Mastering Every Cognitive Bias

An Introduction

I am a high school senior about to graduate and go to college, meaning I am about to learn some of the most important information in my life. To prepare for this, I think one of the best things I can do is to ensure I know how to learn without making any stupid errors. So, how can I do that?

Logical fallacies are fun to learn about and tend to have catchy names. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from getting into an argument with someone and being like, “Umm, that’s a hasty generalization,” while pushing your glasses up and carrying your copies of Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, logical fallacies are pretty mainstream and heavily associated in my mind with the type of atheist who calls random church pastors and debates the existence of god with them, so I don’t think I want to spend much more time writing about them.

When I wrote my first blog post, I had a lot of fun learning about the Illusory Truth Effect (the bias that causes people to be more likely to believe repeated information). I think it could be interesting to learn more about other biases. So, I plan to learn about every bias on The Decision Lab’s list of the most significant cognitive biases in behavioral economics, plus a few more if I feel like they are interesting enough. Then, I will attempt to master them all like I’m a pretentious Ash Ketchum trying to catch every heuristic Pokémon.

I want to make it very clear that I am not an expert in psychology, and anything I say should not be considered professional advice. I think heuristics, psychology, and epistemology are pretty interesting, which is why I like to read about them. When I write about these topics, I will do my best to read deeply and try to understand each bias as well as I can. However, I think it is very likely that I will make mistakes in my reading and understanding, which is why I encourage anyone else intrigued by this topic to do their own research beyond what I have written.

For anyone who is not a good reader and does not know what the word “heuristic” means, even though I used it earlier (a good reader should always look up the definitions of words they do not know), a heuristic is a shortcut our minds use to make decisions more efficiently and reduce the amount of information the brain has to store by grouping information in certain ways. We have developed heuristics because they make things easier for us, but they can often lead to irrational decision-making when they group things improperly.

Image: Oh yeah, I’m also making these cute little bias trading cards for each new post! If you like this post, you are allowed to screenshot this one, but if you do not, you will forever get lost in a maze of incoherent thoughts.

I like to say that I am mastering these biases because it sounds cool, but I very much doubt that I will actually master (in the sense of avoiding) any of them. I am sure that I am still susceptible to many of these biases at any time, and the last thing I want is some sort of Dunning-Kruger effect (spoilers for future post) where I assume that I cannot be biased at all and make stupid mistakes because of it (this is also called the blind spot bias). When I say that I want to master each of these biases, I am not saying that I want to get rid of every mental shortcut I hold, either; that would be stupid and probably just waste time. Instead, I want to learn how to use these biases to my advantage. What shortcuts can I use to learn more efficiently and remember important details? What mistakes in my thinking are causing me harm? What biases do other people hold that I can learn to predict and circumvent? Or can I use them to my advantage?

Psychology fascinates me as a field of study because it makes me feel like I am gaining some unusual power over my surroundings. Perhaps I will not learn how to move objects around with my mind, but if I can understand these underlying patterns in society, I can learn to do things that might be even cooler than that, or at least be annoying to everyone around me when I point out a bias they hold. Overall, learning about these biases seems like a good way to spend my time, with many potential benefits to my thinking and overall happiness.

If you are interested in receiving emails every few days talking about cognitive biases, my personal experience related to them, and ways to use them in the future, you can subscribe to my Substack. If you do this, you will hear each new installment in my heuristic Pokémon journey as soon as it comes out in a nicely formatted email sent directly to your inbox. What could be a more convenient and fun way to learn about this?