Decisions & Action
Survivorship Bias
The startups you hear about are the ones that made it. The ones that didn't aren't talking. That silence is survivorship bias - and it distorts almost every success story you've encountered.
Self-AwarenessRead
Hello to Halo • Cognitive Bias Lexicon
Explore Cognitive Biases
Discover the psychological patterns, mental shortcuts, and decision traps that shape human judgment. Grounded in research, written as stories.
271 patterns found
Decisions & Action
Swimmer's Body Illusion
Swimmers have great bodies because of genetics, not just training. Mistaking selection for causation quietly warps every choice that follows.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Clustering Illusion
Three songs from the same band appear back-to-back on shuffle. The algorithm must be broken. It isn't - but the brain is convinced something non-random just happened.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Social Proof
When everyone else is doing it, it must be the right move. Social proof converts the crowd's behavior into personal evidence - whether the crowd is right or not.
RelationshipsRead
Decisions & Action
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The money is already gone. The question is only whether the next decision is a good one. The sunk cost fallacy answers that question with the wrong evidence.
Money & InvestingRead
Decisions & Action
Reciprocity
Someone gives you something small and unexpected. You didn't ask for it. But now you feel you owe them something back - even if what they're about to ask for is worth far more.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Confirmation Bias
The evidence keeps lining up on your side. But that might say more about the filter you're using than about what the evidence actually shows.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Authority Bias
The doctor said it. The manager approved it. The expert recommended it. But none of that tells you whether the advice itself is sound - and authority bias makes you forget to check.
Career & WorkRead
Memory & Recall
Contrast effect
A mediocre salary feels generous after a bad offer. Contrast effect means context - not reality - is setting your reference point.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Availability Heuristic
Your brain estimates probability by how easily examples come to mind - not by counting. That shortcut is fast, often useful, and routinely wrong in predictable ways.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
It Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better Fallacy
Sometimes things genuinely get worse before they improve. The fallacy is assuming that because things are getting worse, they must be on course to improve.
ProductivityRead
Decisions & Action
Story Bias
Events don't arrive pre-organised into causes and consequences. Your brain does that organising - and the story it builds is tidier, more certain, and less accurate than the facts.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Hindsight bias
Once you know how something turned out, it becomes nearly impossible to remember how uncertain it felt beforehand. That's not just memory fading - it's hindsight bias actively rewriting the record.
ProductivityRead
Decisions & Action
Overconfidence effect
The overconfidence effect doesn't just affect the uninformed. It reliably appears in the people who know most - which makes it one of the harder cognitive biases to catch from the inside.
RelationshipsRead
Decisions & Action
Chauffeur Knowledge
Confident-sounding detail is easy to mistake for depth. Chauffeur knowledge describes what fluency looks like when expertise isn't actually there.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Illusion of control
A repeated action and a favorable outcome arrive together, and the brain records that sequence as cause and effect. That's the illusion of control - not a delusion, just a predictable cognitive shortcut.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Incentive Super-Response Tendency
A narrow reward can improve the metric while weakening the outcome. Learn how to inspect what an incentive counts and what it leaves out.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Regression to Mean Fallacy
After something unusually bad, things tend to get better - not necessarily because of what you did in between, but because extreme values naturally drift back toward average. The regression to mean fallacy is what happens when you credit the wrong thing.
Self-AwarenessRead
Information & Attention
Outcome bias
The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
ProductivityRead
Decisions & Action
Paradox of Choice / Less Is More
More options can make a decision harder, but choice overload is conditional. The task, assortment, goal, and chooser's preferences all matter.
ProductivityRead
Decisions & Action
Liking Bias
The judgment you thought you were making about a product, a request, or a decision was actually, in part, a judgment about how much you like the person in front of you. That's liking bias.
Career & WorkRead
Decisions & Action
Endowment effect
The moment something becomes yours, its value in your mind rises - not because anything changed about the object, but because of what it now represents. That's the endowment effect.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Coincidence
Coincidences feel remarkable because the mind is designed to find patterns. But the feeling of significance isn't evidence of a hidden connection - it's evidence of how pattern-detection works.
Career & WorkRead
Decisions & Action
Groupthink
The meeting wasn't cut short by bad information or weak participants. It was cut short by the social cost of disagreeing. That's groupthink - not a failure of intelligence but a failure of the conditions that allow intelligence to function.
Money & InvestingRead
Decisions & Action
Neglect of probability
The tendency to disregard or underweight probability information when making decisions under uncertainty, focusing instead on the magnitude or emotional salience of outcomes.
ProductivityRead
Decisions & Action
Scarcity Error
Scarcity Error is the tendency to overvalue items or opportunities merely because they are perceived as scarce or limited.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Base rate fallacy
A compelling description of one case can override everything the statistics say about how often that case occurs. That's the base rate fallacy - and it affects careful, analytical people as much as anyone else.
RelationshipsRead
Decisions & Action
Gambler's fallacy
After a long run of the same outcome, the opposite starts to feel overdue. It isn't. That's the gambler's fallacy - a systematic misreading of how randomness works.
Career & WorkRead
Decisions & Action
anchoring bias
Whatever number arrives first in a negotiation, a price comparison, or an estimate becomes the reference point for everything that follows - even when it's completely arbitrary. That's anchoring bias.
Money & InvestingRead
Decisions & Action
Induction
Induction is the cognitive tendency to infer general rules or future outcomes from a limited set of specific observations, treating them as certain.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
Loss aversion
The sting of losing GBP100 feels distinctly sharper than the pleasure of gaining GBP100. That gap isn't weakness or irrationality - it's a systematic feature of how the mind weighs outcomes, and it shapes far more decisions than most people realise.
Money & InvestingRead
Decisions & Action
Social Loafing
The group project gets done, but nobody feels like they gave it everything. Social loafing explains why capable people consistently underperform when their individual contribution is invisible.
Career & WorkRead
Decisions & Action
Exponential Growth
Given a choice between $1,000 a day for a month or a penny that doubles daily, most people choose the fixed amount. The penny would reach over five million dollars. Exponential growth bias is why the correct answer feels wrong.
RelationshipsRead
Decisions & Action
Winner's Curse
The winner's curse is the tendency for the winning bidder in an auction to overpay, especially when the item's true value is uncertain and bidders have similar estimates.
Money & InvestingRead
Meaning & Interpretation
Fundamental Attribution Error
When someone else cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're reckless. When you cut someone off, it's because you were running late. This asymmetry has a name.
Self-AwarenessRead
Decisions & Action
False Causality
False causality is the cognitive error of inferring a causal relationship between two events merely because they occur together or in sequence, without proper evidence.
RelationshipsRead
Complete A-Z directory (271 topics)
S
Survivorship BiasSwimmer's Body IllusionSocial ProofSunk Cost FallacyStory BiasScarcity ErrorSocial LoafingSelf-serving biasSelection biasSimple LogicSleeper EffectSocial comparison biasSerial position effectSalience EffectStrategic MisrepresentationSalience biasSaying is believing effectScope neglectSelective perceptionSelf-relevance effectSemmelweis reflexSexual overperception biasShared information biasSocial cryptomnesiaSocial desirability biasSource confusionSpacing effectSpotlight effectStatus quo biasStereotypingSubadditivity effectSubjective validationSuggestibilitySurrogationSystem justification
C
Clustering IllusionConfirmation BiasContrast effectChauffeur KnowledgeCoincidenceConjunction fallacyCognitive dissonanceContagion BiasCherry PickingCheerleader effectChildhood amnesiaChoice-supportive biasCommon source biasCompassion fadeCongruence biasConservatism biasContext neglect biasCourtesy biasCross-race effectCryptomnesiaCue-dependent forgettingCurse of knowledge
R
A
Authority BiasAvailability Heuristicanchoring biasAlternative PathsAction biasAssociation BiasAffect HeuristicAlternative BlindnessAmbiguity AversionActor-Observer BiasAdditive BiasAesthetic-Usability EffectAgent detection biasAmbiguity EffectAnthropocentric ThinkingAnthropomorphismApopheniaAssumed similarity biasAttentional biasAttribute substitutionAutomation BiasAvailability cascade
I
It Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better FallacyIllusion of controlIncentive Super-Response TendencyInductionInformation biasIntrospection IllusionInability to Shut UpIn-Group Out-Group BiasIdentifiable Victim EffectIllusion of AttentionIllusion of SkillIntention-to-Treat ErrorIllusion of asymmetric insightIllusion of explanatory depthIllusion of learningIllusion of transparencyIllusion of validityIllusory correlationIllusory superiorityIllusory truth effectImpact biasImplicit associationImpostor SyndromeIngroup biasInsensitivity to sample sizeIntentionality bias
H
O
P
Paradox of Choice / Less Is MoreProblem with AverageProcrastinationPlanning FallacyProfessional DeformationPareidoliaPart-list cueing effectPeak–end rulePerky effectPessimism biasPicture superiority effectPlan continuation biasPlant blindnessPresent biasPrimacy effectPro-innovation biasProbability matchingProjection biasProportionality biasPseudocertainty effectPuritanical biasPygmalion effect