Cognitive biases are the mind’s shortcuts that often lead us to make quick but sometimes inaccurate judgments. Imagine your brain as a busy office worker, taking shortcuts to meet deadlines. Just as shortcuts can lead to mistakes in work, cognitive biases can lead to errors in thinking.

By learning about these biases, you equip yourself with the tools to think more clearly and make decisions that are more informed. It’s not about becoming perfect thinkers but about becoming aware of these mental blind spots to navigate the world more effectively. Engaging with cognitive biases is like turning on the lights in a dimly lit room, helping you see and understand things you might have missed before.

Here are some examples of cognitive biases. It is not an exhaustive list, but are common ones people can encounter.

1. Anchoring: The tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.
2. Sunk Cost Fallacy: The misconception that further investments (time, money, resources) should be made due to the substantial resources already committed.
3. Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is readily available or recent in one’s memory.
4. Curse of Knowledge: When better-informed individuals fail to understand the perspective of less-informed individuals.
5. Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
6. Dunning-Kruger Effect: The phenomenon where people with little knowledge overestimate their ability, while experts underestimate theirs.
7. Belief Bias: The tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion.
8. Self-Serving Bias: The common habit of a person taking credit for positive events or outcomes, but blaming outside factors for negative events.
9. The Backfire Effect: When people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
10. The Barnum Effect: The tendency to accept vague or general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to oneself.
11. Groupthink: The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.
12. Negativity Bias: The tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
13. Delinism: Difficulty in understanding that other people don’t know the same things you do. [check this???]
14. The Framing Effect: People react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented; e.g., as a loss or a gain.
15. Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences.
16. The Halo Effect: The tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another area.
17. Optimism Bias: The tendency to think that future events are more likely to be positive than negative.
18. Pessimism Bias: The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes.
19. Just-World Hypothesis: The belief that actions always bring morally fair and fitting consequences to their perpetrators.
20. In-Group Bias: The tendency to favor one’s own group, its members, its characteristics, and its products, particularly in comparison to other groups.
21. Placebo Effect: Improvement in health or behavior not attributable to the medications or invasive treatments that have been administered.
22. Bystander Effect: The phenomenon whereby individuals are less likely to help a victim when other people are present.
23. Reactance: The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.
24. Spotlight Effect: The belief that others pay more attention to one’s appearance and behavior than they really do.

Find more about those cognitive biases on this website: https://yourbias.is/

Additional Resources:

• Wikipedia List of Cognitive Biases
• YouTube: The Paint Explainer: “Every Bias Explained in 8 Minutes”

NOTE: Normalcy bias vs Availability bias

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