A cognitive bias is a mental shortcut that tilts a decision without you noticing. This test measures seven of them with short decision tasks, not opinion questions, then compares the result with how biased you think you are; see how biases shape everyday decisions.
How susceptible is your decision-making to cognitive bias? A ~15-minute assessment that uses seven short decision tasks — not personality quiz questions — to measure your susceptibility to seven well-studied cognitive biases, then compares that with how biased you rate yourself. The task formats come from decades of published heuristics-and-biases experiments; every question is LifeByLogic's own. Everything is scored in your browser, and your result leaves it only if you choose to save it.
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Cognitive bias measurement is an active and contested area of psychology. Reasonable researchers reading the same evidence reach different conclusions. Stanovich, West and Toplak argue that rational thinking can be measured with a broad battery of tasks, as something distinct from intelligence. Teovanović, Knežević and Stankov found that different biases correlate too weakly to support a single "rationality" factor.
Each of the seven effects (anchoring, sunk cost and the rest) is well documented in studies of groups of people. A score built from four to eight questions is a much noisier estimate for one person, though, and your archetype and the two averages on the map are this test's own way of summarizing your seven scores. A different researcher using different analytical choices might characterize you differently.
Treat your results as a starting point for self-reflection, not a fixed label. These biases come from mental shortcuts that everyone relies on, so a high score is not a character flaw. High scores are an invitation to try the habits we'll suggest, each with its source, not a character judgment.
For researchers and curious users: read the full methodology — the documented framework, the variables measured, the scoring algorithm, the limitations, and the references.
You'll work through seven short tasks — not a personality quiz, but actual behavioral measurements that probe how your mind handles specific decision challenges. Each task follows a format from published heuristics-and-biases experiments (Tversky and Kahneman, Evans, Fischhoff, Arkes and Blumer, Baron and Hershey, and others); the questions themselves are LifeByLogic's own. Some will feel like estimation games. Some will feel like small logic puzzles. Some are scenarios where you rate how reasonable a decision was.
1. Don't look things up. Some tasks ask you to estimate facts you're unlikely to know precisely. The point isn't to be correct — it's to see how your mind handles uncertainty. Looking things up defeats the measurement.
2. Don't overthink. Give the answer that feels right at first pass, then commit. The tasks are designed to work with quick, genuine responses. Excessive deliberation can mask the effects we're measuring.
3. You can't fail. There are no wrong answers in the punitive sense — only responses that do or don't show susceptibility to a given bias. These biases come from shortcuts everyone uses. This measures the shape of yours on these particular tasks.
For each question, give your best estimate. You're unlikely to know the exact answer — that's by design. Don't look anything up; don't spend more than 10 seconds per item. If you have no idea, guess a number that feels plausibly in the right neighborhood.
Each scenario describes a real event before its resolution. Without looking anything up, estimate the probability you'd have assigned to the outcome described, given only what was known at the time. Move the slider to your best guess. We'll return to this task near the end.
For each question, choose the answer you think is correct, then rate how confident you are (50% = just guessing, 100% = absolutely certain). Don't look anything up. This task measures calibration — the gap between how confident you feel and how often you're actually right.
You'll see the same six estimation questions from Task 1. This time, each comes with a reference value. First indicate whether the true answer is higher or lower than the reference, then give your final estimate. Your previous answers are not shown — answer each fresh.
Each problem shows two premises followed by a conclusion. Your job: determine whether the conclusion logically follows from the premises — regardless of whether it happens to be true in real life. This is about logical structure, not factual accuracy.
Each problem gives you two pieces of information: a general base rate (how common something is in the population) and a specific signal (evidence about a particular case). Your job: combine them into a probability estimate. This measures how well you integrate base rates with individuating information.
Each scenario puts you in a choice about whether to go ahead. Rate how likely you would be to go ahead in each situation. There are no right answers here; answer each one as you would really act.
Each case describes a decision made under uncertainty, followed by how things turned out. Rate the quality of the decision itself — the reasoning, preparation, and choice — independent of the outcome. Decisions can be well-reasoned but produce bad outcomes, or poorly reasoned but produce good ones.
Now we'll reveal what actually happened in the four scenarios from Task 2. Without looking at your earlier answers, try to recall what probability you assigned when you first saw each scenario. The gap between your recall and your actual earlier rating is the hindsight bias measurement.
These are LBL-original self-report statements, written to mirror the seven biases the tasks above measured. They capture how you perceive your own tendencies — which can differ from how you actually behaved on the tasks above. The gap between the two is the Bias Blind Spot, a featured finding of your full result.
A cognitive bias test measures how far your judgments drift from a normative standard under specific, well-studied conditions. This one does it with behavioral tasks rather than self-report alone: you make estimates, judge probabilities, evaluate arguments, and rate decisions, and the scoring compares what you actually did with the correct answer, or with your own answer to a matched version of the same question. It covers seven biases — anchoring, hindsight, overconfidence, belief bias, base-rate neglect, sunk cost, and outcome bias — plus your Bias Blind Spot: the gap between how biased your task answers were and how biased you rate yourself. It takes about 15 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and keeps your result only if you choose to save it.
Asking "how susceptible are you to anchoring?" measures your theory of yourself, not your behavior. The methodological move that makes bias measurement possible is to put you in the situation and observe the drift. In research, anchoring is usually measured by giving one group a reference number and another none, then comparing estimates; this test does it within one person, asking each question once without a reference number and once with one. Hindsight bias is measured by asking for a prediction, revealing the outcome, and then asking what you originally predicted. Both designs are built into this assessment, which is why some questions come back a second time.
An arbitrary number pulls your estimate toward it, even when you know it is arbitrary. How it is measured here: you give six numerical estimates with no reference point (Phase A). Later, the same six questions return with a reference number attached (Phase B). Your anchoring score is how far your estimates moved toward the reference numbers, on average. Research anchor: Tversky and Kahneman (1974).
Once you know how something turned out, your memory of what you expected shifts toward the outcome. How it is measured here: you rate how likely four historical outcomes were (Phase 1). Later in the test, after the actual outcomes are revealed, you are asked to recall your own earlier ratings (Phase 2). How far your recalled ratings moved toward what actually happened is the bias.
Confidence outruns accuracy. How it is measured here: eight general-knowledge questions, each followed by a confidence rating. Calibration is the relationship between the two — a well-calibrated person is right about 70% of the time when they say 70%. Your score is how far your average confidence ran ahead of your share of right answers.
You judge an argument as valid because you agree with its conclusion, not because the logic holds. How it is measured here: eight short logic problems in which validity and believability are deliberately crossed, so agreement and correctness come apart.
Vivid, specific information swamps the underlying prior probability. How it is measured here: four probability problems that each state a base rate and a specific piece of evidence. Your score is how far your answers moved from the correct (Bayesian) answer toward the answer the evidence alone would give.
Money, time, or effort already spent — and unrecoverable — keeps you committed to a failing course. How it is measured here: two situations, each told twice, once with money already spent and once without. Your score is how much more likely you were to go ahead when the money was already gone.
You rate a decision as good because it worked out, ignoring what was knowable at the time. How it is measured here: four decisions, each shown twice, once with a good outcome and once with a bad one. Your score is how much higher you rated the same decision when it turned out well.
Twelve self-report statements ask how susceptible you believe you are. Your Bias Blind Spot is the discrepancy between that self-assessment and your measured task performance. Pronin, Lin and Ross (2002) showed that people see bias more readily in others than in themselves, and Scopelliti and colleagues (2015) found that the size of this blind spot varies between people. Those studies compare how people rate themselves with how they rate others; this test compares your self-ratings with your own task answers.
Twelve steps, seven tasks, roughly 15 minutes. The order is not arbitrary. Two of the tasks are split in half and separated by other work, because anchoring and hindsight can only be measured across a gap: you must answer once without the manipulation, do something else, and answer again with it. If you skip ahead or look back, you break the measurement — which is why the test does not let you.
Some questions will feel repetitive. They are not. The second pass is the experiment.
Each of the seven biases is scored on its own task, on a 0 to 100 scale. The scores are not percentiles: the test has no norms from a reference group. The seven scores are summarized as two plain averages on a map rather than a single number, and a set of written rules names one of six archetypes — The Anchored, The Contrarian, The Escalator, The Certain, The Calibrated, or The Variable — describing the shape of your profile, not its quality.
There is deliberately no single "rationality score." The research is genuinely divided on whether one exists: Stanovich, West and Toplak (2016) argue that rational thinking can be assessed as a whole with a broad battery; Teovanović and colleagues (2015) found the biases too weakly related to form one factor. Publishing one number would mean picking a side of an open scientific question and hiding that from you.
Three things worth holding onto.
Susceptibility is not intelligence. Stanovich and West (2008) found that many classic biases, among them anchoring, outcome bias, base-rate neglect and sunk cost, were largely unrelated to cognitive ability, while others, such as belief bias, were related to it. Highly intelligent people can be highly susceptible.
These are ordinary shortcuts, not defects. The biases come from mental shortcuts everyone relies on. A high score is an invitation to try the habits listed for that bias, not a diagnosis.
Your score is a snapshot. Scores on bias tasks shift with practice, mood, time of day and familiarity with the questions, and this test's retest reliability hasn't been measured. Retest in a month and expect a different number; read small changes as noise.
The literature on debiasing is more modest than the popular literature suggests, but a few strategies have support. Consider the opposite: before committing to a judgment, explicitly generate reasons it could be wrong; in experiments this reduced overconfidence (Koriat, Lichtenstein and Fischhoff, 1980), hindsight bias (Arkes and colleagues, 1988) and anchoring (Mussweiler, Strack and Pfeiffer, 2000). Take the outside view: ask what usually happens to projects like this one, rather than reasoning from the specifics of yours; this puts the base rate back into the judgment (Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993). Pre-commit to a stopping rule before you invest: setting limits in advance reduced escalation of commitment in experiments (Simonson and Staw, 1992). Separate decision quality from outcome quality in reviews: ask what was knowable at the time, not what happened.
This is an educational instrument, not a clinical or diagnostic one. It uses a fixed item set, so repeated testing with the same items measures partly your memory of them. Scores are 0 to 100 readings of your own answers, not percentiles or norms. The Bias Blind Spot is a discrepancy measure and inherits the noise of both components. Bias tasks in general show modest test-retest reliability, and this test's own reliability hasn't been measured, which is a reason to treat any single score as provisional.
The task formats come from the heuristics-and-biases literature: Tversky and Kahneman on anchoring and base rates, Evans and colleagues on belief bias, Lichtenstein and Fischhoff on calibration, Fischhoff on hindsight, Arkes and Blumer on sunk cost, and Baron and Hershey on outcome bias. The interpretation draws on Stanovich and West on biases and cognitive ability, Pronin and Scopelliti on the bias blind spot, and Teovanović, Berthet and Erceg on how individual bias measures relate to each other. Full references and scoring detail are in the methodology.
Your susceptibility to 7 well-studied cognitive biases — anchoring, belief bias, overconfidence, hindsight bias, base rate neglect, sunk cost, and outcome bias — using actual behavioral tasks rather than self-report alone. The tool also computes your Bias Blind Spot (the gap between how biased your task answers were and how biased you rate yourself). Your archetype shows free; your seven scores and your Bias Blind Spot open with its report, The Bias Tripwire.
About 15 minutes. Some people finish in 12, some take 20. The tasks require genuine thinking, so rushing produces noisier results.
No. The research is divided on whether a single 'rationality factor' exists. Stanovich, West and Toplak (2016) argue rational thinking can be assessed as a whole; Teovanović and colleagues (2015) found the biases too weakly related for one factor. LBL-CBS gives you seven separate scores plus two plain averages, explicitly framed as one summary among several.
No. Stanovich and West (2008) found that many classic biases, including anchoring, outcome bias, base-rate neglect and sunk cost, were largely unrelated to cognitive ability, though some, such as belief bias, were related to it. Smart people can be highly susceptible.
The gap between how biased your task answers were and how biased you rate yourself on twelve statements. Research on the blind spot (Pronin, Lin and Ross, 2002; Scopelliti and colleagues, 2015) found that most people see themselves as less biased than others; this test's version compares you with your own task answers instead.
Only if you choose. All computation happens in your browser, and none of your answers is sent to show you your result. If you choose to save your result to a free LifeGraph+ account, your seven bias scores, your two map averages, your Bias Blind Spot and your profile are kept there with the date; until you buy the report for that result, a free account shows only its archetype. If you buy The Bias Tripwire from your result, only your seven bias scores and your seven self-ratings go to checkout, to write it, and this tab keeps your answers until you close it, so a canceled checkout comes back to your result. Page-level analytics never include your answers or results. Otherwise, close the tab and your result is gone.
Yes. Scores on bias tasks move with practice, mood, time of day and familiarity with the questions, and this test reuses the same questions, so a retake partly reflects your memory of them. Your score is a snapshot, not a fixed trait.
The task formats come from the heuristics-and-biases literature — Tversky and Kahneman (anchoring and base rates), Evans (belief bias), Lichtenstein and Fischhoff (calibration), Fischhoff (hindsight), Arkes and Blumer (sunk cost) and Baron and Hershey (outcome bias) — and the interpretation from Pronin and Scopelliti (bias blind spot) and Stanovich, West and Toplak (rational thinking), among others. All items are LBL-original; the full reference list is at the bottom of the results page.
Yes. The results page has a share text you can copy, with your archetype. No personal identifiers are included.
No. These biases come from mental shortcuts everyone relies on. High scores are an invitation to try the habits listed for each bias, each with its source, not a character judgment.