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Stuff You Should Know

How Cognitive Biases Work

Stuff You Should Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.582.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Humans have all sorts of weird quirks that cause us to do silly things and make bad decisions. It’s not our fault though. Our brains are wired that way. Learn about the psychology of cognitive biases in this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an IHeart podcast.

0:02.6

Guaranteed Human.

0:05.6

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

0:15.4

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,

0:19.9

and we are getting down to business.

0:21.6

Getting right to it here on stuff you should know because we got a lot to cover here.

0:27.1

That's right. So Chuck, I got a little bit of an intro. Let's hear it. Was that it? That

0:33.7

wasn't it? Yep. Um, do you remember how homeostasis used to come up a lot?

0:40.9

Yes.

0:41.7

So for those of you who haven't been listening that long,

0:44.4

homeostasis is what your body and your mind and your brain wants to return to, right?

0:48.7

You just want everything nice and even keel and normal and without exerting too much effort and energy, right? That's homeostasis.

0:56.6

That's, are you asking me? Mm-hmm. Sure. Okay. So one of the ways that the, your brain

1:03.0

returns to homeostasis as fast as it can is to use shortcuts in making decisions, right? Because if you're having to decide something, you're

1:12.4

actively being challenged. You're not in your homeostatic space. So if you use a shortcut,

1:19.5

you can say something like, I've had the red apple in the past and it was delicious. I've

1:26.1

eaten the brown, mushy one before and it was awful.

1:29.7

I'm going to eat this red apple, right? Rather than going to the trouble of pulling both

1:34.0

apples out and like analyzing them with a microscope and all that, you can just kind of use a

1:38.3

little shortcut. That's a heuristic. And it makes a lot of sense because your brain is like,

1:42.7

great, I didn't use that much energy.

1:44.5

I made the right decision and we're good to go.

...

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