confident decisions start here.

Everyone uses mental short-cuts - commonly called cognitive biases and heuristics - to make decisions, so we can act quickly.

But mental short-cuts can also harm our decision making, especially when uncertainty and risks increase.

Learn about the common mental short-cuts and how they can influence our decision making:

Cognitive biases can lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.

Common cognitive biases:

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Confirmation Bias: Tendency to favor information that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or values.
Overconfidence Bias: Overestimating one's own abilities, knowledge, or the accuracy of one's beliefs and predictions.
Anchoring Bias: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the "anchor") when making decisions.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: Continuing a behavior or endeavor as a result of previously invested resources (time, money, etc.) despite new evidence suggesting that it's not the best decision.
Hindsight Bias: Believing, after an event has occurred, that one would have predicted or expected the outcome.
Loss Aversion: The tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains.
Decision Fatigue: Deterioration of decision quality after a long session of decision making.
Status Quo Bias: Preferring the current state of affairs and resisting change.
Availability Cascade: A self-reinforcing process where a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through repetition in a community or society
Framing Effect: Drawing different conclusions based on how information is presented or framed.
Groupthink: The tendency of a group to make decisions without critical evaluation due to pressures for conformity or a desire to maintain group harmony.
Recency Bias: Giving more importance to recent events or information when making decisions.
Illusion of Control: Overestimating one's ability to control or influence events.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that individuals use to make decisions and solve problems more efficiently.

Common heuristics or mental shortcuts:

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Availability Heuristic: Estimating the likelihood of an event based on its availability in memory. If something is easily recalled, it is perceived as more common or probable.
Representativeness Heuristic: Making judgments about the probability of an event based on how similar it is to a prototype or a stereotypical example.
Simplification Heuristic: Reducing complex problems to simpler, more manageable decisions.
Recognition Heuristic: Making decisions based on whether one recognizes or is familiar with a stimulus, often leading to choices favoring well-known options.
Substitution Heuristic: Answering a simpler question than the one posed when the answer to the complex question is unknown.
Affect Heuristic: Making decisions based on emotional responses or gut feelings.
Availability Cascade: A self-reinforcing process where a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through repetition in a community or society.
Framing Heuristic: Drawing different conclusions based on how information is presented or framed.
Halo Effect: Allowing a single positive trait to influence overall judgment.
Social Proof: Copying the behavior of others when making decisions.
Scarcity Heuristic: Perceiving items as more valuable when they are perceived to be less available.
Foot-in-the-Door Heuristic: Agreeing to a small request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a larger one.
Reciprocity Heuristic: Feeling obligated to return a favor.
Commitment Heuristic: Sticking to a decision once it's made to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Endowment Effect: Overvaluing things simply because one owns them.
System Justification Heuristic: Justifying and perpetuating the existing social, economic, and political systems.