683.28604.5b
DOI URL
directSciHub download

HAMSHER, J. H., GELLER, J. D., & ROTTER, J. B.. (1968). INTERPERSONAL TRUST, INTERNAL-EXTERNAL CONTROL, AND THE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Plain numerical DOI: 10.1037/h0025900
DOI URL
directSciHub download

Cognitive Biases

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Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases

Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general.

Name Description
Ambiguity effect The tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown”.[10]
Anchoring or focalism The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).[11][12]
Anthropocentric thinking The tendency to use human analogies as a basis for reasoning about other, less familiar, biological phenomena.[13]
Anthropomorphism or personification The tendency to characterize animals, objects, and abstract concepts as possessing human-like traits, emotions, and intentions.[14]
Attentional bias The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.[15]
Automation bias The tendency to depend excessively on automated systems which can lead to erroneous automated information overriding correct decisions.[16]
Availability heuristic The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.[17]
Availability cascade A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).[18]
Backfire effect The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one’s previous beliefs.[19] cf. Continued influence effect.
Bandwagon effect The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.[20]
Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).[21]
Belief bias An effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[22]
Ben Franklin effect A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[23]
Berkson’s paradox The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities.[24]
Bias blind spot The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[25]
Bystander effect The tendency to think that others will act in an emergency situation.[26]
Choice-supportive bias The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.[27]
Clustering illusion The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[12]
Confirmation bias The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.[28]
Congruence bias The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[12]
Conjunction fallacy The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[29]
Conservatism (belief revision) The tendency to revise one’s belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[5][30][31]
Continued influence effect The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.[32] cf. Backfire effect
Contrast effect The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus’ perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[33]
Courtesy bias The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.[34]
Curse of knowledge When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[35]
Declinism The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively.[36]
Decoy effect Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.[37]
Default effect When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.[38]
Denomination effect The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).[39]
Disposition effect The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value.[40]
Distinction bias The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.[41]
Dunning–Kruger effect The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.[42]
Duration neglect The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.[43]
Empathy gap The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others.[44]
Endowment effect The tendency for people to demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.[45]
Exaggerated expectation Based on the estimates,[clarification needed] real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[unreliable source?][5][46]
Experimenter’s or expectation bias The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[47]
Focusing effect The tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event.[48]
Forer effect or Barnum effect The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.[49]
Form function attribution bias In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot.[50]
Framing effect Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.[51]
Frequency illusion The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[52] This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.[53]
Functional fixedness Limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.[54]
Gambler’s fallacy The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.”[55]
Hard–easy effect Based on a specific level of task difficulty, the confidence in judgments is too conservative and not extreme enough.[5][56][57][58]
Hindsight bias Sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable[59] at the time those events happened.
Hostile attribution bias The “hostile attribution bias” is the tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.[60]
Hot-hand fallacy The “hot-hand fallacy” (also known as the “hot hand phenomenon” or “hot hand”) is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Hyperbolic discounting Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.[61] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
Identifiable victim effect The tendency to respond more strongly to a single identified person at risk than to a large group of people at risk.[62]
IKEA effect The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.[63]
Illicit transference Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
Illusion of control The tendency to overestimate one’s degree of influence over other external events.[64]
Illusion of validity Belief that our judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated.[65]
Illusory correlation Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.[66][67]
Illusory truth effect A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. These are specific cases of truthiness.
Impact bias The tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.[68]
Information bias The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.[69]
Insensitivity to sample size The tendency to under-expect variation in small samples.
Irrational escalation The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Law of the instrument An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Less-is-better effect The tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly.
Look-elsewhere effect An apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.
Loss aversion The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.[70] (see also Sunk cost effects and endowment effect).
Mere exposure effect The tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.[71]
Money illusion The tendency to concentrate on the nominal value (face value) of money rather than its value in terms of purchasing power.[72]
Moral credential effect The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Negativity bias or Negativity effect Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.[73][74] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
Neglect of probability The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.[76]
Normalcy bias The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.
Not invented here Aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group. Related to IKEA effect.
Observer-expectancy effect When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Omission bias The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions).[77]
Optimism bias The tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes (see also wishful thinking, valence effect, positive outcome bias).[78][79]
Ostrich effect Ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.
Outcome bias The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Overconfidence effect Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[5][80][81][82]
Pareidolia A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
Pessimism bias The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.
Placebo effect The belief that a medication works—even if merely a placebo.
Planning fallacy The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.[68]
Post-purchase rationalization The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pro-innovation bias The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation’s usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Projection bias The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one’s current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.[83][84][74]
Pseudocertainty effect The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.[85]
Reactance The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
Reactive devaluation Devaluing proposals only because they purportedly originated with an adversary.
Recency illusion The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
Regressive bias A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.[5][86][87][unreliable source?]
Restraint bias The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to show restraint in the face of temptation.
Rhyme as reason effect Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense’s use of the phrase “If the gloves don’t fit, then you must acquit.”
Risk compensation / Peltzman effect The tendency to take greater risks when perceived safety increases.
Selection bias The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias.
Selective perception The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Semmelweis reflex The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.[31]
Sexual overperception bias / sexual underperception bias The tendency to over-/underestimate sexual interest of another person in oneself.
Social comparison bias The tendency, when making decisions, to favour potential candidates who don’t compete with one’s own particular strengths.[88]
Social desirability bias The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[89]
Status quo bias The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also loss aversion, endowment effect, and system justification).[90][91]
Stereotyping Expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
Subadditivity effect The tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.[92]
Subjective validation Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
Surrogation Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
Survivorship bias Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
Time-saving bias Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
Third-person effect Belief that mass communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than on themselves.
Parkinson’s law of triviality The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.[93]
Unit bias The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.[94]
Weber–Fechner law Difficulty in comparing small differences in large quantities.
Well travelled road effect Underestimation of the duration taken to traverse oft-traveled routes and overestimation of the duration taken to traverse less familiar routes.
Women are wonderful effect A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
Zero-risk bias Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Zero-sum bias A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another).

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

Name Description
Actor-observer bias The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
Authority bias The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.[95]
Cheerleader effect The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.[96]
Defensive attribution hypothesis Attributing more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe or as personal or situational similarity to the victim increases.
Egocentric bias Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them with.
Extrinsic incentives bias An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
False consensus effect The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.[97]
Forer effect (aka Barnum effect) The tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
Fundamental attribution error The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior[74] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
Group attribution error The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
Halo effect The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[98]
Illusion of asymmetric insight People perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.[99]
Illusion of external agency When people view self-generated preferences as instead being caused by insightful, effective and benevolent agents.
Illusion of transparency People overestimate others’ ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
Illusory superiority Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as “Lake Wobegon effect”, “better-than-average effect”, or “superiority bias“.)[100]
Ingroup bias The tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
Just-world hypothesis The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
Moral luck The tendency for people to ascribe greater or lesser moral standing based on the outcome of an event.
Naïve cynicism Expecting more egocentric bias in others than in oneself.
Naïve realism The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
Outgroup homogeneity bias Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.[101]
Self-serving bias The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).[102]
Shared information bias Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).[103]
System justification The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
Trait ascription bias The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Ultimate attribution error Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
Worse-than-average effect A tendency to believe ourselves to be worse than others at tasks which are difficult.[104]

Memory errors and biases

In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:

Name Description
Bizarreness effect Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias In a self-justifying manner retroactively ascribing one’s choices to be more informed than they were when they were made.
Change bias After an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one’s past performance as more difficult than it actually was.[105][unreliable source?]
Childhood amnesia The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Conservatism or Regressive bias Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.[86][87]
Consistency bias Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[106]
Context effect That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cross-race effect The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.[105]
Egocentric bias Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.[107]
False memory A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect (Self-generation effect) That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Hindsight bias The inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were; also called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
Humor effect That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.[108]
Illusion of truth effect That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Illusory correlation Inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.[5][67]
Lag effect The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also spacing effect.
Leveling and sharpening Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[109]
Levels-of-processing effect That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.[110]
List-length effect A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items (“L30”) and a list of 100 items (“L100”). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).[111][further explanation needed]
Misinformation effect Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.[112]
Modality effect That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias The improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.
Next-in-line effect People taking turns speaking in a group tend to have diminished recall for the words of others[clarify] who spoke immediately before them.[113]
Part-list cueing effect That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.[114]
Peak-end rule That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
Persistence The unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event.[citation needed]
Picture superiority effect The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.[115][116][117][118][119][120]
Positivity effect (Socioemotional selectivity theory) That older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
Primacy effect, recency effect & serial position effect That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[121]
Processing difficulty effect That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.[122]
Reminiscence bump The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.[123]
Rosy retrospection The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-relevance effect That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Source confusion Confusing episodic memories with other information, creating distorted memories.[124]
Spacing effect That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one.
Spotlight effect The tendency to overestimate the amount that other people notice your appearance or behavior.
Stereotypical bias Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender).
Suffix effect Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.[125][126]
Suggestibility A form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
Tachypsychia When time perceived by the individual either lengthens, making events appear to slow down, or contracts.[127]
Telescoping effect The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
Testing effect The fact that you more easily remember information you have read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.[128]
Tip of the tongue phenomenon When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[105]
Travis Syndrome Overestimating the significance of the present.[129] It is related to the enlightenment Idea of Progress and chronological snobbery with possibly an appeal to novelty logical fallacy being part of the bias.
Verbatim effect That the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.[130] This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
von Restorff effect That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.[131]
Zeigarnik effect That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggested that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes noisy information processing during storage and retrieval of information in human memory.[5]

Individual differences in decision making biases

People do appear to have stable individual differences in their susceptibility to decision biases such as overconfidence, temporal discounting, and bias blind spot.[134] That said, these stable levels of bias within individuals are possible to change. Participants in experiments who watched training videos and played debiasing games showed medium to large reductions both immediately and up to three months later in the extent to which they exhibited susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, projection bias, and representativeness.[135]

Debiasing

Debiasing is the reduction of biases in judgment and decision making through incentives, nudges, and training. Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects.


Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
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mid-14c., “a plotting of evil, unlawful design; a combination of persons for an evil purpose,” from Anglo-French conspiracie, Old French conspiracie “conspiracy, plot,” from Latin conspirationem (nominative conspiratio) “agreement, union, unanimity,” noun of action from past-participle stem of conspirare “to agree, unite, plot,” literally “to breathe together” (see conspire).

Earlier in same sense was conspiration (early 14c.), from French conspiration (13c.), from Latin conspirationem. An Old English word for it was facengecwis.

Conspiracy theory “explanation of an event or situation involving unwarranted belief that it is caused by a conspiracy among powerful forces” emerged in mid-20c. (by 1937) and figures in the writings of, or about, Charles Beard, Hofstadter, Veblen, etc., but the degree of paranoia and unreasonableness implied in each use is not always easy to discern. The phrase was used from 19c. in a non-pejorative sense “the theory that a (certain) conspiracy exists,” especially in court cases. Its use in general reference to theories of hidden cabals pulling wires behind the scenes of national or global events is by 1871.

We shall better understand the ensuing civil war if we study the movements in the four most important of these States, in relation to a theory which asserts that the secession was a conspiracy whose central cabal, composed of Southern senators and representatives in Washington, dictated through its ramifications in the States the inception and the course of the revolution. [James Ford Rhodes, page headed “The Conspiracy Theory” in “History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850,” New York, 1893]

To the Jingo Imperialist “the South African Conspiracy” is the alleged Dutch conspiracy to drive the British into the sea. But, to the man accustomed to weigh evidence and to base his opinions on ascertained facts, it is clear that this conspiracy theory is absolutely untenable, for whatever “evidence” has been adduced in support of the theory is nebulous and shadowy in the extreme. [“The South African Conspiracy,” in “The Westminster Review,” January 1902]

https://www.etymonline.com/word/conspiracy

The conspiracy theory meme as a tool of cultural hegemony: A critical discourse analysis

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322682499_The_conspiracy_theory_meme_as_a_tool_of_cultural_hegemony_A_critical_discourse_analysis

Rankin Jr., J. E.. (2018). The conspiracy theory meme as a tool of cultural hegemony: A critical discourse analysis. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering

Abstract (Summary)

Those rejecting the official accounts of significant suspicious and impactful events are often labeled conspiracy theorists and the alternative explanations they propose are often referred to as conspiracy theories. These labels are often used to dismiss the beliefs of those individuals who question potentially hegemonic control of what people believe. The conspiracy theory concept functions as an impediment to legitimate discursive examination of conspiracy suspicions. The effect of the label appears to constrain even the most respected thinkers. This impediment is particularly problematic in academia, where thorough, objective analysis of information is critical to uncovering truth, and where members of the academy are typically considered among the most important of epistemic authorities. This dissertation tracked the development and use of such terms as pejoratives used to shut down critical thinking, analysis, and challenges to authority. This was accomplished using critical discourse analysis as a research methodology. Evidence suggesting government agents were instrumental in creating the pejorative meme conspiracy theorist was found in contemporary media. Tracing the evolution of the conspiracy theory meme and its use as a pejorative silencer may heighten awareness of its use in this manner and diminish its impact.