Delusional, other kinds of thinking: A new lexicon

You know how sometimes you can't remember the name of a movie or a beer or a book?

Well, there's a phrase for that, and it's not "Man, I'm getting old."

It's called the "Google effect," the tendency to quickly forget information we can readily find online.

These kinds of terms, once the province of social scientists, "have seeped into common parlance," said University of St. Thomas social psychology professor Ryan Bremner. The problem? "People can process them or even use them without understanding what they mean," he said.

While misusing these idioms doesn't make us idiots, understanding their meanings can help us better understand ourselves. "Many of these words represent powerful and universal psychological phenomena," he said, "which, when properly understood, can be highly advantageous in one's personal and business life."

So, here's the lowdown on this lexicon:

Above-average effect: The manner in which most people judge themselves above average on desirable traits. In surveys, 75 to 90 percent of us considered ourselves above average in driving skills and leadership ability. That makes us susceptible to self-serving bias, in which we tend to credit our successes to our abilities and effort, while blaming our failures on bad luck, the difficulty of the task, other people, etc.

Bystander effect: An instance in which individuals fail to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders.

Cheerleader effect: The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.

 Confirmation bias: A tendency to search for, focus on, and remember information in a way that confirms preconceptions.

Counterfactual thinking: A tendency to look for facts after an event that would have made an incorrect prediction correct (e.g., people who predicted that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 presidential election might say, "If only that '47 percent' video hadn't come out, I would have been right").

 Groupthink: When the desire for harmony or conformity outweighs the importance of decisions made by a group.

Halo effect: The tendency of the positive effects from one person to boost the perception of an entire group.

Hindsight bias: The belief, which forms after an event, that the chain of events leading to the event was inevitable when it, in fact, was not. Its sibling, outcome bias, is the tendency to judge a decision based on its outcome instead of on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Looking-glass self: The concept that how we see ourselves does not come from who we really are, but rather from how we believe others see us.

Planning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long a task will take.

Recency bias: The tendency to think that trends and patterns we observed in the recent past will continue in the future.