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🧩 Your Brain’s Blind Spots

The systematic thinking errors hiding in every human mind.

lessons

~30 min

to learn

🔬 Science

subject

Adults

level

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What you’ll learn

Define cognitive bias, understand why the brain produces biases, and meet confirmation and anchoring bias.Biases are systematic errors born of mental shortcuts; confirmation bias filters evidence to fit beliefs and anchoring tethers judgments to initial numbers.
Recognize availability, Dunning-Kruger, halo, and sunk cost effects in everyday judgment.We misjudge frequency by memorability, overrate our own skill, let one trait color whole impressions, and cling to past investments.
Understand loss aversion, framing, and hindsight bias, and learn practical defenses.Losses outweigh gains, wording shapes choices, and outcomes look obvious in retrospect, but slowing down and seeking disconfirmation can reduce the damage.

Questions this course answers

A cognitive bias is best described as:

Biases are systematic, predictable deviations from rational judgment rooted in how the brain processes information.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to:

We seek, interpret, and recall evidence that confirms existing beliefs while discounting what contradicts them.

Anchoring bias occurs when people:

An initial value, even an irrelevant one, anchors later judgments, which adjust away from it but usually not enough.

The availability heuristic causes people to:

Memorable, dramatic events feel more common than they are, distorting risk perception, like fearing shark attacks over car crashes.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how:

Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study found that those least skilled often lack the competence to recognize their own incompetence.

The sunk cost fallacy leads people to:

We irrationally stick with failing endeavors because of resources already spent, even when quitting is the better choice going forward.

Grounded in trusted sources

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Simply Psychology, 'What Is Cognitive Bias? Types & Examples.' https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-bias.html
Wikipedia, 'List of cognitive biases.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

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