Cognitive Biases
A practical cognitive-bias site with clear definitions, learning paths, assessments, self-audits, and debiasing tools.
Comparison Guides
Bias work gets sharper when readers can tell nearby patterns apart. These guides focus on high-confusion pairs, with quick rules, diagnostic questions, examples, and a repair move that works before the label hardens.
Each guide links back to the underlying bias entries so comparison and deeper study stay connected.
Both protect a favored conclusion, but confirmation bias narrows the search and motivated reasoning bends the whole evaluation around what the person wants to be true.
Quick rule: Ask whether the main failure is selective evidence intake or desire-driven evaluation after evidence arrives.
Anchoring pulls judgment toward a starting value; framing changes judgment by changing how the same substance is described.
Quick rule: Ask whether the distortion is caused by a starting point or by a presentation shift.
The halo effect lets one positive impression spill into unrelated judgments; fundamental attribution error overreads behavior as character while underreading situation.
Quick rule: Ask whether one admired trait is spilling outward, or whether a behavior is being turned into a trait explanation too quickly.
Hindsight bias makes the outcome feel predictable after the fact; outcome bias uses the result to grade the earlier decision process.
Quick rule: Ask whether the claim is about prior predictability or decision quality.
The default effect is a choice-architecture pull toward the preselected option; status quo bias is a broader preference for leaving things as they are.
Quick rule: Ask whether people are staying because the option was preselected or because change itself feels costly, risky, or abnormal.
Availability mistakes ease of recall for prevalence; frequency illusion makes newly noticed things seem suddenly common.
Quick rule: Ask whether the item is easy to recall because it is vivid, or newly salient because attention has been tuned to it.
Survivorship bias samples only visible winners; base-rate neglect ignores the background frequency needed to interpret a case.
Quick rule: Ask whether the missing information is failed cases from the sample or background rates for the whole inference.
Groupthink is a group decision dynamic that suppresses dissent; social desirability bias is distorted reporting caused by wanting to look acceptable.
Quick rule: Ask whether the main distortion is convergence in group deliberation or self-presentational reporting.
Illusion of explanatory depth is overestimating how well you understand a mechanism; Dunning-Kruger is miscalibrated self-assessment when limited skill hides what is missing.
Quick rule: Ask whether the missing piece is mechanism explanation or broader competence calibration.
Loss aversion overweights losses relative to gains; the sunk cost effect keeps investment going because prior costs feel like they must be redeemed.
Quick rule: Ask whether the pain comes from possible future loss or from refusing to accept an unrecoverable past cost.