Cognitive Biases & Judgement Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the tendency, especially under strong emotion, to disregard probability altogether when making a decision, so that the mere possibility of a dread outcome is treated as though it were likely, or a tiny risk is rounded to zero?

Question 2

What is the name for the tendency to let one positive impression of a person, often their physical attractiveness, spill over into ratings of unrelated qualities, so that good-looking people are judged kinder, smarter and more honest?

Question 3

What is the name for the tendency to underestimate how common one's own desirable abilities and admirable behaviours are, so that people who recycle diligently or give blood assume far fewer others do the same than actually do?

Question 4

What is the name for the tendency to keep investing time, money or effort in a failing venture because of what has already been spent, so people sit through a bad film they paid for and governments pour funds into doomed projects?

Question 5

What is the name for the tendency to treat an outcome as if it were certain when it is actually only one stage of a multi-stage gamble, so that a two-step prize described as guaranteed if you reach the second stage is chosen over a plainly stated one-step probability of the same size?

Question 6

What is the name for the way that misinformation keeps shaping people's reasoning and memory even after they have seen, and say they accept, a clear correction, so a retracted claim about the cause of a fire still colours later judgements about it?

Question 7

What is the name for the unshaken confidence in one's own predictions that persists even after being shown that they are no better than chance, described by Kahneman from his army days assessing officer candidates whose later performance his team could not predict?

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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.