Cognitive Biases & Judgement Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for perceiving a relationship between two things that are in fact unrelated, or a much stronger one than exists, such as the widespread conviction that arthritis pain tracks the weather, or that a distinctive group commits more crime?

Question 2

What is the name for the finding that people readily recognise biases in others' thinking but believe their own judgements are relatively free of them, rating themselves less biased than the average person?

Question 3

What is the name for the tendency to place less value on a proposal or concession simply because it came from an adversary, so the very same peace terms are rated worse when attributed to the other side than to one's own?

Question 4

What is the name for the error, summed up as 'nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it', in which dwelling on one factor, income, climate, a new car, makes it loom larger in judgements of happiness than it does in lived life?

Question 5

What reasoning error is shown when people told about Linda, an outspoken former philosophy student concerned with social justice, rate 'Linda is a bank teller and a feminist' as more probable than 'Linda is a bank teller', even though a pair of conditions can never be likelier than one alone?

Question 6

What is the name for the tendency to see one's own personality, attitudes and moods as flexible and situation-dependent while viewing other people as having fixed, predictable traits?

Question 7

What is the name for the readiness of people to accept a vague, general personality description, one that could apply to almost anyone, as a strikingly accurate and personal portrait of themselves, the mechanism behind horoscopes and fairground fortune-telling?

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About Cognitive Biases & Judgement

This quiz is about the ways human judgement goes wrong in predictable patterns: the two modes of thinking, the shortcuts the mind uses to answer hard questions, the systematic biases in how we handle probability, belief, memory, other people, risk and choice, and the methods that can push back against all of it. Ninety-five questions in five packs, each describing a bias, a heuristic, a fallacy of reasoning or a decision-making effect and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack covers the fast and slow modes of thought, bounded rationality and satisficing, and the core judgement heuristics, availability, representativeness, anchoring, affect and recognition, together with the conjunction fallacy, base-rate neglect, the gambler's and hot-hand fallacies, the clustering illusion, the planning fallacy and the peak-end rule.

The second pack covers biases of belief and knowledge: confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, the backfire effect and belief perseverance, hindsight bias, the curse of knowledge, the Dunning-Kruger effect and the illusion of explanatory depth, overconfidence, illusory correlation and the illusory truth effect, the availability cascade, the Barnum effect, the Semmelweis reflex, the illusion of control and cognitive dissonance.

The third pack covers how we judge ourselves and other people: the fundamental attribution error, the self-serving bias, illusory superiority, the spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency, optimism and pessimism bias, the halo and horn effects, naive realism, the bias blind spot, the just-world hypothesis, the Pygmalion and golem effects, and the third-person effect.

The fourth pack covers decisions about risk and money: prospect theory and loss aversion, framing, the endowment effect, the sunk-cost fallacy, mental accounting, the decoy effect, status quo bias, the certainty and pseudocertainty effects, hyperbolic discounting, the identifiable victim effect, choice overload, the bandwagon effect and the IKEA effect.

The fifth pack covers errors with samples and probability and the fight against bias: survivorship and selection bias, the regression and sharpshooter fallacies, the law of small numbers, scope insensitivity, the prosecutor's fallacy, the placebo and nocebo effects, the outcome bias, the ostrich effect, normalcy bias, the contrast and focusing illusions, rosy retrospection, reference-class forecasting and debiasing itself.

The wrong answers are always other biases, heuristics, fallacies or effects of the same kind. About thirty-five of the ninety-five questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, dice, a coin, a balance scale, a stopwatch, a model brain or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. The work draws on Kahneman and Tversky's research programme and standard reference summaries of it.