Definition
The likelihood of an event occurring may be judged by the degree of similarity with the class it is perceived to belong to.
Classification reasoning
Similarity bias is relevant in the context of orient phase when information at hand feels similar to information obtained from a previous use case. As an architect, the tendency is to automatically interpret the information in the same manner due to the similarity to make design decisions.
Example
Version control system: There are plenty of version control systems such as Github, GitLab, BitBucket etc. Each option has slight variations when compared with one another. Consider the base where the choice is between GitLab and BitBucket. With BitBucket making a lot of improvements recently such as the addition of pipelines and so on, both options feel similar in many aspects.
Impact
Take into consideration a common use case such as setting up continuous integration to run multiple independent steps in parallel. If the decision is to use BitBucket due to it being similar to GitLab, then this use case would be difficult to implement as the Pipelines feature of BitBucket does not support this feature yet where GitLab already has the feature implemented.
Debiasing techniques
Seek more information to distinguish the current requirements with similar ones to avoid applying the same solution simply due to similarity.
Related biases
- Distinction(The tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately)