What is a cognitive bias?
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Identify common biases and heuristics influencing judgments, with real-world examples to improve critical thinking and decision skills.
Mastering this deck will enhance your ability to recognize and mitigate cognitive biases in everyday decisions, leading to more rational, informed, and critical thinking skills that can improve personal and professional judgment.
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| # | Front | Back | Hint |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is a cognitive bias? | A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from rationality or good judgment, often resulting from heuristics or mental shortcuts that simplify decision-making but can lead to errors. | Think of biases as mental shortcuts that sometimes mislead us. |
| 2 | Name and describe the availability heuristic. | The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where people estimate the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. For example, fearing plane crashes after hearing about a recent accident. | Remember: 'Availability' = what easily comes to mind. |
| 3 | What is the representativeness heuristic? | The representativeness heuristic involves judging the probability of an event based on how much it resembles a typical case, often ignoring base rates. For instance, assuming someone is a librarian because they are quiet and introverted, ignoring the actual proportion of librarians in the population. | Think: 'Does it seem representative?' |
| 4 | Define the anchoring bias. | Anchoring bias occurs when individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the 'anchor') when making decisions, such as in price negotiations or estimating quantities. | Anchor = starting point that influences subsequent judgments. |
| 5 | What is confirmation bias? | Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts them. | Remember: 'Confirm' your beliefs, sometimes at the expense of truth. |
| 6 | Give an example of the hindsight bias. | Hindsight bias is the tendency to see events as more predictable after they have occurred. For example, believing you knew all along that a stock would crash after it did. | It's the 'I knew it all along' effect. |
| 7 | What is the gambler's fallacy? | The gambler's fallacy is the belief that if an event occurs more frequently than normal during a period, it will happen less often in the future, or vice versa, such as thinking a coin flip is 'due' to land on tails after several heads. | Misconception: past independent events influence future ones. |
| 8 | Describe the overconfidence bias. | Overconfidence bias is when individuals overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, or predictions, leading to overly risky decisions or underestimating uncertainties. | Think: 'Too sure of yourself.' |
| 9 | What is the Dunning-Kruger effect? | The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability or knowledge overestimate their competence, while experts may underestimate their skills. | Remember: 'Incompetent people overestimate, experts underestimate.' |
| 10 | Explain the false consensus effect. | The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how much others share our beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, leading to a perception that our views are more common than they really are. | Think: 'Everyone agrees with me.' |
| 11 | What is the affect heuristic? | The affect heuristic involves making decisions based on emotions and feelings rather than objective analysis, such as avoiding a risky activity because it makes you feel anxious. | Affect = emotion-driven judgment. |
| 12 | Define the status quo bias. | The status quo bias is the preference to keep things the same by resisting change, often leading to inertia in decision-making, like sticking with an outdated service plan. | Remember: 'Prefer current state.' |
| 13 | What is the framing effect? | The framing effect occurs when different presentations of the same information influence decisions, such as preferring surgery when told there is a 90% survival rate versus a 10% mortality rate. | Frame it differently, decide differently. |
| 14 | Explain the planning fallacy. | The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, or risks of future actions while overestimating the benefits, often leading to overly optimistic plans. | Think: 'Underestimating how long things take.' |
| 15 | What is the sunk cost fallacy? | The sunk cost fallacy involves continuing a behavior or endeavor because of previously invested resources (time, money), even when it’s no longer rational, like staying in a bad movie because you've already watched part of it. | Don't throw good after bad. |
| 16 | Describe the bandwagon effect. | The bandwagon effect is the tendency to adopt beliefs or behaviors because many others are doing so, leading to herd behavior, such as joining a popular social trend without critical evaluation. | Follow the crowd. |
| 17 | What is the hindsight bias's impact on memory? | It causes individuals to misremember their prior predictions or beliefs as being more accurate than they actually were, distorting their memory of past judgments. | Memory rearranged after the fact. |
| 18 | Give an example of the self-serving bias. | The self-serving bias is attributing successes to internal factors (ability, effort) and failures to external factors (luck, circumstances), such as praising yourself for a win but blaming the team for a loss. | It's about protecting self-esteem. |
| 19 | What is the outcome bias? | Outcome bias occurs when judgments about a decision are influenced by its outcome rather than the quality of the decision at the time it was made, like praising a risky investment because it turned out well. | Judge decisions by results, not process. |
| 20 | Describe the illusion of control. | The illusion of control is the belief that one has influence over events that are actually determined by chance, such as believing you can control the outcome of a roulette wheel. | Think: 'I can influence randomness.' |
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