15 Lies Your Brain Tells You (Proven by Real Experiments)

Your brain edits reality before you even notice — here are 15 ways it does it, every single day. From a rigged wheel of fortune to a swapped photo nobody noticed, these are real psychology experiments that caught the brain lying: about facts, money, time, memory, other people and yourself. For each bias you get the study, an everyday example and one simple way to fight back. Chapters 0:00 Your brain is lying to you 1:11 1. Confirmation bias 2:15 2. Anchoring 3:19 3. Availability heuristic 4:17 4. Negativity bias 5:20 5. Spotlight effect 6:16 6. Fundamental attribution error 7:10 7. Optimism bias 8:06 8. Planning fallacy 9:12 9. Sunk cost fallacy 10:12 10. Loss aversion 11:10 11. Hindsight bias 12:08 12. Misinformation effect 13:06 13. Choice blindness 14:19 14. Illusory truth effect 15:17 15. Bias blind spot 16:28 How to outsmart your brain Studies mentioned Lord, Ross & Lepper (1979) – Biased assimilation and attitude polarization Tversky & Kahneman (1974) – Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman & Combs (1978) – Judged frequency of lethal events Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer & Vohs (2001) – Bad is stronger than good Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky (2000) – The spotlight effect in social judgment Jones & Harris (1967) – The attribution of attitudes Weinstein (1980) – Unrealistic optimism about future life events Buehler, Griffin & Ross (1994) – Exploring the "planning fallacy" Arkes & Blumer (1985) – The psychology of sunk cost Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler (1990) – Experimental tests of the endowment effect Fischhoff & Beyth (1975) – "I knew it would happen" Loftus & Palmer (1974) – Reconstruction of automobile destruction Johansson, Hall, Sikström & Olsson (2005) – Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome (choice blindness) Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino (1977); Fazio, Brashier, Payne & Marsh (2015) – Illusory truth Pronin, Lin & Ross (2002) – The bias blind spot Which one did you catch yourself in? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe to Tangled Head for more psychology, drawn simple. #psychology #cognitivebias #selfimprovement #brain #mentalmodels #criticalthinking #stickman #tangledhead