Are We Really Biased: 4 Biases and the Possible Cure

We think top students are logical and objective, but data shows bias shapes our thinking daily.

Photo by Brett Jordan from Unsplash

We like to think that being a student at a top-tier university like HSE makes us experts in logic and objective thought. We believe we are the masters of our schedules and the kings of our research. But the data says something else entirely. It suggests that our brains are not the perfect processors we imagine them to be, but rather a collection of shortcuts and glitches designed to help us survive the pressure of the semester.

To find out whether there are specific shortcuts our own brains take to navigate the semester, I conducted a survey with 13 of my peers from the Master’s program in Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication. The results were both enlightening and humbling. They suggest that when it comes to our own abilities, we don’t just make mistakes, we systematically deceive ourselves.

Why Two Weeks is Never Enough

It is a scene every HSE student knows well: it’s 11:00 PM, a 15-page term paper is due in exactly 59 minutes, and you are staring at a blinking cursor on a blank white screen. In my survey, I asked students to estimate the time needed for such a task, but with a hypothetical luxury: “You have a 15-page term paper due in two weeks. If you started tomorrow and worked with average focus, how many total hours of actual writing would it take you to finish?”

The responses revealed a fascinating spectrum of over-optimism. A small group of “extreme optimists” claimed they could finish the entire task in just five or six hours. One student confidently capped their work time at exactly eight hours, meaning they expected to produce nearly two pages of high-level academic prose every sixty minutes, research included. The majority of the cohort was more moderate but still hopeful, estimating between ten and twenty-four hours. Only a few students acknowledged the true depth of the work, providing “heavy-duty” estimates of forty to seventy-two hours.

However, the real “glitch” appeared in the follow-up question. When recalling their actual past experiences, these same students admitted that papers they estimated would take 20 hours actually took 40 hours or more. This is the Planning Fallacy. Coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it describes our tendency to underestimate the time required for a task, even when we have a mountain of evidence from our own past that says we are being unrealistic (Warje, 2021).

I’ve been there myself. During my first year as a philosophy student, I was convinced that writing a deep-dive essay on Plato’s Symposium would take me a manageable five hours. I sat down, feeling motivated and undistracted. Fifteen hours later, as the sun began to rise, I realized how wrong I was. We fail to account for the “unknown unknowns”, i.e., the hours spent hunting for a lost citation or the time spent simply staring at a sentence that refuses to make sense.

The Cure: The Rule of Two and Segmented Planning

To overcome this, experts suggest we stop looking “inside” at our current feelings of motivation and start looking “outside” at our track record (Ibid.). One practical strategy is The Rule of Two: take your most optimistic estimate and automatically double it. Additionally, try Segmented Planning. Instead of estimating the essay, estimate the research phase, the outlining phase, the drafting phase, and the final citation check as separate tasks. When we break the “beast” into smaller parts, it becomes much harder for our brain to lie to us about how long it will take to conquer it.

Familiarity vs. Fluency

Has there ever been a time when, while preparing for an exam, you felt you understood a concept so well that you skipped it to focus on harder questions? Then, you receive the exam paper and find you cannot even explain that “easy” concept. You either draw a total blank or provide a definition so vague it becomes meaningless.

This is the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. In my research, this was the most entertaining part of the process. When I asked my peers if they understood the core concept of “Intercultural Communication,” 85% of them rated themselves as a 9 or 10 out of 10. We feel like experts because we hear these terms every day in lectures. Nevertheless, when I asked for a three-sentence technical definition of High-Context vs. Low-Context societies, without using the word “culture”, the mirage faded instantly.

Out of 13 responses, only four could be considered correct. Three students confused “Context” with “Power Distance” (social hierarchy), while others gave poetic but technically empty answers, such as “soaring through the clouds.” We mistake familiarity for fluency. We are like tech-savvy Gen-Z students who use smartphones for eight hours a day but, when asked how the glass actually knows where our finger is touching, we guess heat or pressure. In reality, it’s about electrical charges disrupting a capacitor field (HowStuffWorks, n.d.). It turns out we aren’t exactly experts; we’re more like casual users who know which buttons to press but have no idea how the underlying engine actually functions.

The Cure: The Feynman Technique.

The best way to expose this bias is to try and teach the concept to someone else. Try the Explain to a 10-Year-Old method: if you cannot explain your thesis or a core concept in simple, non-jargon terms, you do not truly understand it yet. Before you skip a topic while studying, force yourself to write a three-sentence definition from memory. If you can’t do it, the mirage has won. Last but not least, honesty is essential. Admitting when we lack specific knowledge is the first step toward actually acquiring it. By remaining curious and receptive to new perspectives, we can effectively broaden our horizons.

The Habit of Being Right

While failing to define a concept is a humbling academic experience, a far more insidious threat emerges when we believe we are right. Once we have committed to a particular understanding, no matter how shallow, our brains begin to filter the world to protect that belief. This shift from “not knowing” to “refusing to see” marks the transition into the territory of our next bias. In an academic setting, Confirmation Bias is perhaps the most dangerous trap of all. It is our tendency to search for, favor, and recall information that confirms what we already believe, while ignoring anything that challenges us (Pilat & Krastev, 2021).

In my survey, I asked: “You find a source that perfectly supports your view but has a weak methodology. Do you use it anyway?” A staggering 61.5% said yes. Even more telling were the reactions to a strong, peer-reviewed study that directly contradicted their own thesis. While some students suggested they would “highlight the differences,” many admitted they would simply ignore it. One respondent jokingly, but honestly, captured the human ego perfectly: “Crack the code, delete the study, brainwash others, I’m a winner”.

We often don’t look for truth in the library; we look for “mirrors” that reflect our own opinions back at us. This creates a soft version of bias where we squeeze contradictory data into our own narrative just so we don’t have to admit we were wrong.

The Cure: Active Disconfirmation and the Darwin Rule

True academic rigor requires you to be your own “devil’s advocate.” Try The Search for 'No': for every three sources that support your thesis, specifically hunt for one high-quality source that argues the opposite. Or simply share your bibliography with a classmate and ask them to spot one-sidedness. We can also learn from Charles Darwin. Whenever Darwin came across a fact that contradicted his theory, he forced himself to write it down within 30 minutes. He knew that if he didn’t, his brain would auto-delete the uncomfortable information to protect his existing theory (Blau, 2015).

When Leading Precedes Learning

The habit of being right eventually builds a wall of false confidence where our belief in our own mastery far outpaces our technical reality. The Dunning-Kruger Effect occurs when we lack the very skills we need to realize we are struggling. In our cohort, the majority of the class was quite humble about their own writing, with nearly 46.2% rating themselves as “Average.” However, the moment the question shifted from “doing” to “teaching,” the confidence surged upward.

Despite the technical confusion we saw regarding core concepts earlier, over 75% of the class felt very confident (rating themselves a 7 or higher on a 1-10 scale) that they could explain a difficult subject well enough for a freshman to pass an exam. We recognize the terms, so we mistakenly believe we have mastered the mechanics.

This creates a fascinating contrast: we feel ready to lead others through the forest even when we only have a “vague map” of the terrain ourselves. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it underscores a healthy level of academic confidence, but at the same time it highlights the gap between feeling like an expert and the complex reality of teaching.

The Cure: Objective Benchmarking

Ego is the enemy of growth. To stay objective, you need external mirrors. Use Rubric Auditing: compare your work against a strict, published rubric rather than your feeling of how well you wrote. Finally, Seek Brutal Feedback: ask your professors for a “pre-read” specifically to find flaws and gaps, not just to confirm that you are doing a good job (Pilat & Krastev, 2021).

So, are we really biased? The answer is a resounding Yes. But being biased isn’t a “fail.” It’s a symptom of a human brain trying to navigate the high-pressure, high-speed environment of a Master’s program at HSE. By identifying these four traps — The Planning Fallacy, the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, Confirmation Bias, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect — we stop being victims of our biology and start being true researchers.

Being “smart” does not protect you from being biased; in fact, it often makes you more skilled at rationalizing your mistakes. The goal of recognizing these biases isn’t to reach a state of perfection, but to achieve Intellectual Humility. By implementing these cures, we can move from being “unskilled and unaware” to being disciplined, objective, and truly critical thinkers.

References and Further Reading

1. Blau, A. (2015, July 28). Help needed: Darwin on confirmation bias. Adrian Blau’s Blog. https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/help-needed-darwin-on-confirmation-bias/
2. HowStuffWorks. (n.d.). How does a computer mouse or a smartphone screen work? https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question716.htm
3. Pilat, D., & Krastev, S. (2021). Confirmation Bias. The Decision Lab. Retrieved April 9, 2026, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/confirmation-bias 
4. Pilat, D., & Krastev, S. (2021). Dunning–Kruger Effect. The Decision Lab. Retrieved April 9, 2026, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/dunning-kruger-effect
5. Pilat, D., & Krastev, S. (2021). The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. The Decision Lab. Retrieved April 9, 2026, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-illusion-of-explanatory-depth
6. Warje, K. (2021). Planning fallacy. The Decision Lab. Retrieved April 9, 2026, from https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/planning-fallacy

Shared by

Anna Petrovskikh