100 cards
The human brain relies on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to navigate a constant flood of information. While these shortcuts are often efficient, they systematically produce predictable errors. Confirmation bias, for example, drives us to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms our pre-existing b...
Cognitive biases also color how we see ourselves, often flattering the self while obscuring reality. The self-serving bias captures this neatly: we attribute our wins to talent and effort and our losses to bad luck or unfairness. The actor-observer bias explains the related asymmetry in which we excuse our own behavior...
Humans are intensely social creatures, and many biases emerge from the dynamics of group life. Social conformity drives the bandwagon effect and the more extreme herd mentality, in which individuals adopt beliefs or behaviors simply because so many others seem to do so. Groupthink formalizes this dynamic in decision-ma...
Many biases arise from the ways our memory and attention are built. Hindsight bias, often called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, makes past events feel predictable after they have occurred. Recency bias gives the most recent information disproportionate weight when making judgments, while the primacy effect makes fir...
Another cluster of biases governs how we assign value, especially to things we own or have invested in. The sunk cost fallacy traps us into continuing failed courses of action because of what we have already invested, even when abandoning would be objectively wiser, as when one finishes a bad movie because the ticket i...
A surprising number of biases involve resisting change, avoiding threatening information, or doubling down on existing beliefs. Reactance, formalized by Jack Brehm's reactance theory, describes the unpleasant motivational state that arises when people feel their freedom to choose is threatened, and how that state drive...
A final set of biases shows how expectations can shape reality itself, for better and worse. The Pygmalion effect (also called the Rosenthal effect) demonstrates that higher expectations tend to produce improved performance: teachers who expect students to succeed elicit better work from them, just as managers who expe...