Misc

18 Cognitive Bias Examples Show Why Mental Mistakes Get Made

Published

5 years ago

March 3, 2018

Jeff Desjardins

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18 Cognitive Bias Examples

View the high resolution version of today’s graphic by clicking here.

Out of the 188 cognitive biases that exist, there is a much narrower group of biases that has a disproportionately large effect on the ways we do business.

These are things that affect workplace culture, budget estimates, deal outcomes, and our perceived return on investments within the company.

Mental mistakes such as these can add up quickly, and can hamper any organization in reaching its full bottom line potential.

Cognitive Bias Examples

Today’s infographic from Raconteur aptly highlights 18 different cognitive bias examples that can create particularly difficult challenges for company decision-making.

The list includes biases that fall into categories such as financial, social, short term-ism, and failure to estimate:

Financial biases
These are imprecise mental shortcuts we make with numbers, such as hyperbolic discounting – the mistake of preferring a smaller, sooner payoff instead of a larger, later reward. Another classic financial cognitive bias example is the “Ostrich effect”, which is where one sticks their head in the sand, pretending that negative financial information simply doesn’t exist.

Social biases
Social biases can have a big impact on teams and company culture. For example, teams can bandwagon (when people do something because other people are doing it), and individual team members can engage in blind spot bias (viewing oneself as less biased than others). These both can lead to worse decision-making.

Short Term-isms
One way to ensure a business that doesn’t last? Engage in short term-isms – fallacies that gear your business towards decisions that can be rationalized now, but that don’t add any long-term value. Status quo bias and anchoring are two ways this can happen.

Failure to Estimate
So much about business relies on making projections about the future, and the biases in this category make it difficult to make accurate estimates. Cognitive bias examples here include the availability heuristic (just because information is available, means it must be true), and the gambler’s fallacy (future probabilities are altered by past events).

Want more on cognitive biases? Here are five main biases that impact investors, specifically.

Related Topics:shortcuts psychology mental cognitive biases mistakes

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Technology

Ranked: The Best Selling Video Games in History

This chart shows the top ten best selling video games, ranked by software units sold. Six of them have been released in the last 12 years.

Creator Program

Published

15 hours ago

March 31, 2023

Pallavi Rao

A chart ranking the top-ten most sold video games in history.

Ranked: The Best Selling Video Games in History

It’s a good time to be a video game fan. Not only is the gaming industry booming and projected to grow to $320 billion by 2026, but every year is bringing new evolutions in the medium.

2022 saw massive launches in both games (Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök) and media based on games (the films Uncharted and Sonic the Hedgehog 2). 2023 has already seen the release of major flagship TV series based on a game, HBO’s The Last of Us, and the much-anticipated The Super Mario Bros. Movie is slated to release in April.

But which game is the best, or most successful? That debate may never end, but from company reports and sales data aggregated by Wikipedia, Samuel Parker’s chart of the most-sold video games as of March 3, 2023 can at least tell us which ones have been the most popular.

Top Ten Video Games Sold in History

The best selling video game didn’t need multimillion dollar budgets, sixty-hour narratives, or celebrity voice actors and ad spots. The independently-developed (indie) Minecraft, with its pixelated blocks, takes the top spot on this list.

Rank	Game	Sales (units)	Year Released	Developer
1	Minecraft	238.0M	2011	Mojang Studios
2	GTA 5	175.0M	2013	Rockstar
3	Tetris (EA)	100.0M	2006	EA Mobile
4	Wii Sport	82.9M	2006	Nintendo
5	PUBG: Battlegrounds	75.0M	2017	PUBG Corp
6	Mario Kart 8	60.5M	2014	Nintendo
7	Super Mario Bros.	58.0M	1985	Nintendo
8	Read Dead Redemption 2	50.0M	2018	Rockstar
9	Pokémon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow	47.5M	1996	GameFreak
10	Terraria	44.5M	2011	Re-Logic

Minecraft sold more units than the combined forces of Grand Theft Auto 5 (#2) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (#8), both made by industry giant Rockstar. Its immense popularity has been credited to its simple gameplay (no goals), creative structure (build anything), and engaged community with player-run servers and additional feature creations (known as mods).

Another simple favorite, Tetris, comes in at third place with 100 million units sold of its 2006 re-release. Millennials continue to make up a large chunk of the video game playing demographic which might explain Tetris’ sales.

But newer games are making up the majority of sales records. PUBG: Battlegrounds, a battle-royale shooter game which helped popularize the genre (and eventually its competitor Fortnite) asserts its popularity at #5. That puts it well ahead of the better-known shooter Call of Duty, even despite PUBG being banned in a number of countries for the alleged impact on the mental health of gamers.

The oldest game to make the list is Super Mario Bros. (#7), apt considering it is credited with reviving the video game industry after it crashed in 1983. The original staple side-scroller has sold 58 million copies worldwide.

Developer Dominance

Though the top selling games span various series of games, a few developers managed to repeatedly find success.

Developer	Top 20 Best-Selling Games
Nintendo	11
Rockstar	2
Others	7

Japanese video game titan Nintendo developed three games (Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, Wii Sport/Fitness) in the top 10 and another eight in the top 20. That’s not including its co-ownership of Pokémon, the world’s highest-grossing media franchise.

American publisher Rockstar Games also managed to score multiple hits, though its longer development cycle necessary to create cinematic games gives it fewer potential candidates. That might change with the much-anticipated GTA 6 reportedly in production.

Best Selling Genres

The most popular genres in the top 10 give players the freedom to impose their will upon the world and pursue objectives at their leisure:

Genre	Games
Sandbox/Open World	4
Simulation	2
Others	4

Two games (Minecraft, Terraria) are classic sandbox games, where worlds are procedurally generated and there are no gameplay goals. Another two (GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2) are in the adjacent open-world genre, with a combination of sandbox elements and a narrative structure.

However, with new games launching and selling millions of units every year, new entrants to the top 10 list of best selling video games of all-time seems likely. How will these developers, genres, and games fare over time?