A cognitive bias is a mental shortcut your brain uses to quickly interpret the world around you. While these shortcuts help with rapid decision-making, they’re not always accurate or helpful.
For instance, if you usually leave your keys on the kitchen counter, you’ll likely check there first, even if you’ve placed them elsewhere. This illustrates cognitive bias at work.
In everyday life, cognitive biases influence your judgements and decisions. For example, you might trust a friend’s opinion over a stranger’s, even if the stranger is more knowledgeable—a form of “ingroup bias.”
These biases can also lead you to favour information confirming your existing beliefs, causing you to overlook other crucial evidence or rely too heavily on the first information you encounter.
Being aware of cognitive biases allows you to question your initial judgements, consider diverse viewpoints, and make more thoughtful, informed decisions. Ultimately, understanding these biases supports your personal growth and enhances your worldview.
Reality Bias: The tendency to believe one’s perception of reality is the ‘true’ reality, ignoring the limitations and distortions of one’s mental models.
Confirmation Bias: Favoring information that confirms preexisting beliefs while disregarding contradictory evidence.
Hindsight Bias: The inclination to see events as having been predictable after they have already occurred.
Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.
Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that comes to mind quickly, often due to recent exposure or emotional impact.
Self-Serving Bias: Attributing successes to internal factors while blaming failures on external circumstances.
Fundamental Attribution Error: Overemphasizing personal characteristics and underestimating situational factors when explaining others’ behaviors.
Actor-Observer Bias: Attributing one’s own actions to external causes while attributing others’ actions to internal causes.
False Consensus Effect: Overestimating the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors.
Halo Effect: Allowing an overall impression of a person to influence judgments about their character or properties.
Dunning–Kruger Effect: The phenomenon where individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: Continuing an endeavor due to previously invested resources (time, money, effort), even when it’s no longer beneficial.
Optimism Bias: Believing that one is less likely to experience negative events compared to others.
Loss Aversion: The tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains.
Status Quo Bias: Preferring things to remain the same rather than change.
Bandwagon Effect: Adopting beliefs or behaviors because many others do.
Negativity Bias: Giving more weight to negative experiences than positive ones.
Planning Fallacy: Underestimating the time needed to complete tasks.
Illusory Truth Effect: Believing false information to be true after repeated exposure.
Peak-End Rule: Judging experiences based on how they felt at their peak and at their end, rather than the total experience.
The planning fallacy is a bias that tricks us into underestimating how long tasks will take. We imagine best-case scenarios and forget past experience. It leads to missed deadlines, stress, and unrealistic goals. In this post, we’ll look at how to spot it and plan better.\
Confidence can be deceptive. The Dunning–Kruger Effect shows how we often feel most sure when we know the least. But understanding this bias creates space for humility, learning, and deeper connection. Awareness is the first step toward wisdom.
Do you find that negative events often trigger more intense emotional reactions than positive ones? This could be the Negativity Bias at play.
Self-serving bias can cloud our judgment and hinder our growth. Learning to identify and manage it brings us closer to living truthfully.
Ever noticed how you remember your partner’s lateness but overlook when they’re on time? That’s confirmation bias at work. Learn how to balance your views.
