Your Brain Has Been Fooling You Your Entire Life.

A Nobel Prize winner spent 40 years proving it. Here are 10 mental traps controlling every decision you make: 🧵👇

💡 Daniel Kahneman, a Holocaust survivor, became obsessed with understanding human behavior. Why did some help Jews while others turned them in? Why do rational people make irrational choices? It took him decades to uncover the answers.

👬 In 1969, Kahneman met Amos Tversky. Together, they discovered: 🧠 System 1: Fast, intuitive, automatic thinking. 🧠 System 2: Slow, analytical, effortful thinking. The twist? System 1 runs the show 95% of the time.

⚡ System 1 helped our ancestors survive (“Is that a tiger?!”) but creates blind spots in modern life called cognitive biases. Here are 5 of the most powerful biases:

1️⃣ Anchoring Bias Your brain clings to the first info it gets. See a $1000 watch first? A $400 one feels cheap. See $400 first? It feels expensive. Stores use this for “deals.”

2️⃣ Loss Aversion We feel losses twice as intensely as gains. Losing $100 hurts more than finding $100 feels good. This explains why investors hold onto losing stocks.

3️⃣ Availability Bias We overestimate events we can easily recall. Hear about a plane crash? Flying feels riskier—even though driving is far more dangerous.

4️⃣ Confirmation Bias We seek info that confirms our beliefs and ignore the rest. Two people can look at the same data and draw opposite conclusions.

5️⃣ Planning Fallacy We underestimate how long tasks take. “It’ll only take 5 minutes” often means 15-20 minutes.

6️⃣ Hindsight Bias After something happens, we believe we “knew it all along.” This gives us a false sense of predictability and makes us overconfident in future decisions.

7️⃣ Overconfidence Bias We tend to overestimate our abilities, knowledge, and chances of success. This is why people underestimate risks or believe they’re better-than-average drivers.

8️⃣ Recency Bias We give more weight to recent events than older ones. If the stock market crashes today, we think it’ll stay bad—even if history says otherwise.

9️⃣ Sunk Cost Fallacy We stick to bad decisions because of the time, money, or effort we’ve already invested. It’s why people stay in bad relationships or hold onto failed projects.

🔟 Framing Effect Our decisions are influenced by how information is presented. A “90% success rate” sounds better than “10% failure rate,” even if they mean the same thing.