Cognitive Biases

What you'll learn

• ✓Name and spot key biases

Lessons

1. 🧠
   The Shortcuts

   Your brain isn't broken, it's a savanna
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2. Anchoring

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3. Confirmation Bias

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4. Recency and Availability

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5. Overconfidence and Hindsight

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6. The Cure

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7. Final Boss: Spot the Bias

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Sources

All content is drawn from the sources below. We deliberately avoid unverified material.

• Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Science 185 (4157), 1974, pp. 1124-1131 · academic
  Foundational paper for the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic and the wheel-of-fortune experiment used in lesson 2. Also defines representativeness and availability used in lesson 4.
  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
• Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence
  Charles Lord, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (11), 1979, pp. 2098-2109 · academic
  Source for confirmation bias / biased assimilation in lesson 3 and referenced again in the boss multi-quiz.
• Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty
  Baruch Fischhoff, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1 (3), 1975, pp. 288-299 · academic
  Source for the hindsight bias finding and the title-style slogan used in lesson 5 and the boss.
• Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment
  Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, Quarterly Journal of Economics 116 (1), February 2001, pp. 261-292 · academic
  Source for the men-trade-more-and-earn-less finding (about 0.9 percentage points per year overall, about 1.4 points for single men vs single women) cited in lesson 5 and the boss.
  https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/116/1/261/1939000
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
  Daniel Kahneman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 · book
  Source for the System 1 / System 2 framing used as scaffolding in lesson 1 and the broader availability-heuristic framing in lesson 4.
• Performing a Project Premortem
  Gary Klein, Harvard Business Review, September 2007 · article
  Source for the pre-mortem technique used in lesson 6 and the boss.
  https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
• Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
  Peter Kaufman (ed.), Walsworth Publishing, expanded 3rd ed., 2005 · book
  Source for Munger's 'invert, always invert' discipline and the rule about understanding the other side's argument better than they do, used in lessons 3 and 6.
• Performance Persistence
  Stephen Brown and William Goetzmann, Journal of Finance 50 (2), 1995, pp. 679-698 · academic
  Source for the survivorship-bias warning in the boss lesson: failed mutual funds drop out of historical performance databases and inflate average reported returns.
• Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?
  Ola Svenson, Acta Psychologica 47 (2), 1981, pp. 143-148 · academic
  Source for the classic 'most drivers think they're above average' finding referenced in lesson 5 as the canonical illustration of overconfidence.