Free ebookCognitive Biases 101: How Your Mind Makes (and Mistakes) Decisions

Course Description

Cognitive Biases 101: How Your Mind Makes and Mistakes Decisions is a practical psychology course in the Health category designed to help you understand why smart people still make predictable judgment errors. You will learn how cognitive biases shape everyday decisions in work, relationships, money, and media, and how to spot the mental shortcuts that quietly steer your choices.

Through clear explanations and relatable examples, you will recognize patterns behind cognitive bias, including confirmation bias when you mainly notice what supports what you already believe, the availability heuristic when vivid stories feel like facts, and anchoring when first numbers or first impressions pull later decisions off course. You will also explore sunk cost and escalation, why it can feel hard to let go of time, money, or effort already spent, and how overconfidence and poor calibration can make certainty outrun accuracy.

The course connects these ideas to real-world applications across psychology and health behavior: framing effects, loss aversion, and reference points that influence spending, saving, and risk; social and identity biases that affect group decisions and self-image; and common distortions in relationships such as assumptions, attribution errors, and misread signals. You will see how bias shows up at work in hiring, meetings, performance reviews, and strategy decisions, and how it also shapes consumer choices like subscriptions, investing, and impulse purchases.

To help you move from awareness to action, you will practice practical debiasing methods that fit into daily life, using simple frameworks, checklists, and decision journals. You will learn how to slow down fast takes, reduce bias-driven sharing, and evaluate information more carefully in an environment full of media noise and misinformation.

If you want better decisions without needing a psychology degree, start this course and build a calmer, clearer way of thinking that you can use immediately.