Cognitive Biases: A Cheat Sheet for Better Decisions

The picture in words

A three-column grid of 24 cognitive biases, each given a name and a one-line definition.

Twelve are defined in the text. The other twelve are loss aversion; overconfidence, attribution, similarity, negativity, outcome, survivorship and optimism bias; the framing and contrast effects; the halo and horns effect, where one trait colours the whole judgement; and the clustering illusion, finding patterns in randomness.

How to make better decisions.

Avoid these 24 cognitive biases (you'll thank me later):

• 1/ Confirmation Bias: Favoring information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.

• 2/ Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered.

• 3/ Hindsight Bias: Seeing past events as predictable.

• 4/ Availability Bias: Overestimating the importance of information that is readily available.

• 5/ Dunning-Kruger Effect: Overestimating one's abilities or knowledge.

• 6/ Bandwagon Effect: Following the beliefs of others because many people do.

• 7/ Sunk Cost Fallacy: Continuing a project due to the invested resources.

• 8/ Recency Effect: Emphasizing recent events over earlier ones.

• 9/ Status Quo Bias: Preferring things to stay the same.

• 10/ Self-Serving Bias: Attributing successes to oneself and failures to external factors.

• 11/ Groupthink: Valuing consensus over making the best decision.

• 12/ Halo Effect: Allowing one positive trait to influence overall perception.

• 13/ Overconfidence Bias: Being to …

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Source: Ashley Nicholson on LinkedIn — view the original post.