Having access to unrelated information was enough to inflate their intellectual confidence.

The perceived fluency of an impending task makes us underestimate the difficulty of executing it.

Controllability: We are inclined to blame things that we can control rather than things that we cannot control.

The answer is that we can be susceptible to cognitive biases even after we learn about them because most (or perhaps all) of them are by-products of highly adaptive mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years to aid in our survival as a species. We can’t just turn them off.

Things that our mind can easily process elicit overconfidence. This fluency effect can sneak up on us in several ways. Illusion

that people are more willing to derive a cause from a correlation when they can picture the underlying mechanism. Even though the actual data remains the same, we are much more willing to leap to a causal conclusion when we can envision the fluent process by which an outcome is generated.

When we see final products that look fluent, masterful, or just perfectly normal, like a lofty soufflé or a person in good shape, we make the mistake of believing the process that led to those results must have also been fluent, smooth, and easy. When you read a book that’s easy to understand, you may feel like that book must have also been easy to