This is the final exam for Debiasing & the Bias Blind Spot. It pulls the whole course together: why you rate yourself less biased than everyone else (and why that feeling is worthless as evidence), why merely knowing about a bias barely reduces it, the two families of real fixes — changing the thinker (outside view, considering the opposite, pre-mortems, calibration training) and changing the environment (checklists, red teams, decision hygiene, algorithms, pre-commitment) — the hierarchy that ranks them, how to match a fix to a bias and to the stakes, and the ways debiasing itself can mislead you. Several questions look easy until you spot the trap: an “aware” fix masquerading as a real one, a structural tool aimed at the wrong bias, or over- correction dressed up as humility. Reason each one through.
How this exam works
Read carefully — this exam is final. Each question appears one at a time. Once you submit an answer it is locked for good: there’s no going back, no retry, and no restart. Your score is hidden until the end, where you’ll see a pass/fail verdict. The pass mark is 70%. A few questions ask you to select all correct answers.
What is the "bias blind spot"?
Select an answer to continue.
Course Recap
Big picture
Debiasing, in one picture
- Debiasing & the Bias Blind Spot
- The bias blind spot
- You rate yourself less biased than average and spot bias in others, not yourself (Pronin). Powered by the introspection illusion: you judge others by behaviour, yourself by inner thoughts that feel bias-free because biases run below awareness. Learning about biases can make it WORSE. Feeling objective is zero evidence of being objective.
- Why knowing doesn't help
- Awareness ≠ correction. Education barely debiases; anchoring persists even when warned/paid; hindsight and sunk cost persist. Biases are fast, automatic, below awareness — knowledge arrives too late and rationalises. Detecting a bias is easy; correcting your own live judgment is hard. Awareness is necessary but not sufficient.
- Change the thinker
- Willpower-based tools: outside view / reference class (base rate of similar cases, not inside-view detail), consider the opposite (antidote to confirmation bias; beware the fluency backfire), pre-mortem (assume it failed, explain why), calibration training with feedback (best-evidenced). Shared weakness: you must remember to run them.
- Change the environment
- Structural fixes that don't rely on catching yourself: checklists (offload judgment; WHO surgical checklist), red teams / structured dissent (dissent as an assigned role), decision hygiene (independent estimates BEFORE discussion — order is the fix), algorithms/simple rules (Meehl; consistency beats noisy override), pre-commitment (bind your future self).
- The hierarchy & matching
- Structure > incentives > training > mere awareness. Match the fix to the bias (independent estimates for anchoring, red team for confirmation, outside view for the planning fallacy) and to the stakes (heavy hygiene for high-stakes irreversible calls, not for small reversible ones).
- Where debiasing lies
- Weaponising "you're just biased" while exempting yourself (the blind spot returns). Over-correction into useless hedging — keep calibration AND resolution; trust expert intuition only in regular domains with good feedback (Kahneman–Klein). Hygiene has costs — scale to stakes. No technique removes bias; it only shrinks it. Build the structure because you can't be trusted.
- The bias blind spot
Key takeaways
The one idea to carry out of this course: you cannot think your way out of your own biases by knowing more about them. The bias blind spot guarantees you’ll feel objective while you’re not, because introspection can’t see biases that run below awareness — and that felt objectivity is worthless as evidence. So merely knowing barely helps. What helps sorts into two families: change the thinker (the outside view, considering the opposite, pre-mortems, and calibration training — real, but they lean on your willpower) and, more powerfully, change the environment (checklists, red teams, independent estimates before discussion, simple rules, and pre-commitment — which work whether or not you catch yourself). That gives the hierarchy: structure beats incentives beats training beats mere awareness. Match the fix to the specific bias and to the stakes, spend heavy hygiene only where a mistake is expensive and permanent, and stay humble — debiasing shrinks bias, it never removes it. The deepest move in the whole latticework of judgment is the most humbling one: build the process precisely because you know you can’t trust yourself to be objective.