236 checked facts

Cognition

Everything on this site about cognition — each one naming the study behind it.

You can solve problems better when you walk away.
A 2012 study by Baird et al. found that participants who performed a different, undemanding task performed better on a…
You ignore information that contradicts what you already believe.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and favor information that validates your pre-existing opinions.…
You are judged more by your errors than your successes.
The 'negativity bias' causes the brain to process harmful information more deeply and for a longer duration than posit…
The first thing you see changes the entire scene.
In cinema, the 'Kuleshov Effect' demonstrates that an identical shot of an actor's neutral face is interpreted as hung…
You perceive objects as closer when you want them.
Your level of desire for a physical object influences your visual perception of how close it is to you.…
You mistake the ease of processing for objective truth.
People rate statements as more accurate simply because the font is easier to read.…
Your brain ignores facts that contradict your current context.
The Moses illusion occurs when people fail to notice factual errors in sentences because the question contains a seman…
You ignore evidence that contradicts your rule unless it's framed socially.
The Wason selection task demonstrates that people identify the correct logical cards with significantly higher accurac…
You use your own life as the ultimate metric.
The 'Curse of Knowledge' describes your tendency to over-rely on your own perspective when judging the knowledge of ot…
New memories actively overwrite what you already remembered.
Retroactive interference describes the inhibition or competitive interference that makes it difficult to retrieve olde…
Speaking two languages physically reorganizes your brain's efficiency.
Some studies suggest that bilingual individuals may demonstrate an advantage in specific executive function tasks, tho…
You believe every category has a hidden, unchanging truth.
Psychological essentialism explains your tendency to assume that groups—like gender or race—possess an immutable, inte…
You don't know what you want until you see it.
Preference construction theory demonstrates that people do not have fixed internal values; instead, they build their p…
You are more creative when the font is harder to read.
Cognitive disfluency—the experience of difficulty in processing information—can trigger more deliberate, analytic thin…
Your desire for closure changes the way you process information.
A 1993 study found that individuals with a higher desire for closure form opinions faster and are more resistant to ch…
You only notice your stress when you stop moving.
The incubation effect, as described by Graham Wallas in his 1926 book 'The Art of Thought,' suggests that creative sol…
Your decision-making changes when you are distracted by numbers.
In a 1999 study by Shiv and Fedorikhin, participants holding a 7-digit number (high cognitive load) chose chocolate ca…
You struggle to change your mind even when presented with new facts.
A 2015 study found that repeated exposure to false claims makes them seem true, even when they contradict existing kno…
You rate a choice as better after you have already made it.
A 1956 study demonstrated that participants immediately increased their preference for a chosen item and decreased it …
You see patterns in random data that simply do not exist.
The 1985 Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky study focused on basketball shooting performance, but utilized the known psych…
You are more creative when you move your hands.
Gesturing while talking helps you organize your thought process.…
Your pupils widen when you encounter mental difficulty.
A 1964 study found that pupil diameter increases in relation to the effort required to process information.…
Your moral judgment is tied to your physical hygiene.
A 2006 study showed that recalling your own unethical behavior increases your desire for physical cleansing products.…
You assign human traits to objects to satisfy a need for connection.
A 2008 study found that individuals experiencing social exclusion were more likely to attribute human-like intentions …
You learn faster when you expect to teach the material.
A 2014 study found that participants who prepared to teach information performed significantly better on recall tests …
You are more creative when your physical environment feels expansive.
A 2007 study by Meyers-Levy and Zhu in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that ceiling height influences whether …
Your hands are not just reflecting your thoughts; they are thinking.
A 2009 study showed that students who were encouraged to gesture while explaining math problems retained the informati…
You underestimate the power of your own habits.
Automaticity is the ability of well-practiced behaviors to run without conscious supervision or intent.…
You are influenced by the first thing you hear.
The primacy effect in conversation means the first piece of information you receive about a person disproportionately …
You struggle to accept information that changes your mind.
Motivated skepticism is the tendency to scrutinize counter-attitudinal information more intensely than information tha…
You are worse at predicting your own behavior.
The introspection illusion is the tendency to trust one's own introspections as a reliable source of information while…
You remember words significantly better if you read them aloud.
The production effect shows that articulating information improves memory compared to reading it silently.…
Your brain creates patterns where there are none.
A 2008 study found that individuals who were prompted to feel a lack of control were more likely to perceive illusory …
You claim to understand concepts that do not exist.
In a 2003 study, participants consistently claimed knowledge of nonexistent academic terms when asked to rate their fa…
You make decisions based on the first thing you hear.
A 1974 experiment showed that asking participants if the population of a city was greater than 5 million or 200 thousa…
Your brain creates a story to explain your physical reactions.
In a 1962 experiment, subjects were injected with adrenaline and told it was a vitamin, leading them to misinterpret t…
Curiosity is the physical feeling of a missing piece.
A 1994 analysis defined curiosity as a 'cognitively induced deprivation' triggered by the awareness of a gap in one's …
Your language shapes how your brain perceives color.
A 2007 study showed that Russian speakers, who have distinct words for light and dark blue, could categorize these col…
Describing a face makes you worse at identifying it.
A 1990 study found that participants who wrote a verbal description of a face were significantly less likely to correc…
Your brain creates a false sense of visual continuity.
The 'flicker paradigm' reveals that people often fail to notice massive changes in a scene if they occur during a brie…
You believe that reading is the same as learning.
Semantic processing results in better recall than structural or phonemic processing, a finding supported by subsequent…
You struggle to understand that others know what you don't.
Theory of Mind is a developmental process that matures throughout early childhood, with performance on false-belief ta…
You see patterns that do not actually exist in data.
Apophenia describes the human tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated information.…
You value things more if you had to work for them.
Increased involvement in the construction of an object leads to a higher subjective appraisal of its worth.…
You stop being curious the moment you name something.
Labeling an object shifts cognitive focus toward category prototypes at the expense of specific feature recall.…
You change your mind when you cannot use tools.
In a 1945 study, participants failed to solve problems because they could not stop seeing an object's 'intended' use.…
You judge powerful people based on their physical height.
Research shows that participants consistently associate power-related concepts like 'leader' or 'dominant' with items …
Your attention is limited to one object.
When you are highly focused on a specific task, you may experience 'inattentional blindness,' where you fail to notice…
You struggle to change your mind despite evidence.
Belief persistence describes the psychological tendency to maintain an initial belief even after the evidence supporti…
You perform differently when the task requires effort.
The effort-accuracy trade-off shows that you adjust your cognitive effort based on how much accuracy you believe the t…
You categorize people before you know their names.
The social categorization process begins almost instantly, shifting your perception of an individual based on their gr…
You avoid thinking deeply even when you could.
Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive, incorrect response in favor of a more deliberate, accur…
You have a limit to your internal mental voice.
The phonological loop was introduced as a model component by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974, but the finding that its capa…
Your mood at this moment dictates your life evaluation.
The mood-as-information hypothesis suggests that you use your current affective state as a heuristic to judge your lif…
Your best decisions happen when you stop thinking hard.
A 2006 study by Dijksterhuis proposed that complex decisions are made more effectively when distracted, though these f…
Anxiety changes what you pay attention to in conversation.
Attentional control theory suggests that anxiety impairs your ability to shift attention away from task-irrelevant sti…
Your brain treats numbers as physical space.
The SNARC effect reveals that humans associate smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the…
You consistently underestimate your own internal narrative.
The narrative fallacy describes your tendency to force complex, random events into simple, cause-and-effect stories.…
You struggle to change a rule once established.
Mental set, or the Einstellung effect, happens when you become fixated on a single approach and fail to see simpler, a…
You ignore information that disagrees with your prior beliefs.
The disconfirmation bias leads you to spend more cognitive effort scrutinizing and attacking evidence that contradicts…
Your brain processes familiar words faster than uncommon ones.
The word-frequency effect shows that you recognize high-frequency words significantly faster than words you encounter …
Your memory changes every time you recall it.
Memory reconsolidation is a process where retrieved memories can become labile and subject to modification under speci…
Darkness changes the way you think.
A 2013 study found that dimmed ambient lighting significantly boosts creative performance compared to bright light set…
Sometimes you choose ignorance over useful information.
A 2010 review found that individuals intentionally avoid available information if they believe that data will threaten…
You feel more confident in a decision after it is made.
Choice-supportive bias drives the brain to emphasize the positives of a chosen option and ignore its drawbacks post-se…
Your brain predicts what you see before you actually see it.
The predictive processing model suggests your brain creates a mental model of reality and updates it with sensory erro…
Your brain reconstructs memories to fit a coherent narrative structure.
Bartlett demonstrated that memory is a reconstructive process influenced by cultural schemas.…
You naturally prefer effortful thinking over simple, automated shortcuts.
The 'need for cognition' trait measures a person's intrinsic tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful mental exertion…
Your brain creates meaning out of literal noise.
Klaus Conrad originally coined 'apophenia' in 1958 to describe a clinical symptom of the early stages of schizophrenia…
Your brain ignores details that complicate your narrative.
The 'Schema-Consistent Bias' causes you to recall information that fits your existing framework while forgetting incon…
You actively block your own goals to focus.
Goal shielding is the process where the activation of a target goal inhibits the accessibility of competing goals.…
You vividly remember events that never happened.
In a 1995 study, 25% of participants formed false memories of being lost in a shopping mall after being prompted with …
You categorize people to save your brain energy.
A 1994 study demonstrated that stereotypes act as cognitive energy-saving devices, allowing people to conserve cogniti…
Your need for order makes you refuse new evidence.
A 1996 study measured 'need for closure' and found that those with high scores stop collecting information as soon as …
You are a slave to your previous assumptions.
Schema-based processing leads to faster information integration at the cost of detail.…
You make judgements based on how quickly you think.
The feeling of ease, or processing fluency, acts as a heuristic for validity.…
You remember stories better than sequences of abstract facts.
The dual-coding theory suggests that memory is enhanced by pairing verbal and visual information.…
Your physical movements can prime your mental speed.
Mental rotation of objects takes longer when the angle of rotation is greater.…
You have a bottleneck in your visual attention.
When two distinct targets appear in rapid succession, you frequently miss the second one.…
You lose time with every shift in focus.
A 2001 study found that task-switching costs result in significant drops in efficiency when moving between different t…
You twist evidence to support a chosen path.
The study titled 'Biased interpretation of evidence' by Carlson and Russo, which demonstrates how people distort new i…
Your brain prioritizes unfinished tasks to force closure.
The Zeigarnik effect dictates that interrupted tasks are remembered significantly better than completed ones.…
Expressing gratitude consistently rewires your daily outlook.
A 2003 study showed that writing about things you are grateful for increases well-being compared to focusing on daily …
You forget your intentions when you walk through doorways.
A 2011 study found that entering a new room significantly decreases your ability to recall information from the previo…
You fail because you trust your first instinct.
The Cognitive Reflection Test shows that people often fail simple logic puzzles by relying on intuitive, incorrect ans…
You cannot ignore the meaning of a word.
The Stroop effect demonstrates that you are slower at identifying the ink color of a word that names a different color…
You process sentences faster when they match your physical movement.
The action-sentence compatibility effect demonstrates that manual reaction times are faster when the sentence describe…
Your brain treats abstract ideas as physical weight.
Participants holding a heavy clipboard rated job applicants as having more 'serious' and 'significant' personalities.…
You link abstract sounds to specific physical shapes.
Research by Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) reported that 95% of participants associated the names as described, but t…
You consistently overestimate your ability to control external events.
When an outcome is preceded by your own action, even if it is unrelated, you feel a 'sense of agency' that causes you …
You interpret ambiguity based on your current physical comfort.
Hard chairs make people more 'stubborn' and 'unyielding' during negotiations compared to soft seating.…
You use the same solution for different problems.
You will stick to an inefficient solution for a problem because it worked on previous ones.…
Comparing two things takes longer when they are similar.
You identify which of two numbers is larger faster if the distance between them is greater.…
What you wear changes how your brain functions.
Wearing a garment identified as a doctor's coat reduced the number of errors made on specific selective attention task…
Your mood determines what you can remember.
Information is sometimes encoded and retrieved more effectively when the internal emotional state matches between enco…
You avoid making choices when you have too much data.
A 2000 study by Iyengar and Lepper suggested that, in specific conditions, limited choice sets can lead to higher conv…
You overestimate your ability to predict the future.
The 'hot hand' fallacy leads people to believe that success streaks imply a higher probability of continued success.…
Similar sounding words disrupt your short-term memory.
Lists of phonologically similar words are significantly harder to memorize than lists of dissimilar-sounding words.…
You react differently to the same information framed differently.
The framing effect, where choice is influenced by whether information is presented as gains or losses, was famously ex…
You rewrite your history to suit your present.
After learning an outcome, you shift your past confidence to make the result seem inevitable.…
You take credit for your wins and blame bad luck elsewhere.
The self-serving bias is the tendency to perceive oneself as responsible for successes and external factors as respons…
You learn significantly more by forgetting a little bit.
Distributed learning sessions result in longer retention than cramming the same amount of time into one sitting.…
You assume your memories are accurate replays of reality.
Human memory is a reconstructive process where, under certain conditions, a retrieved memory can enter a labile state …
You see patterns where none actually exist.
Illusory correlation causes you to perceive a relationship between two variables even when they are statistically unre…
A rhyme makes a statement seem more truthful to you.
The rhyme-as-reason effect increases the perceived accuracy of a statement simply because it is phonologically pleasin…
You think the past forces a change in probability.
A 1971 study found that people expect a coin flip to balance out after a streak of heads, as if the coin has a memory.…
You cling to your convictions even when proven false.
A 1975 study found that participants still believed in their own ability to detect suicide notes even after researcher…
You cannot imagine not knowing what you already know.
A 1990 experiment showed that people assume listeners will identify a tapped song 50% of the time, while the actual ra…
You define your worth by measuring it against others.
A 1954 study proposed that in the absence of objective standards, humans evaluate their abilities through social compa…
You cannot imagine what it is like not knowing.
A 1990 study found that people who knew a song's rhythm consistently overestimated how many people would recognize it …
You claim personal credit for wins but blame luck.
A 1978 study showed that participants took credit for success but attributed failure to external variables like test d…
You pay a steep cognitive price for multitasking.
Switching between tasks significantly increases error rates and lowers processing speed compared to focusing on one ta…
You consistently underestimate how much time a task requires.
People exhibit a deep-seated bias to overlook potential obstacles when creating their own personal schedules.…
You remember information better if it relates to you.
A 1977 study showed that people recall words more effectively when asked to relate them to their own personal experien…
Your certainty in your beliefs outweighs their actual accuracy.
Research by Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1977) demonstrates that individuals consistently demonstrate overconf…
Your memory is not a recording of past events.
In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, participants consistently remember seeing a word that was never actually pre…
Your brain learns more by spreading study over time.
A 1978 study by Landauer and Bjork confirmed that information is retained better when study sessions are spaced out.…
You remember stories better than raw information.
A 1969 study by Bower and Clark showed that readers remembered information significantly better when it was framed as …
You rewrite your memory to claim you saw it coming.
Fischhoff (1975) demonstrated that after an event occurs, people consistently overestimate their ability to have predi…
Your first impression of a price sets the internal standard.
Tversky and Kahneman found that participants' estimates of unknown quantities are consistently pulled toward an arbitr…
You value things more just because you suffered for them.
Effort justification is a specific paradigm derived from cognitive dissonance theory, most notably demonstrated by Aro…
You have stopped remembering things because the internet does.
The Google effect, or digital amnesia, is the tendency to forget information that can be easily accessed via search en…
You fail to notice the obvious in plain sight.
Inattentional blindness occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight because thei…
You remember your past choices as better than they were.
Choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively attribute positive attributes to an option you selected and ne…
You assume experts share your clarity of thought.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where you find it difficult to imagine what it is like not to know what you…
You find vague personality descriptions surprisingly accurate.
The Forer effect is the tendency for people to accept broad personality assessments as uniquely applicable to them.…
You see patterns in noise that aren't there.
Patternicity, a term coined by Michael Shermer, is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Rela…
You trust a statement more if it rhymes.
The rhyme-as-reason effect makes you perceive rhyming phrases as more truthful than identical statements written in pr…
You remember information better if you create it.
Memory retention is significantly higher for information you generate yourself than for information you are simply giv…
If you have a hammer, everything is a nail.
People tend to apply the same familiar solution to every problem regardless of context.…
You remember seeing more than was actually there.
The human mind consistently extends the boundaries of scenes you view in images.…
You only clearly remember the start and end.
People recall the first and final items in a series better than those in the middle.…
You believe your internal state is obvious to others.
People systematically overestimate how accurately others can read their emotions or intentions.…
You are far more certain than you are accurate.
Overprecision is the excessive certainty you feel regarding the accuracy of your own beliefs.…
You suffer most when you imagine how things might be.
Counterfactual thinking is the tendency to mentally simulate alternative outcomes for past events.…
You do not see what you are not expecting.
Highly focused attention can lead to inattentional blindness, where the rate of missing unexpected events ranges from …
Trying to suppress a thought makes it unavoidable.
The effort to actively ignore a specific idea increases its cognitive accessibility.…
You find it nearly impossible to ignore what you know.
The curse of knowledge describes a cognitive bias where individuals are unable to ignore their own knowledge when pred…
You can remember events that never actually happened.
Introducing suggestive information after an event can rewrite your personal memory of the original experience.…
You struggle to use objects in new ways.
Functional fixedness limits your ability to see new uses for common objects.…
You cannot accurately explain how a zipper works.
The illusion of explanatory depth causes you to overestimate your understanding.…
Your brain prefers to avoid thinking deeply.
The cognitive miser theory suggests that you habitually seek shortcuts to minimize mental effort.…
You assume the worst when others act neutrally.
Hostile attribution bias causes people to interpret ambiguous social cues as intentionally aggressive.…
Asking if you will act makes you more likely to.
The mere measurement effect describes a phenomenon where measuring intentions may influence subsequent behavior, thoug…
Your judgment is skewed by what you saw before.
The contrast effect describes how the perception of an object is changed by its comparison to a preceding object, a ph…
Your brain tracks background noise until your name is spoken.
The cocktail party effect describes your ability to focus your attention on one voice while ignoring other background …
You misremember your past choices as smarter than they were.
Choice-supportive bias occurs when you remember your previous decisions as better and more rational than they were at …
You find deep meaning in vague, generic descriptions.
The Barnum effect is a specific instance of the broader concept of subjective validation.…
You repeat a false statement until you believe it.
The illusory truth effect describes the tendency to believe repeated information is more credible, a phenomenon first …
You systematically overestimate how much you know about topics.
The overconfidence effect is a bias where subjective confidence in judgments often exceeds objective accuracy, though …
Disconfirming evidence can strengthen your initial incorrect belief.
The 'backfire effect' was proposed in 2010 to describe people doubling down on beliefs, but subsequent large-scale res…
Your brain actively ignores evidence that contradicts your view.
Confirmation bias involves selectively processing information to support existing beliefs.…
You buy more when a useless option is added.
The inclusion of an asymmetrically dominated decoy makes a target option look more attractive.…
You feel worse because you imagined a better outcome.
A 1997 review article by Neal Roese synthesizes the established connection between upward counterfactuals and regret, …
You struggle to remember joyful moments while feeling sad.
Mood-congruent memory is the phenomenon where your current emotional state dictates the accessibility of your past mem…
You see patterns that do not actually exist.
Humans are prone to perceiving relationships between two independent events because they share a superficial similarit…
Your ability to make good choices erodes by evening.
Decision fatigue suggests that quality of judgment declines after repeated choices, a phenomenon famously illustrated …
You believe you possess more talent than the average.
The better-than-average effect is a widespread cognitive bias where individuals rate their abilities as superior to th…
You assume you understand everyday objects better than you do.
The illusion of explanatory depth reveals that people believe they understand complex systems until asked to explain t…
You do not know why you reached that conclusion.
The confabulation effect occurs when you provide a logical reason for an action that was actually caused by a subconsc…
Your brain fills in gaps with events that never happened.
A 1996 study found that simply imagining a past event increases the participant's confidence that the event actually o…
You think your personal memories are objectively accurate.
Source monitoring errors lead you to misattribute the origin of your memories.…
You will always underestimate the time a task takes.
People consistently predict they will complete tasks faster than they actually do.…
Your brain is programmed to ignore the middle.
The serial position effect was first identified and described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885.…
You remember information better when it relates to yourself.
A 1977 study found that words are recalled far more accurately if they are processed in relation to one's own traits.…
You trust information more when it is easier read.
A 2008 study found that simple, easy-to-read fonts make statements seem more factual and credible.…
You eventually believe the lies you heard before.
The persuasive power of a message can increase over time, even if the source was initially discredited.…
Your performance drops when you fear confirming a stereotype.
The awareness of a negative stereotype regarding your group can cause an involuntary decline in performance.…
You ignore information that contradicts your existing world view.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with your pre-…
You accept illogical arguments if the conclusion feels true.
Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion rather t…
You remember information best when you connect it to yourself.
The self-reference effect is the tendency for people to encode information differently when it is related to themselve…
You remember the core meaning but lose the exact words.
The verbatim effect states that you are much more likely to remember the meaning of a sentence than the specific words…
You expect patterns where there is only randomness.
The gambler's fallacy is a well-established cognitive bias defined as the belief that past independent events influenc…
You cannot imagine a world where you do not know this.
Once you possess information, you find it nearly impossible to simulate the mindset of someone who lacks it.…
You judge your own actions by intent, but others' by outcomes.
The actor-observer asymmetry was a widely cited hypothesis, but it has failed to replicate in broad meta-analyses.…
You automatically assume that fluent speech equals high intelligence.
A 2006 study found that writers who use complex, unnecessary words are perceived as less intelligent.…
You ignore past evidence when predicting your future speed.
The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions, regardless of past…
Your brain prioritizes negative news over positive feedback.
Negativity bias dictates that, across a variety of domains, negative information is processed more deeply and remember…
Your ability to make sound choices depletes throughout the day.
While the 2011 Danziger study identified a correlation between judicial rulings and meal breaks, the 'decision fatigue…
You no longer remember information, only where to find it.
The 'Google effect' causes your brain to offload knowledge to external storage, leading to poorer recall of the inform…
You ignore the context while fixating on the outcome.
Focalism causes you to overestimate how much a single event will influence your future happiness.…
Evidence against your belief makes you hold tighter.
Belief perseverance is the cognitive tendency to maintain a position even when the evidence supporting it has been cle…
You think of future plans in impossible terms.
Construal level theory explains that the more distant an event is, the more abstractly you represent it.…
You might be misreading your fear as attraction.
The misattribution of arousal occurs when your brain misidentifies the source of physiological excitement.…
You work significantly faster as you approach a goal.
The goal gradient effect shows that the closer you are to finishing a task, the more effort you invest to complete it.…
You remember facts better if you explain them yourself.
The generation effect demonstrates that information is better retained when you produce it from your own mind.…
You assign human traits to inanimate geometry.
In a 1944 study, viewers who watched an animation of shapes moving around a box almost universally described the shape…
Your brain confuses ease of processing with actual truth.
The fluency heuristic leads people to believe that information is true simply because it is easy to understand or reca…
You judge the quality of a choice by its outcome.
Outcome bias is the tendency to evaluate the intelligence of a decision based on the final result rather than the qual…
You mistakenly believe others think exactly like you do.
The false consensus effect is the cognitive bias where you overestimate the extent to which your opinions and habits a…
You are physically unable to forget what you already know.
Once you learn a piece of information, you consistently overestimate others' ability to guess it.…
Your self-control is exhausted by simple mental math.
In a 1999 study, participants who were asked to memorize a seven-digit number were about 1.5 times more likely to choo…
You believe you control events that are entirely random.
A 1975 study showed that people overestimate their chances of winning a game of pure luck if they have performed a per…
You only remember the beginning and the end.
Ebbinghaus (1885) identified the serial position effect, but the explanation attributing it to the interaction between…
Anxiety about performance can lower your actual results.
A 1995 study found that black students performed worse on tests when reminded of negative stereotypes about their inte…
You interpret neutral social interactions as deliberate attacks.
A 1980 study found that highly aggressive individuals are significantly more likely to assume others act with harmful …
You ignore information that challenges your existing beliefs.
A 1979 study found that participants discounted evidence that contradicted their opinions while accepting flawed evide…
You remember information better when it relates to you.
A 1977 study showed that participants recalled adjectives much better when asked if they described themselves.…
You remember information better if you create it yourself.
A 1978 study demonstrated that participants remembered words better when they generated them rather than simply readin…
You judge your actions by circumstances but others by character.
Research in the 1970s proposed an actor-observer asymmetry in attribution, though modern meta-analyses indicate this e…
You find it impossible to ignore what you know.
In Elizabeth Newton's 1990 study, tappers were unable to predict how difficult it would be for listeners to identify a…
You over-allocate resources to eliminate a minor, symbolic risk.
The zero-risk bias leads people to prefer the complete elimination of a small risk over a greater total reduction in r…
You like things more simply because you have seen them.
The mere exposure effect is the tendency to develop a preference for stimuli merely because you are familiar with them…
You assume generic descriptions apply specifically to you.
The phenomenon is known as the Forer effect or the fallacy of personal validation, while the term 'Barnum effect' was …
You stop remembering facts you know are stored digitally.
The Google effect shows that you are less likely to remember information if you believe it is easily accessible online…
You believe past events were more predictable than they were.
Hindsight bias causes you to view historical outcomes as inevitable despite the inherent uncertainty of the time.…
You find statements more true if they simply rhyme.
Rhyming statements are processed as more accurate and truthful than non-rhyming statements.…
You only clearly remember the beginning and the end.
Information presented at the start and conclusion of a list is significantly better retained.…
You selectively interpret facts to protect your existing worldview.
A 1979 study found that participants shown balanced evidence on capital punishment were convinced their original stanc…
Your brain shuts down for half a second after focusing.
Participants show significantly reduced performance in detecting a second target when it appears 200 to 500 millisecon…
You believe you understand how a simple zipper works.
A 2002 study showed that people consistently overestimate their grasp of complex systems until they are forced to expl…
You hold onto opinions even after being disproven.
A 1975 study showed that once an initial belief is formed, it remains influential even after the evidence supporting i…
Your brain ignores facts that contradict your beliefs.
Motivated reasoning and biased assimilation lead people to evaluate contradictory evidence more critically than suppor…
You notice things more frequently after learning about them.
The frequency illusion occurs when a new piece of information you recently learned suddenly seems to appear everywhere…
You perceive members of other groups as all identical.
Outgroup homogeneity is the tendency to see individuals in other groups as having fewer unique traits than people in y…
You find it impossible to ignore what you already know.
The curse of knowledge causes you to overestimate how well others understand what you are explaining.…
You defend your beliefs after seeing contrary data.
The 'backfire effect' refers to a proposed psychological phenomenon where contrary evidence strengthens existing belie…
You believe you are more observant than you are.
A 1998 study found that a significant portion of observers failed to detect changes in a person during a real-world in…
You are more likely to lie for a small reward.
A 1959 study showed that people are more willing to perform a dull task for a small incentive if they convince themsel…
If it sounds familiar, you assume it is true.
A 2015 study found that statements were rated as more accurate if they had been heard previously, even when the source…
Your ability to make sound decisions erodes throughout the day.
A 2011 study of over 1,000 judicial rulings found that parole boards were significantly more likely to grant favorable…
You retroactively invent reasons to prefer your choice.
A 2007 study found that people misremember the features of rejected options to make their chosen one seem superior.…
Nothing is as important as you think it is.
People misjudge the long-term impact of life events because they focus too heavily on them at the moment.…
You struggle to solve problems you have used before.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias where you become unable to see an object as having any function other than it…
You try to suppress thoughts and make them louder.
The 'ironic process theory' suggests that the effort to suppress a specific thought makes it more cognitively accessib…
The more you try not to think, the more.
A 1994 study revealed that instructions to suppress a specific thought result in that thought becoming more cognitivel…
A repeated claim eventually feels like a known truth.
A 2015 study found that even clearly false headlines are rated as more accurate simply because they have been seen bef…
You believe the world is fundamentally fair to everyone.
A 1966 study demonstrated that people will blame victims for their own misfortune to maintain the belief that people g…
You mistake your own point of view for objective reality.
Research indicates that people assume their view of the world is based on unbiased information, while those who disagr…
You believe generic personality descriptions are uniquely about you.
A 1948 study found that when individuals are given a vague, personality assessment, they overwhelmingly rate it as acc…
You cannot imagine what it is like not knowing.
A 1990 study by Elizabeth Newton found that individuals possess a 'curse of knowledge' that makes them systematically …
You only vividly remember the beginning and the end.
A 1962 experiment confirmed that memory recall is highest for items at the start and end of a list, with a significant…
Common tools often become invisible when you need new uses.
A 1945 study found that participants struggled to solve problems when the necessary tools were already being used for …
We spend more mental energy processing bad news than good.
A 2001 review concluded that humans consistently pay more attention to, and retain, negative information over positive…
Ease of memory leads us to overestimate rare events.
A 1973 study showed that people judge the frequency of an event by how easily they can recall examples from memory.…
We consistently assume that others think like we do.
A 1977 study revealed that people are significantly more likely to assume others share their own beliefs and habits th…