You are worse at this than you think.
That is not an insult. It is the finding — replicated for fifty years, in every population tested, including the people who study it. Try one.
In English, are there more words that start with the letter R, or more words with R as their third letter?
Ask yourself how you decided. You tried to recall examples. Words beginning with R arrive instantly — road, river, run. Words with R in third position do not, because memory is not indexed that way. Ease of recall felt like evidence of frequency. It is not. That substitution has a name: the availability heuristic.
It is one of 188. Most of the others are working on you right now, and they do not announce themselves either.
Reading a list of biases does not change how you decide.
Most bias apps hand you a glossary. You scroll it once, feel briefly clever, and keep making the same errors — because recognising a bias in a definition is a different skill from catching it in your own reasoning, under time pressure, on a decision that matters to you.
Debias is built for the second skill. It works in three passes.
Quiz until it is automatic
Realistic situations drawn from all 188 biases, not flashcards of definitions. Track accuracy over time and watch the gap close between knowing a bias and spotting it.
Run a bias check on a real call
Log a decision you are actually facing — a job offer, a purchase, a deadline you keep moving — and check it against the biases most likely to be at work. Sunk cost. Planning fallacy. Optimism bias.
See the pattern in your history
Your reflection log shows which biases you lean on most across decisions. That is the part a glossary cannot give you: not what biases exist, but which ones are yours.
Every bias solves a problem the brain actually has.
Biases are not defects bolted onto thinking. They are the cost of four shortcuts the brain needs to function at all. Debias groups all 188 by which of the four they come from — so you learn the mechanism, not a list of names.
Too much information
The brain filters aggressively. What gets through is what is recent, odd, or already believed — not what matters.
Not enough meaning
Gaps get filled with story. Patterns are found in noise, and confidence arrives long before the evidence does.
The need to act fast
Decisions cannot wait for certainty, so the brain trades accuracy for speed and rarely tells you the trade was made.
What should be remembered
Memory edits to save space. Details are dropped, gist is kept, and the revised version feels like the original.
Anyone whose decisions have a cost.
- StudentsPsychology, behavioural economics, and decision science — with worked examples rather than definitions to memorise.
- InvestorsWhere anchoring, loss aversion, and confirmation bias are expensive in a way you can measure.
- ManagersHiring calls, project estimates, and the sunk costs nobody in the room wants to name first.
- ResearchersDesigners and analysts who need to model how people actually behave, not how they should.
- Everyone elseThe biases do not check your job title before they run.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually think.
Get Debias on Google Play