Feeling of knowing
Sense of Certainty
Meaning Maintenance
Belief Persistence
Motivated Reasoning
Motivated Skepticism
Prior Attitude Effect
Disconfirmation Bias
Attitude PolarizationAttitude Strength Effect
Myside Bias
False Beliefs
Illusion of Truth Effect
Persistent Influence of Misinformation
Continued Influence Effect
Inferred Justification
Dogmatic and Rigid Thinking
Ideo-attribution Effect
Mindset
Idée fixe
Monomania
Einstellung effect
Functional fixedness
Cognitive Capture

Feeling of knowing
We can have an intuitive sense of "knowing" something that is actually true. The Feeling of Knowing is a metacognitive sensation.
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Sense of Certainty
Certainty or “feeling of knowing” is an interesting sensation that may aid in the decision-making process, but can lead us to invest in false assumptions. It is the sensation we feel that allows us to believe or value evidence, and to be able to successfully predict events from what we already know. When we try to recall the past, it is what allows us to distinguish from dream or story, and our actually lived events.

The feeling of certainty, however, is still just a feeling that is attached to our perception. When we perceive a color, for example, the color itself is independent of the feelings we may have about that color. Similarly, truth is independent of the feelings we may have about it. In some studies, the “feeling of knowing” has been located in the right medial frontal and anterior cingulate cortex.      

Meaning Maintenance
Heine, S. J., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. D. (2006). The meaning maintenance model: on the coherence of social motivations. Personality and social psychology review an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. 10(2), 88-110.    
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Belief Persistence

Motivated Reasoning
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Motivated Skepticism
“People are motivated skeptics; they are prone to accept at face value evidence that is congruent with their prior beliefs but apt to denigrate and hyper-critically evaluate evidence contrary to their priors”
  • Ditto & Lopez, 1992
  • Koehler, 1993
Taber, C.S. and Lodge, M. 2000. Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs.  Presented at the 
2000 meeting of the American Political Science Association. 
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Prior Attitude Effect
When we have strong feelings about issues or causes we tend to view supportive arguments as more credible than contrary arguments. This happens even if we are asked to be objective and neutral when looking at the evidence.

Disconfirmation Bias
We spend more time, effort and cognitive processing to find ways to discredit arguments we disagree with, than to find data to support our own arguments.

Attitude Polarization
We stand more firmly behind our initial arguments when we are exposed to contrary arguments or evidence.

Attitude Strength Effect
The stronger one's attitudes the more prone to the above biases. 

Sophisticated Strength Effect
People who have more political knowledge, actually have an increased chance to be biased and assume they can see through logical fallacies and irrational arguments, when in fact they just have a more sophisticated defense system and ability to find rationalizations.

Myside Bias

Ideo-attribution Effect

False Beliefs
  • Do infants really understand false belief? Is there a simple recipe for how to make friends? Ted Ruffman, Josef Perner (2005) Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (10) p. 462-463
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Illusion of Truth Effect
  • Explicit warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of misinformation. Ullrich K H Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, David T W Tang (2010) Memory cognition 38 (8) p. 1087-1100
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The Persistent Influence of Misinformation
The brain holds on to false facts, even after they have been retracted.
Ulrick Ecker
  • Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., Park, D., & Schwarz, N. (2005). How warnings about false claims become recommendations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 713-724.
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Continued Influence Effect
  • Johnson, H. M., & Seifert, C. M. (1994). Sources of the continued influence effect: When discredited information in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20 (6), 1420-1436.
  • Ecker, U. K., Lewandowsky, S., Swire, B., & Chang, D. (2011). Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 570-578.
  • Weaver, K., Garcia, S. M., Schwarz, N., & Miller, D. T. (2007). Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice sounds like a chorus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 821-833.
  • Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32, 303-330.

Inferred Justification
  • Inferred Justification. Prasad, M., Perrin, A. J., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S. G., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., & Powers, A. S. (2009). There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification. Sociological Inquiry, 79(2), 142-162. 

Dogmatic and Rigid Thinking

Mindset

Idée fixe
A preoccupation of mind held so firmly as to resist any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name originates from the French [French : idée, idea + fixe, fixed].

Einstellung effect
The creation of a mechanized state of mind.
Often called a problem solving set, Einstellung refers to a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving the problem.

The Einstellung effect is the negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems.
  • The Effect of Einstellung on Compositional Processes and Rigidity of Behavior, A Variational Approach to the Effect of Einstellung.
  • Luchins, A. S. (1942). Mechanization in problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 54, No. 248.

Functional fixedness
An impaired ability to discover a new use for an object, owing to the subject's previous use of the object in a functionally dissimilar context. It can also be deemed a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. Duncker also pointed out that the phenomenon occurs not only with physical objects, but also with mental objects or concepts (a point which lends itself nicely to the phenomenon of Einstellung effect).
Duncker, K. (1945). On problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 58:5 (Whole No. 270)