Thinking well is hard. Our brains are wired to find the easiest path between two points, and when it comes to trying to make sense of a world full of both too much information and too little meaning, our brains have to take shortcuts. We call these shortcuts cognitive biases.

Over on the Medium Newsletter (our daily newsletter aimed at helping you learn something new every day), we’ve been celebrating Cognitive Bias Week with a series of explorations into these ways our brains can deceive us, as well as some ideas about how to recognize and mitigate them.

We’ve explored confirmation bias (focusing only on info that reinforces what we already believe), outcome bias (judging how good a decision was solely on the basis of its outcome, not its reasoning), the sunk cost fallacy (being afraid to change something because you’ve already invested a lot into it, even if it’s not worth it anymore), and false memories (remembering something that never happened), but that’s just scratching the surface of the over 180 cognitive biases researchers have uncovered so far. Want to dig deeper? This cognitive bias cheatsheet from the Medium archive is a great place to start.

As always, thanks for reading.
– Scott Lamb, VP of Content at Medium

Cognitive bias

The above references the cognitive bias cheatsheet from Medium, which is summarized here:

The Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet by Buster Benson is a comprehensive guide that categorizes over 200 cognitive biases that influence our thinking and decision-making.

1. Categories of Biases:
   • Too Much Information: Biases that help us filter information (e.g., confirmation bias, availability heuristic).
   • Not Enough Meaning: Biases that fill in gaps in our understanding (e.g., narrative fallacy, clustering illusion).
   • Need to Act Fast: Biases that prompt quick decisions (e.g., anchoring, overconfidence effect).
   • What Should We Remember?: Biases that affect memory (e.g., hindsight bias, serial position effect).
2. Key Biases:
   • Confirmation Bias: Favoring information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.
   • Anchoring: Relying heavily on the first piece of information encountered.
   • Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is readily available.
   • Hindsight Bias: Believing, after an event has occurred, that one would have predicted or expected the outcome.
3. Purpose:
   • The cheat sheet aims to help individuals recognize and mitigate the impact of these biases in their daily lives and decision-making processes.

Me writing in 1971 at the Friends Volunteer Service Mission in Indianapolis