Appendix B. Cognitive Biases: Common Mental Mind Traps

Mind traps are like optical illusions that fool you into thinking you’re right when you’re not. It is important to get a proper introduction to these mental mistakes because you will run into them as you practice a new way of thinking. Social scientists have identified many different kinds of mental mistakes associated with the way human beings process information. The pioneering work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, culminating in Kahneman being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for economic sciences, sheds light on the human tendency to make systematic errors in certain situations.

Basically, humans use simple rules, heuristics, to make judgments. Although heuristics are quite useful, they operate like shortcuts that save us time, but they also create systematic errors. A few of the more prevalent ones are described here. They are grouped so that you can see which of the five steps of critical thinking they are most likely to impact.