
Recognize shifting baseline effects and evaluate how gradual norm changes distort long-term judgment.
Explain time and hyperbolic discounting and assess their impact on present-biased decision-making.
Explore time discounting in executive decision making, balancing quarterly shareholder focus with long-term strategic potential, and evaluate terms to avoid sacrificing long-term value for short-term gains.
Explore a forecast horizon simulator to see how quarterly pressure, crisis mode, and long-term incentives shape short-term thinking, then run the notebook and adjust inputs to engineer short-term thinking.
Analyze motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and echo chambers in belief formation and reinforcement.
Explore how describing an initiative with different keywords changes perception and adoption in this narrative framing lab, using a single input variable to test outcomes.
Identify self-serving and self-protective biases that distort self-assessment and responsibility attribution.
Identify self-serving perception, self-enhancement, and illusion among executives, balancing optimism with accountability. Deliver on promises and minimize the gap between what you think and what you do, avoiding blame.
Evaluate herd, group polarization, and in-group biases in collective decision-making and extremism.
Engage in a group think pressure simulator to explore how diversity viewpoints, CEO dominance, and input variables shape group think pressure, identify contributing factors, and engineer worst-case scenarios.
Detect perceived depth and effort biases and assess how they influence valuation and action.
Assess how naming and labeling biases alter perception, behavior, and future outcomes.
Simulate executive perception distortion by adjusting inputs such as consensus, financial pressure, and public pressure. Explore which factors amplify or mitigate distortion and engineer a maximized distortion scenario.
Identify overfitting biases and evaluate risks of extrapolating from limited or past-specific data.
Differentiate moral evaluation from moral blame and assess its impact on collaboration and conflict.
Navigate a moral framing distortion simulator to see how political alignment, emotional framing, and group cohesion influence polarization and how to engineer high-polarization scenarios analytically.
Analyze loss aversion, sunk cost, and endowment effects in persistence and escalation decisions.
Executives learn to recognize loss, sunk cost, and endowment bias, and decide today whether to start or drop an initiative.
Explore sunk cost escalation bias with a simulator by adjusting emotional attachment, money invested, and public commitment to observe how outputs shift.
Explain salience-driven memory distortions and assess their influence on judgment and recall.
Explore how peak-end and recency primacy shape memorability of a presentation using a simulator, adjusting opening strength, data density, ending impact, and emotional climax to engineer memorable outcomes.
Evaluate how simplicity and perceived triviality bias memory, understanding, and persuasion.
Executives encounter simplicity bias and authority effects that mask underlying issues. Ask targeted questions: what are you not telling me, and what else is going on, to justify beyond simplicity.
Explain familiarity and exposure effects and assess their role in belief formation over time.
Identify suggestibility mechanisms and evaluate implementation intentions as behavioral drivers.
Be aware of others’ suggestions, double-check the source of ideas, and manage impulses to resist manipulation; recognize implementation attention as a persuasion tool in hiring, projects, and decisions.
Explore interpersonal biases that shift how we interpret events based on others' actions, including authority bias, hostile attribution bias, and naive realism, and how motivated reasoning shapes judgment.
Assess authority and halo effects and their impact on critical thinking and decision quality.
Develop intellectual integrity by challenging authority and exposing halo effects, calling out inconsistencies politely regardless of status to prevent deceit and manipulation in executive thinking.
Analyze attribution biases and their role in misjudging intentions and behaviors.
Evaluate naive realism and its effects on expectations, disagreement, and institutional trust.
Explore how consistency manipulation drives ongoing behavior through first-person commitments, escalation, and rationalization, with examples from charities, terms of service, and the Ikea effect.
Explore consistency manipulation in executive relations, from escalation of commitment and active choice to visualization, pros lists, and written commitments, and learn how adept leaders avoid these traps.
Explore how emotional manipulation uses others' emotions to drive actions, from hype and fear to bullying and guilt, including positive or negative outcomes, emotional blackmail, and attention seeking.
Explore how manipulation in executive relations uses shared identity to persuade by showing understanding of others' views. See examples of aligning with peers and recalling past collaborations to influence decisions.
Examine how executives manipulate facts by reweighting metrics, downplaying weak areas, and emphasizing strong results in projects, initiatives, and performance metrics.
Explore how context manipulation sways executive judgments by framing favorable comparisons and highlighting positives and negatives. Identify when present versus past benchmarks or internal predecessors distort performance.
Explore nine manipulation techniques, from consistency and emotional manipulation to context and labeling, and learn to identify and prevent manipulation through awareness of cognitive biases.
Learn to mentally prepare and apply defensive and offensive tools to deal with difficult people, guided by four modules: inner game, defensive tools, offensive tools, and strategy.
Begin with the inner game to set your frame before techniques, detach from reactions, reinforce your identity, and document the behavior to guide future responses.
Explore defensive tools to protect yourself from negative behaviors, using boundary framing, explicit inquiring, and careful documentation to block harassment and keep daily life uninterrupted.
documenting the consequences of someone's actions creates a clear, measurable record that defends you in business decisions, using emails, read receipts, screenshots, and videos.
Explore offensive tools to hold others accountable and stop problematic behavior, including implementation intention, intent labeling (creating a consistency trap), and presence and persistence to actively stop the other side.
Intent labeling forces statements in the first person, creating a consistency trap; use either repeat-back or active-choice to lock in commitments for defense or offense.
Presence and persistence deter intimidation by holding the tension in tough conversations, using frames and boundaries to guide action and reveal true intents through eye contact and a firm stance.
Vasco's YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/VascoPatricio
Vasco's booking page (for consulting/coaching:
http://CoachingBooking.com/
In this course, we will cover the usual cognitive biases, fallacies, and other errors and distortions in human behavior and thinking, and their applications in an executive context.
These can be caused by external triggers, skewed perceptions, other people, and/or many other triggers. Although it's not always easy to simply "fix" these biases, a thorough understanding of them is the first step to changing perception and behavior.
You will learn about both frequent and unknown/obscure biases including:
- Loss aversion;
- Time discounting, baseline discounting, symbol grounding and symbol dependence;
- Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, negative attribution and many other biases related to emotion;
- Perceived depth and effort manipulation, simplicity and triviality biases, and more;
- Salience effects, the peak-end effect, and others;
- The focusing illusion and affluent pressure;
- Anchoring, framing and context manipulation;
... As well as many others, and how they apply in a corporate and executive context.
The course is presented in a reference guide format. In short, lessons are not sequential or dependent. You can take any specific section and watch it, and the contents will be encapsulated. But naturally, for someone watching the whole course in one go, things will be sequential and ordered. By the time you're done, you'll be an expert on all things cognitive biases.
If this seems the course for you, let's begin!