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Free Mind Traps quiz: 82 trivia questions and answers — biases & brain illusions. Easy to hard, with explained answers. No sign-up.
Start this quiz →🖨️ Printable version (20 questions + answers)
From negativity bias to motion illusions, this quiz explores the cognitive traps that regularly trick our brains. A fun way to better understand your own reasoning.
This quiz currently has 82 questions, ranging from easy to hard, available in French, English and Spanish when the Spanish translation is available.
Warm up before the quiz with these 16 trivia questions and their explained answers: click a question to reveal the answer.
Answer: Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to favour information that confirms our beliefs or hypotheses.
Answer: Recency bias. Recency bias is the tendency to give more weight to recent information in a series.
Answer: Cognitive economy. The brain constantly seeks to minimise mental load by favouring heuristic shortcuts.
Answer: Rationalisation. Rationalisation allows us to construct logical (but false) explanations to justify impulsive or irrational behaviour.
Answer: Groupthink. The desire for harmony within the group leads to suppressing dissenting views and validating decisions without critical examination.
Answer: Illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe that information is true simply because it has been repeated multiple times.
Answer: The number of items it can hold. Working memory is limited to about 7 items (the 'magic number seven'), which leads the brain to simplify information.
Answer: Immediate reward from the limbic system. The limbic system, seat of emotions and immediate desires, often overrides the prefrontal cortex (reasoning).
Answer: Pareidolia. Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, such as faces, in random or ambiguous stimuli.
Answer: Adelson's illusion. Adelson's illusion shows that squares of the same colour can appear different depending on their context.
Answer: Negativity bias. Negativity bias is the tendency to give more weight to negative information than to positive information.
Answer: Confabulation. Confabulation is the production of false memories without any deliberate intention to deceive, aimed at ensuring logical continuity.
Answer: Hostile attribution bias. This bias leads us to interpret ambiguous behaviour by others as being motivated by hostile intent.
Answer: Cognitive avoidance. Cognitive avoidance is a strategy for limiting exposure to anxiety-generating stimuli.
Answer: Cognitive blind spot. We are far better at detecting biases in others than at seeing our own.
Answer: Pygmalion effect. A person's behaviour is influenced by the expectations others hold of them (self-fulfilling prophecy).
66 more questions are waiting for you in the quiz!