Cognitive Biases, One Page at A Time: Visual Guide to 50 Everyday Thinking Errors

Fifty ways your mind takes a shortcut, one spread each, drawn and explained. A cognitive bias is not stupidity and not a character flaw. It is a shortcut that is usually cheap and occasionally expensive. This book gives fifty of them a page of their own: an original diagram on the left, and on the right a plain definition, an example from ordinary life, and one prompt for catching yourself in the act. The fifty are grouped into seven families: belief and evidence, framing and comparison, memory, probability, social judgement, self and confidence, decision and action. You can see the shared machinery underneath rather than memorising a list. It is also honest about the evidence. Psychology has spent fifteen years re-testing its own classics; some famous effects came through intact, some shrank, and a few dissolved. Where an entry here is weaker than its popular reputation, the page says so in plain words instead of repeating the confident internet version. Two well-known biases were left out of the fifty for exactly that reason. Read one a day for fifty days, read a family in a sitting, or look one up when a decision feels wrong. Includes: 50 illustrated spreads, each with two worked examples - seven family openers - a quick-reference table - two self-test sections - and a two-page index collecting all fifty catch-yourself prompts.