Concept · Cognitive Bias: Temporal biases
Immune neglect
Origin: Gilbert et al., 1998
Biological Parallel
Injured animals overestimate recovery time—a wounded deer expects to be vulnerable for weeks but resumes normal activity within days. Immune neglect: underestimating adaptive response systems. Wound healing, stress recovery, and behavioral compensation happen faster than prospective prediction. The mechanism: we can't introspect into automatic systems (immune response, tissue repair, psychological adaptation). Evolution shaped robust recovery mechanisms but didn't make them cognitively accessible. We predict based on initial damage, not recovery capacity.