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Intellectual

Cognitive biases

16 sections · 10 pts/section
Section 1 / 16

Your brain takes shortcuts

Your brain has too much to handle.

So it takes shortcuts to think fast.

The shortcuts help most of the time.

Your guess

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much is the ball?

The shortcut fired in the wrong spot.

Brains make this same mistake again and again.

We call that repeated mistake a cognitive bias.

cognitive bias
A thinking pattern that pulls a judgment away from what is true.

These shortcuts show up everywhere.

You skim a news headline and feel sure you know the whole story.
A kind friend snaps at you once, and you decide they are mean.
Some people say, "I just trust my gut."Tap to reveal

A gut feeling is often a shortcut firing. It feels like deep wisdom, so the mistake hides. The bias wears the mask of common sense.

Sources

  • Tversky & Kahneman (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 185:1124–1131.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • The Decision Lab — Biases & Heuristics index (https://thedecisionlab.com/biases)
  • SimplyPsychology — Cognitive Bias overview (https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-bias.html)