What's a brain bias?

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Cognitive biases interrupt our ability to make rational decisions in our personal and financial lives. We come into this world with a hidd...

The Confirmation Bias

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The tendency to seek evidence that agrees with our position and dismiss evidence that does not. Instinctively, most humans avoid evidence t...

The Self-Serving Bias

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The tendency to take credit for desirable outcomes and blame others for undesirable ones. A student who gets a good grade on an exam might ...

The Contrast Bias

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The tendency to mentally upgrade or downgrade an object when comparing it to a contrasting object. We constantly compare things, people and...

The Planning Fallacy

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The tendency to underestimate the time is takes to complete a task. The   Denver International Airport   opened 16 months late, at a cost o...

The Just-World Bias

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The tendency for people to believe the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve." People fantasize t...

The Loss Aversion Bias

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The tendency to find losses twice as painful as we find gains pleasurable. “People hate losses (and their Automatic Systems can get pretty ...

The GroupThink Bias

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The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other folks do.  Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority vi...

The Beautiful People Bias

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The tendency for beautiful people to receive more rewards than less attractive people. Do pretty people earn more?  Studies show attractive...

The Von Restorff Effect

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The tendency to recall an item that "stands out like a purple cow" more easily than other items in a group. A phenomenon of memor...

The Omissions Bias

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The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions. Sam, a tennis player, would be facing a toug...

The Neglect-of-Probability Bias

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The tendency to marvel over coincidences and ignore probabilities . Why does probability-neglect happen?  It's partly a psychological t...

The Information Overload Bias

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The tendency to place too much attention on information, even when it's barely relevant. People often think, "The more information...

The Anchoring Effect

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The tendency to "anchor" (rely too heavily) on one piece of information when making a decision.  During normal decision-making, w...

The Impact Bias

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The tendency for people to overestimate the duration or intensity of their future feelings. This bias says, it's not going to be as bad...

The Look-Alikes Bias

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The tendency for people to cozy up to people who look like themselves and pick on those who don't. We migrate toward people who remind ...

The Denial Bias

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The tendency to discount or disbelieve an important and uncomfortable fact. When faced with a fact that's uncomfortable to accept, this...

The Déformation Professionelle Bias

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The tendency to look at things from the point of view of your profession and forget a broader perspective. A French phrase, Déformation Pro...

The Endowment Effect

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The tendency to demand much more to give up an object than you would be willing to pay to acquire it. In one experiment, people demanded a ...

The Illusory-Correlation Bias

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The tendency to inaccurately link an action and an effect . It's so easy to overestimate a link between two variables—a cause with an e...