Credibility, Attribution & Social Bias

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Abstractions about source credibility, self- and other-perception, information seeking, persuasion, deception, and biases in judging messages or people.

15 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Authority Bias — Decompose any act of deference into a content term and a source-cue term, and flag the upward tilt as bias whenever authority signals — titles, uniforms, confident bearing — inflate credence beyond the authority's genuine expertise in the specific claim.
• Child lying — Study a child's intentional false communication to an audience as a developing social-cognitive performance, separating initial deception, maintenance, motive, belief understanding, inhibition, and moral evaluation without treating ordinary development as diagnosis.
• False-Uniqueness Effect — The social-cognition finding that people underestimate how common their own virtues are among peers, biasing peer-prevalence estimates downward for positive, identity-relevant traits in order to preserve a sense of distinctiveness and positive self-evaluation.
• Focusing Effect (Focusing Illusion) — Systematically overweight whatever attribute attention currently rests on when judging a complex multi-attribute target, so the focused feature dominates the constructed evaluation far above its real causal contribution while everything below the attentional threshold recedes.
• Halo Effect — Explain why a judge's positive impression of one salient attribute of a target inflates ratings of its structurally unrelated attributes — treating a same-judge same-target rating correlation as an upper bound on, not an estimate of, the true trait correlation.
• Impostor Syndrome — The pattern in which a demonstrably capable, externally-validated person keeps a private conviction that their competence is fake, because a non-updating self-assessment channel rereads each new success as proof the deception still works rather than as evidence of ability.
• Information Manipulation Theory — A theory of deceptive message design in which speakers mislead by covertly manipulating the quantity, quality, relevance, or manner of information relative to conversational expectations.
• Information Seeking — Goal-directed human activity that begins with a perceived information need and proceeds through source selection, searching, encountering, evaluating, using, and sometimes abandoning information across formal and informal channels.
• Naive Realism — Explain intractable disagreement as the converging conviction that one perceives the world directly, that all rational observers would agree, and that dissenters must be biased — relocating the dispute from the facts to each party's invisible construction of them.
• Name-Letter Effect — Measure implicit self-positivity by the small, aggregate-only elevation in how much people like their own name-letters on a task framed as purely aesthetic and not cued to the self — a proxy that vanishes the instant self-relevance is made salient.
• Native-advertising confusion — Diagnose a media artifact by splitting its content from its channel signal, so the failure becomes a decoupling — editorial-coded layout asserting journalistic provenance over commercially-incentivized content — and credibility tracks the signal, not the disclosure label.
• Poe's Law — Without an explicit marker of intent, a faithful parody of an extreme position becomes indistinguishable from a sincere expression of it, because sincere and parodic content overlap completely once the channel strips tone, context, and the sender's known standing.
• Poisoning the Well — Pre-emptively discrediting the source of a forthcoming argument, so an anchoring frame of suspicion is installed first and every later thing the source says is received through it — including any rebuttal, read as defensiveness.
• Source Credibility — A receiver-side, perception-mediated weighting attached to a communicator — decomposing into expertise, trustworthiness, and goodwill — that gates how much of a message's content is accepted and acted upon, independent of the content's own evidential quality.
• Third-Person Effect — Explain censorship and content-regulation demand by the gap between how strongly people think a media message affects others versus themselves, since it is that perceived self-other asymmetry, not the message's real influence, that drives the demand — and its sign flips with the message's valence.