Understanding Cognitive Biases

Discover why it’s so easy for us to find a blind spot in the reasoning of others, yet so difficult to recognize it in ourselves. Most of us believe our reasoning is always sound and logical. But the evidence shows our thinking is easily affected by even the most seemingly benign changes around us.

Explore one of the most well-known and pervasive cognitive biases. We see the effects of confirmation bias in our media, politics, and much more—this tendency for us to only accept information that confirms our existing worldview and to actively reject information that opposes what we already believe to be true.

Learn about biases you have experienced since infancy: pareidolia and anthropomorphism, which are our brain’s tendency to find patterns—particularly faces—in everything around us, and to assign those patterns human characteristics. For most of our evolutionary history, these biases have kept us alive and procreating. But can they also lead us astray?

Consider our tendency to place a high value on things we’ve built ourselves, referred to as the IKEA effect. The psychological concept of effort justification causes us to value our own efforts more than the job might warrant, as we attempt to avoid the cognitive dissonance that a more honest evaluation could bring.

Explore the new set of biases that can develop when individuals must make decisions in a group. Groupthink and group polarization can lead to dire consequences when there is little or no discussion of alternate choices—as evidenced in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Discover how to use three particular cognitive biases to your own advantage. The testing effect, the generation effect, and spacing effect—which come from our brain’s tendencies to use information in specific ways—can lead to improved information retention, better test scores, and a greater depth of knowledge at any stage of life.

See how observer bias can significantly affect the results of activities from scientific experiments to classroom teaching to the entertainment of “talking” animals. You’ll also learn how the double-blind experimental method was developed to specifically combat observer bias and reveal the crucial role it plays in public health.

Discover the cognitive bias that can help you negotiate more successfully for that next car purchase. Your brain uses the anchoring heuristic—the tendency to use reference points in decision-making—for efficiency. Armed with this knowledge, you might want to forget everything you’ve learned previously about negotiating.

Was it really your fault that your car scraped the light pole in the parking lot? Discover what’s behind our familiar tendency to attribute negative outcomes of our own behaviors to “circumstances,” while attributing others’ behaviors to their traits and mental abilities. We’ve all done this; or could it be a uniquely Western bias?

The misinformation effect reflects our tendency to trust our memories implicitly as truth. Actually, they are influenced by our emotions, expectations, culture, and what others have to say about them. Learn how this cognitive bias has negatively affected our criminal justice processes, and what’s being done about it.

Evolutionary theory suggests the availability bias and the representativeness heuristic developed when we needed them in order to stay alive. But what about our very different modern lives today? Learn how these heuristics can cause us to assess danger incorrectly and make poor decisions as a result.

The hindsight bias leads us to believe we knew more than we actually did at the time of a specific event, especially one involving danger or tragedy. Learn how new information replaces old information in our memory, making it much more efficient but less accurate, and making us more susceptible to the hindsight bias.

Given the human desire for control, it can be very disconcerting for us to accept that life is filled with random events. Discover how the gambler’s fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy biases lead us to see cause and effect where none exists—and the poor choices we can make as a result.

Discover how the Forer effect, also known as the Barnum effect, plays into our self-validation—a mental operation we all rely on to validate our self-worth. We all like to think we wouldn’t be swayed by Barnum statements. But Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos debacle and the $2 billion psychic-services industry say otherwise.

Could stereotypes be a form of cognitive bias? Absolutely, as we “efficiently” use the characteristics of an individual to represent an entire group. Learn how our brain’s natural tendency to look for patterns and categories can lead us to stereotype constantly—often creating great harm in the process—and how we can fight against this bias in ourselves.

Explore the Dunning-Kruger effect and the “curse of knowledge,” two biases that affect our accurate assessment of our abilities, including the ability to communicate knowledge to others. Unlike most other cognitive biases, culture plays a strong role in our susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger effect; the effect disappears in collectivistic societies.

Discover the cognitive bias called cryptomnesia, the tendency for a person to falsely identify an idea as one they developed themselves, as opposed to one they heard about from someone else, i.e., a memory. In this heuristic, our brain stores the idea but not the idea’s source—a shortcut that can easily get us in trouble.

Explore the sources and impacts of belief bias, the tendency to judge arguments on the believability of their conclusions rather than the whole argument. While we all tend to rely on this heuristic to some extent, by learning the technical requirements of a logical argument, we can better assess the validity of what we’re hearing or watching.

The peak-end rule is the cognitive bias that causes us to judge an experience based on how we felt at its most intense moments and at its end. Discover how this heuristic biases us against remembering the more nuanced aspects of any experience, and the effects this can have on our lives.

Trace the evolutionary history of social desirability bias and how it can affect our lives and relationships in numerous ways. Our brain created this heuristic in response to our deep biological need to associate with other members of our species and to bond in various ways. But does it always work to our advantage, and how can we push past it when we want to?

The empathy gap bias is the tendency to disconnect or reduce empathy in situations where it would be expected or typically felt. Explore the cognitive steps required for empathy to occur, and what can happen when those processes don’t occur. What can keep us from understanding why other people might feel the way they feel?

Discover the many ways in which survivorship bias affects our daily life. This tendency to focus only on people or objects that have moved past some defined selection process keeps us from understanding a more complex, fuller story. From important personal decisions to business, politics, and military history, the impacts of this cognitive bias can be seen all around us.

Delve into the reactance bias, our tendency to act in ways that are opposite to established rules, particularly, if we think those rules will reduce our freedom. This is a bias that operates mostly in the dark recesses of our subconscious and can be difficult to recognize until someone else specifically calls out the behavior.

Explore the status quo bias—our tendency to prefer the current state of affairs in our lives and the world around us—as well as the illusion of control, the false belief that we can influence things over which we actually have no control. Learn how the illusion of control can feed many other cognitive biases, and when the status quo bias might actually be our best rational choice.