In research for my upcoming book, Big Decisions: Why we make them badly, how we can make them better, I have discovered more than 280 psychological, perception, memory, logic, physical and social effects, errors, biases, shortcuts, fallacies and traps that lead us into making bad decisions.  Here are ten of what I find to be among the most surprising and thorny traps.  They go by varied names and have many disguises.  I have grouped these traps in three categories, and for each offer a definition and thoughts about why it poses a problem for decision making, and then give some examples of how they can lead us astray.  Read on to find the answers to the "true or false" quiz and to learn much more about ways we unknowingly trip ourselves up.

Our vocabulary is replete with phrases that express the dual way that we recognize, process and deal with the input that we receive in life.   In the introduction to his seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes, "As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified.  But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are."  Kahneman's observation is backed by the decades of research that he and his late partner, Amos Tversky, conducted on judgment and decision-making.