Cognitive Biases

Watch

• The psychology behind irrational decisions - Sara Garofalo ↗TED-Ed
• 3 kinds of bias that shape your worldview | J. Marshall Shepherd ↗TED
• The Most Common Cognitive Bias ↗Veritasium
• Your Brain: Perception Deception | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS ↗NOVA PBS Official
• Cognitive Biases 101, with Peter Baumann | Big Think ↗Big Think

Read

• Thinking, Fast and Slow ↗A magisterial synthesis of decades of research, this work illuminates the two systems that drive human thought and the systematic errors they produce.Daniel Kahneman
• Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and BiasesThe seminal paper that introduced the concept of cognitive heuristics and the biases they engender, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of human rationality.Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness ↗This influential work explores how subtle interventions, or 'nudges,' can steer individuals towards better choices without restricting freedom, a cornerstone of behavioural economics.Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions ↗An engaging and accessible exploration of the myriad ways human behaviour deviates from rational economic models, illustrated with compelling experiments and real-world examples.Dan Ariely
• Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under RiskThis groundbreaking paper introduced prospect theory, offering a psychologically more realistic alternative to expected utility theory by explaining how individuals make decisions under risk and uncertainty.Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky

Voices to follow

• Daniel Kahneman ↗His pioneering work with Amos Tversky fundamentally reshaped understanding of human judgment and decision-making, earning him a Nobel Prize.Psychologist, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economic Sciences
• Richard Thaler ↗A Nobel laureate, he integrated psychological realism into economic theory, demonstrating how human irrationality impacts markets and individual choices.Economist, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in Economic Sciences
• Cass Sunstein ↗As a key architect of 'nudge' theory, he explores how subtle, choice-preserving interventions can guide behaviour by leveraging cognitive insights.Legal scholar, Harvard University
• Dan Ariely ↗He masterfully communicates the predictable irrationality of human behaviour, making complex psychological phenomena accessible through engaging research and narratives.Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Duke University

Glossary

• Anchoring BiasWe rely too heavily on the first piece of information we hear (the "anchor") when making decisions, even if it's not very relevant. This first piece of info sets a starting point for our judgment. For example, if a shopkeeper first tells you a t-shirt costs ₹1000, then offers it for ₹500, the ₹500 might seem like a great deal, even if the t-shirt is only worth ₹300.
• Availability HeuristicWe judge how likely or common something is based on how easily examples come to mind. If we can quickly think of many examples, we assume it happens often. For example, after seeing many news reports about plane crashes, you might think flying is more dangerous than driving, even though statistics show driving is much riskier.
• Bandwagon EffectWe tend to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same. It's like joining a trend just because everyone else is doing it. For example, you might start listening to a certain music artist or wearing a particular style of clothes because all your friends are doing it, even if you weren't initially interested.
• Confirmation BiasWe tend to look for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. It's like only seeing what you want to see. For example, if you believe a certain brand of phone is the best, you might only notice articles and reviews that praise that brand, ignoring any negative feedback.
• Dunning-Kruger EffectPeople with limited knowledge or skill in a certain area often overestimate their own competence, while highly skilled people tend to underestimate theirs. It's about not knowing what you don't know. For example, a student who has only studied a topic for a short time might feel very confident they understand it completely, while an expert might still feel they have much more to learn.
• False Consensus EffectWe tend to overestimate how much other people agree with our own opinions, beliefs, and behaviors. We think our views are more common than they actually are. For example, if you love a certain movie, you might assume most of your friends and classmates also love it, even if they don't.
• Framing EffectOur choices are influenced by how information is presented or "framed," even if the underlying facts are the same. The way something is worded can change our perception. For example, you might prefer a snack advertised as "90% fat-free" over one advertised as "contains 10% fat," even though they are exactly the same product.
• Halo EffectOur overall impression of a person, company, or product (especially if it's positive) influences how we feel about their specific traits or qualities. One good quality makes us think everything else is good too. For example, if a celebrity you admire endorses a product, you might automatically assume the product is high-quality, even if you know nothing else about it.
• Hindsight BiasAfter an event has happened, we often believe we "knew it all along" or that the outcome was obvious, even if we didn't predict it beforehand. It makes past events seem more predictable than they actually were. For example, after a sports team wins a big game, you might say, "I knew they were going to win!" even if you were unsure before the game started.
• Optimism BiasWe tend to believe that positive events are more likely to happen to us than to others, and negative events are less likely. We often think "bad things won't happen to me." For example, you might believe you're less likely to get sick or have an accident than your friends, even if you take similar risks.
• Self-Serving BiasWe tend to take credit for our successes but blame external factors for our failures. It's a way to protect our self-esteem. For example, if you get a good grade on a test, you might say it's because you're smart and studied hard, but if you get a bad grade, you might blame the teacher or the difficult questions.
• Sunk Cost FallacyWe continue to invest time, money, or effort into something because we've already put a lot into it, even when it's clear it's not working out. We don't want to feel like we wasted our past investment. For example, you keep watching a boring movie until the end just because you've already spent an hour watching it, even though you're not enjoying it.

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Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Aesthetics Arts

  Ever notice a face or a song just feels 'right'? Often that's your brain enjoying how easily it figured the thing out, a smoothness scientists call processing fluency. We feel that easy click and think the beauty is out there in the object, when really it's happening inside our own heads.

• Logic and Valid Reasoning Philosophy

  Give people a dry logic puzzle with letters and numbers and most flub it. Reword the exact same puzzle as 'catch the person cheating you,' and suddenly almost everyone nails it. That's a clue our brains didn't evolve for pure logic, they evolved to spot cheaters, and reasoning runs best on social fuel.

• Conversion and New Religious Movements Religion

  A cult predicts the world ends Tuesday. Tuesday comes, nothing happens, and instead of quitting, many members believe harder. Being proven wrong creates a painful clash in the mind, and it's often easier to double down than admit you were fooled. Psychologists call that mental squirming dissonance reduction.

• Concepts of God Religion

  If a bush rustles, the ancestor who assumed 'hidden creature!' and ran survived; the one who assumed 'just wind' sometimes got eaten. So our brains are tuned to sense unseen agents everywhere, even when nothing's there. Belief in invisible gods may ride on that same jumpy, better-safe-than-sorry wiring.

• Natural Hazards and Disaster Geography Geography

  After a flood everyone rushes to buy flood insurance, but almost nobody preps for the quiet earthquake slowly building underneath. Your brain trusts whatever disaster it remembers most vividly, not whatever's actually most likely. So we keep guarding against the last catastrophe instead of the next one.

• The US-China Rivalry Politics

  Your brain hates losing something you already have far more than it enjoys gaining something new. Scale that up to countries: a fading superpower will fight desperately to keep its top spot, harder than a rising one fights to take it. That's what makes a nation in decline so dangerous. It feels its slipping like a painful loss.

• Nuclear Energy Technology

  We're terrified of a rare nuclear meltdown, but barely worried about coal smoke that quietly kills far more people every year. It's the fear, not the actual physics, that keeps the deadlier coal plants running and the safer nuclear ones shut.

• Famous Artists and Paintings Arts

  Your brain tends to like things just because it's seen them a lot, a quirk called the mere-exposure effect. So we half-believe a painting is 'great' partly because it's printed everywhere. The list of 'masterpieces' might be familiarity in disguise, dressed up as good taste.

• Pandemics Science

  Human brains are terrible at feeling how fast doubling grows. So an outbreak with a few cases looks harmless right up until it explodes. That blind spot makes us wait to act exactly when acting would have been cheapest and easiest.

• Taxation Economics

  Taxes get quietly taken from your paycheck before you ever see the money, and that's on purpose. Our brains hate losing money we're holding far more than money we never touched. If people had to write one big tax cheque every April, they'd revolt; the trick is just clever framing.

• Vaccines Health

  Our brains fear harm we cause more than bigger harm we allow. A rare vaccine side effect feels scarier than the disease it prevents, even when the disease is far more dangerous. That mental glitch, called omission bias, quietly drives a lot of vaccine hesitancy, not simple ignorance.

• Extreme Weather Environment

  People keep rebuilding homes in flood zones because our brains misjudge rare disasters. Before a flood hits, it feels impossible; right after, it feels safe again, 'lightning won't strike twice.' The mind systematically underrates those rare, catastrophic events, so we bet against them and lose.

• Climate Change Science

  Climate change is almost perfectly built to slip past the human brain. The danger feels far away in time, far in space, and only maybe, so our minds treat it as not real yet. We're wired to shrug at exactly this kind of slow, distant threat.

• Renaissance and Enlightenment History

  The Enlightenment bet everything on one idea: humans are basically rational, so give people reason and freedom and they'll think clearly. Modern psychology partly lost that bet — our minds run on predictable glitches, so the perfectly rational person it imagined never really existed.

• Personal Finance & Money Skills Economics

  The CFPB identifies present bias and mental accounting as influences on money decisions. Treating a gift differently from wages, or prioritising an immediate purchase over future saving, makes personal finance a concrete setting for examining these biases; knowing a bias exists does not guarantee better choices.

  Sources: CFPB — Effective financial education: five principles (2017) ↗

• Games, Play & Interactive Media Arts & Design

  The FTC’s Fortnite order addressed confusing purchase interfaces and unintended charges. In-game choices therefore provide a concrete setting for examining how interface prominence and friction can influence decisions. This enforcement case concerns choice design; it does not demonstrate that every player has a particular cognitive bias.

  Sources: FTC — Final order concerning Fortnite purchases (2023) ↗

• AI Safety & Alignment Technology & Engineering

  NIST distinguishes human cognitive bias from systemic and computational or statistical sources of bias. Choices about training data, labels, evaluation and deployment connect human judgment to AI outcomes. This distinction matters: correcting one person’s judgment cannot by itself remove biased institutions or limitations in a dataset.

  Sources: NIST — Towards a Standard for Identifying and Managing Bias in Artificial Intelligence, SP 1270 (2022) ↗

• Meditation, Mindfulness & the Contemplative Mind Psychology

  Hafenbrack and colleagues tested brief mindfulness exercises in studies of the sunk-cost bias: continuing because of resources already spent. Their findings connect a particular attention practice to a particular decision task. They do not show that meditation eliminates cognitive biases generally or guarantees good real-world decisions.

  Sources: Hafenbrack, Kinias and Barsade — Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation: Mindfulness and the Sunk-Cost Bias (2014) ↗