A double-barreled question is a single question that contains two questions within it. As a result, “respondents must answer two questions with one answer” Bradburn et al. (2004, p. 142). The challenge of a double-barreled question is that it can be difficult to answer and may even be designed to cause someone confusion or cause

Selective attention refers to the ability to intentionally focus awareness on specific aspects of a situation or information. This allows a person to ignore irrelevant or distracting elements so only certain information is processed. There is an incredible amount of “data” in our environment. It includes visual and auditory stimuli, internal thoughts and memories, as

Change blindness is what happens when a person fails to recognize the change in an object or scene when that change coincides with a brief visual disruption (Simons & Levin, 1997). Change blindness occurs when we don’t perceive the motion that happens when a stimulus moves from one location to another in a visual scene

Examples of cognitive bias include optimism bias (overpredicting the likelihood of the best outcome) and egocentric bias (being biased towards outcomes that benefit ourselves). The fact is, most of us overestimate our thinking skills. We think we are objective in our analysis and a good judge of the accuracy and credibility of information. Unfortunately, that

The mere exposure effect refers to situations where people develop a preference for something simply because it is familiar. It is sometimes referred to as the familiarity principle. The more frequently a person is exposed to something, the more likely it is that they will begin to prefer it. This is based on a cognitive