9 Cognitive Biases That Distort Our Reality

Our minds are full of hidden traps—cognitive biases that subtly distort how we perceive the world and make decisions. Here are nine of the most common thinking errors that can lead us astray.

1. Rhyme as Reason Effect

We are subconsciously more likely to believe a statement if it rhymes. This persuasion technique was even used by manipulative psychologists in the TV series “Mind Games.” Numerous studies have shown that people trust rhyming phrases more than non-rhyming ones. For example, “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” is seen as more convincing than “Sobriety hides what alcohol reveals.” The effect may be due to the way rhymes make cognitive processing easier and help link seemingly unrelated parts of a sentence in our minds.

2. Anchoring Effect

People often rely on the first piece of information they see (“the anchor”) and base all subsequent judgments on it. For example, if participants are given five seconds to estimate the result of 1×2×3×4×5×6×7×8, most will multiply the first few numbers, see a small result, and guess a low final answer (average: about 512). If the order is reversed (8×7×6×5×4×3×2×1), the initial products are larger, so people guess a much higher answer (average: about 2,250). The correct answer is 40,320.

3. Availability Heuristic

When asked, “Are there more students from Colorado or California at your college?” most people will base their answer on the examples that come to mind most easily. The easier something is to recall, the more we trust that information. For instance, if asked whether a random word is more likely to start with the letter K or have K as its third letter, most people recall more words starting with K, even though there are actually twice as many words with K in the third position.

4. Buyer’s Stockholm Syndrome

After making a purchase, people tend to attribute positive qualities to the item they bought and downplay its flaws, especially if they can’t return it. For example, if you buy an Apple computer, you might ignore its shortcomings and criticize Windows computers more harshly. This bias also explains purchases made with the thought, “I’ll feel much better in this once I lose weight.”

5. Decoy Effect

When choosing between a cheaper, less spacious MP3 player (A) and a more expensive, higher-capacity one (B), some will prefer price, others capacity. But if a third option (C) is introduced—more expensive than both A and B, with more memory than A but less than B—it makes B look like the best deal. The decoy’s only purpose is to nudge you toward a specific choice. This tactic is common in marketing but can appear in other areas as well.

6. IKEA Effect

We tend to overvalue things we’ve helped create. Many IKEA products require home assembly, and that’s no accident: people value products more when they feel they contributed to making them. Experiments show that people are willing to pay more for something they assembled themselves and rate it as higher quality and more reliable.

7. Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

This bias is our inability to imagine ourselves in a different state and predict our behavior in that state. For example, when you’re hot, it’s hard to appreciate the comfort of coolness; when you’re madly in love, you can’t remember what it was like before. This short-sightedness can lead to rash decisions: until we face real temptation, we think it will be easy to resist.

8. Functional Fixedness

This mental block prevents us from seeing new uses for familiar objects: paperclips are for holding papers, hammers are for driving nails. A classic experiment demonstrates this: participants are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and matches, and asked to attach the candle to the wall so it doesn’t drip on the table. Few realize they can use the box as a candle holder, instead trying to tack the candle directly to the wall.

9. Just-World Hypothesis

While hoping for the best is generally positive, it has a dark side: people struggle to accept that the world is unfair and full of randomness, so they try to find logic in even the most senseless tragedies. This leads to victim-blaming, such as suggesting that crime victims somehow provoked the perpetrator (for example, blaming victims of assault for their own misfortune).

Understanding these cognitive biases can help us make more rational decisions and see the world more clearly.