Common flaws in human reasoning

Question 1

Availability Bias

Answer 1

A cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision. (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973)

Question 2

Conjunction Fallacy

Answer 2

A cognitive bias in which people tend to believe that the co-occurrence of two events is more likely than the occurrence of one of the events alone. This fallacy was first described by Tversky and Kahneman in 1983.

Question 3

Representativeness Heuristic

Answer 3

A strategy for making categorical judgments about a given person or target based on how closely the exemplar matches the typical or average member of the category.

Question 4

Functional Fixedness

Answer 4

The tendency to perceive an object only in terms of its most common use.