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Do You Understand Cognitive Biases?

10 Questions
2 Minutes

Find out whether you'll fall for these near-universal shortcuts.

Our minds like shortcuts, and a number of them are built into our brains. Unless we actively take steps to counteract the shortcuts—also known as cognitive biases—they can skew decision-making and keep us from doing as well as we want. Take this test to see if you can recognize common cognitive distortions.

1. The self-serving bias encourages you to take credit for positive, but not for negative, outcomes.
2. The availability heuristic makes you believe your neighbor is your friend.
3. Confirmation bias makes you think you know more than you really do.
4. The sunk-cost fallacy encourages you to believe that expensive items are always better than inexpensive ones.
5. The hindsight bias allows you to insist, after an event, that you knew what the outcome would be all along.
6. The fundamental attribution error is the inability to understand what puts people in a bad mood.
7. Negativity bias describes the priority human brains give to negative information.
8. The stereotyping bias pushes you to make generalizations that are always false.
9. The halo effect makes you think that people who are successful at one thing will excel at everything they do.
10. The spotlight effect prompts you to admire whoever is the center of attention in a situation.
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References

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking—Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

The Decision Lab. Cognitive Biases: A list of the most relevant biases in behavioral economics. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases

Bias. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/bias

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