🧩 QuizPsychology10 questions~6 min
Cognitive biases: do you fall for them?
Anchoring, confirmation, sunk costs… Cognitive biases are brain shortcuts that mislead us in predictable ways, even when we know about them. These 10 questions are based on real experiments: no prior knowledge needed, but take a moment to think before you answer.
An educational quiz. Getting these wrong is normal: it is precisely what the experiments show.
What this content is based on
Each question is based on a published experiment (references at the bottom of the page). Figures quoted come from the original papers. Laboratory psychology findings vary across populations and replications; two questions (Dunning-Kruger effect, bias blind spot) are deliberately worded with nuance because the scientific debate is not closed.
Reviewed in 2026-10
Going further: read the article : The anchoring bias — why the first number wins
References
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.
- Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129–140.
- Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458.
- Casscells, W., Schoenberger, A., & Graboys, T. B. (1978). Interpretation by physicians of clinical laboratory results. New England Journal of Medicine, 299(18), 999–1001. DOI PubMed
- Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 288–299.
- Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.
- Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. DOI PubMed
- Gignac, G. E., & Zajenkowski, M. (2020). The Dunning-Kruger effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact: Valid approaches to testing the hypothesis with individual differences data. Intelligence, 80, 101449.
- Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381.
- West, R. F., Meserve, R. J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2012). Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 506–519.
References checked via PubMed (National Library of Medicine). DOI links lead to the original publications.