Social Cognition & Attribution Bias

Primes about how people interpret and misjudge social reality: belief formation and self-assessment (confidence, epistemic humility, Dunning-Kruger, self-efficacy), attribution of cause and blame (fundamental attribution error, scapegoating, responsibility attribution), and group distortions (conformity, groupthink, stereotyping).

26 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Anthropomorphism — Surface cues recruit a human agent-model for a nonhuman or non-agent target whose agency or mental states have not been established, so intention, emotion, or understanding is inferred more cheaply than it is verified.
• Belief Formation — Commitment-transition by which an agent comes to hold a proposition as true and act accordingly.
• Causality — Cause-effect relationships.
• Cognitive Appraisal — The interpretive step that evaluates a situation's significance and one's coping resources, determining the emotional and behavioral response rather than the raw stimulus doing so.
• Confidence Annotation — A graded warrant marker attached to a claim that travels with it and tells downstream consumers how much weight to place on it.
• Conformity — Aligning one's behaviour or beliefs to a group standard.
• Dunning-Kruger Effect — The miscalibration in which the skills needed to judge one's own competence are the same skills one lacks, so the least competent most overestimate their ability.
• Epistemic Humility — Calibrating the confidence of one's claims to the actual strength of the evidence and staying open to revision when new information arrives.
• Epistemic Justice — Fair knowledge production.
• Fundamental Attribution Error — Misattribute causes.
• Groupthink — Conformity overrides realism.
• Information Asymmetry — Parties to an interaction hold unequal private knowledge.
• Observational Learning (Social Learning) — Learn by observing.
• Public vs. Private Contexts — Audience presence alters motivation and behavior through reputation.
• Rashomon Effect — Multiple internally coherent but mutually inconsistent accounts of one event, underdetermined by the testimony set with no internal adjudication procedure.
• Reactance — Resistance to constraints.
• Responsibility Attribution — Assigning credit or blame for an outcome to a particular agent.
• Scapegoating — Channeling collective blame onto a substitute target.
• Schismogenesis — A cumulative interaction pattern in which each side's response intensifies the relation—through matching escalation or mutually amplifying opposites—driving progressive differentiation unless balancing processes intervene.
• Self-Efficacy — Belief in capability.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — Expectations shape outcomes.
• Stereotyping — Generalized category beliefs compress individual variation into archetypes.
• Structural Violence — Systemic harm.
• Summary Substance Divergence — An artefact's short summary surface and long substance surface, authored under different incentives and consumed by different audiences, drift apart into two truth-conditions.
• Symmetric Response to Asymmetric State — Equal treatment of an unequal state distorts toward the weaker side.
• Unreliable Narrator — A source whose report is systematically distorted relative to the reality it describes, so the receiver must model the distortion rather than read the account as transparent.