The moment you're most certain you're being logical is the moment you're most exposed
You open your feed on the way home and someone has replied to your comment. You read it. The rebuttal is about your credentials. Where did your actual argument go?
Saturday afternoon, and you're putting something in a cart because everyone seems to be buying it. Do you need it — or are you being steered?
"Come on. I'm a fairly rational person."
You've thought that, right?
Here's a data point. Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test poses three short reasoning problems where the intuitive answer is wrong. Across 3,428 participants, only about 17% got all three right. At MIT, fewer than half did.
And it gets worse. West, Meserve and Stanovich found that cognitive sophistication does not reduce the bias blind spot — smarter participants were no better, and in some cases worse, at seeing their own biases.
You are most vulnerable precisely when you feel most reasonable.
What's running underneath all of it: logical fallacies. Arguments that look sound and quietly bend your judgment. They operate in meetings, in news, in advertising, and in conversations with people you love.
Learn them once and debates change, relationships change, spending changes, decisions change.
Ten fallacies, each one embedded deep in ordinary life.
Don't be intimidated. Knowing they exist is most of the defense. People who know where the hole is stop falling in it.