Master Your Thinking
See reality more clearly and make better decisions. Explore 190+ cognitive biases to understand why the mind misjudges, and what you can do about it.
A free social-impact project in 66 languages, with one target: a billion people who can catch their own thinking going wrong.
Free forever. No card required.
What is a cognitive bias?
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking: a mental shortcut that helped our ancestors decide fast and now quietly distorts everyday judgment. This library covers 190+ of them in plain language — where each one comes from, and how to catch it in yourself.
Every entry ends with its primary sources. That comes to more than 1,800 academic references across the 190 articles.
Reviewed by Volodymyr Zhukov
It only takes 10% of us.
In 2011, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center modelled how an idea travels through a network. Under 10% committed believers it stalls — reaching the majority would take longer than the universe has existed. Cross 10% and the majority follows fast.
Apply that to how we think. If one person in ten can name a cognitive bias out loud and refuses to make decisions on one, the other nine adjust. Not because anyone argued them into it, but because sloppy reasoning stops going unchallenged.
So that is the plan. One billion people through a free course on how the mind misjudges. We are heading the other way at the moment: confidence keeps outrunning knowledge, and most people have never been told their brain misfires by design. Ten percent is what turns that around.
Ten people in a hundred. That is the whole threshold: past it, a way of thinking stops being a minority position and becomes the default.
- 10%
- of a population is the tipping point for an unshakable belief Xie et al., Physical Review E, 2011
- 1 billion
- people we want to take the course
- 66
- languages, and every article is free to read
Bias Categories
Browse biases by category to understand different aspects of human decision making.
Not enough meaning
6 patterns
- We find stories and patterns even in sparse data
- We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories
- We imagine things and people we're familiar with or fond of as better
- We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about
- We think we know what other people are thinking
- We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future
Need to act fast
4 patterns
- To act, we must be confident we can make an impact and feel what we do is important
- To stay focused, we favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of us
- To get things done, we tend to complete things we've invested time and energy in
- To avoid mistakes, we aim to preserve autonomy and group status, and avoid irreversible decisions
