Sources

“Cite or it didn't happen” is the house rule. Every trap teaches a real, replicated-or-classic finding from judgment and decision-making research. Here is each trap's primary citation, plus the data sources behind specific factual claims.

Honesty note: the jellybean jar, the escaped mouse, Project Hoverboot, and the popcorn menu are fictional scenarios built to demonstrate real effects. No citation covers the jar. The jar is beyond science.

Trap citations

• The Anchor DropAnchoring

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.

• The Frame FlipThe framing effect

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458.

• The Base Rate GoblinBase-rate neglect

  Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80(4), 237–251.

• The Pattern GremlinConfirmation bias

  Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129–140.

• The Availability AmbushThe availability heuristic

  Lichtenstein, S., Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., Layman, M., & Combs, B. (1978). Judged frequency of lethal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 551–578.

• The Sunk Cost SwampThe sunk cost fallacy

  Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.

• The Decoy DuckThe decoy effect

  Huber, J., Payne, J. W., & Puto, C. (1982). Adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives: Violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(1), 90–98.

• The Confidence CannonOverconfidence & calibration

  Moore, D. A., & Healy, P. J. (2008). The trouble with overconfidence. Psychological Review, 115(2), 502–517.

• The Probability PileupThe conjunction fallacy

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90(4), 293–315.

• The Door DilemmaConditional probability (the Monty Hall problem)

  Krauss, S., & Wang, X. T. (2003). The psychology of the Monty Hall problem: Discovering psychological mechanisms for solving a tenacious brain teaser. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132(1), 3–22.

• The Streak MirageThe gambler's fallacy

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76(2), 105–110.

• The Ownership TaxThe endowment effect

  Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1325–1348.

• The Bigger Bowl BamboozleRatio bias (denominator neglect)

  Denes-Raj, V., & Epstein, S. (1994). Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: When people behave against their better judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(5), 819–829.

• The Obvious AnswerCognitive reflection

  Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.

• The Doubling DelusionExponential growth bias

  Wagenaar, W. A., & Sagaria, S. D. (1975). Misperception of exponential growth. Perception & Psychophysics, 18(6), 416–422.

• The Bullet Hole BlunderSurvivorship bias

  Mangel, M., & Samaniego, F. J. (1984). Abraham Wald's work on aircraft survivability. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79(386), 259–267.

• The Do-Nothing DoctrineOmission bias

  Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1990). Reluctance to vaccinate: Omission bias and ambiguity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 3(4), 263–277.

• The Raise RuseMoney illusion

  Shafir, E., Diamond, P., & Tversky, A. (1997). Money illusion. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 341–374.

• The Third Letter HeistThe availability heuristic (retrieval fluency)

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.

• The Phantom CrowdConformity (social proof)

  Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1–70.

• The Rose-Tinted ForecastUnrealistic optimism

  Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 806–820.

• The Imaginary SpotlightThe spotlight effect

  Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.

• The Ticket TantrumMental accounting

  Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, values, and frames. American Psychologist, 39(4), 341–350.

• The Sure Thing SyndromeThe certainty effect (Allais paradox)

  Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.

• The Impatience EnginePresent bias (hyperbolic discounting)

  Thaler, R. (1981). Some empirical evidence on dynamic inconsistency. Economics Letters, 8(3), 201–207.

• The Mystery Bag GambitAmbiguity aversion (the Ellsberg paradox)

  Ellsberg, D. (1961). Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 75(4), 643–669.

• The Flattery MachineThe Barnum (Forer) effect

  Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123.

• The Deadline MirageThe planning fallacy

  Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381.

• The Lean SpinAttribute framing

  Levin, I. P., & Gaeth, G. J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(3), 374–378.

• The Hindsight RefereeOutcome bias

  Baron, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Outcome bias in decision evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(4), 569–579.

Specific factual claims

• US mortality comparisons in the Danger Ranking Test (asthma vs tornadoes, deer collisions vs sharks, insect stings vs lightning)

  • CDC National Center for Health Statistics, underlying cause of death data (asthma: ~3,500+ deaths/yr; hornet/wasp/bee stings: ~72 deaths/yr average, 2011–2021).
  • NOAA National Weather Service natural hazard statistics (tornadoes and lightning fatalities, multi-year averages).
  • Insurance Institute for Highway Safety / State Farm analyses of animal–vehicle collisions (deer-related crash fatalities, ~150–200/yr).
  • International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum of Natural History (~1 US shark fatality/yr average).

• Saturn has more confirmed moons than Jupiter (274 vs 95)

  • International Astronomical Union / NASA moon counts following the March 2025 recognition of 128 additional Saturnian moons.

• Base-rate arithmetic in the Detective Test (a 'Series K' flag is wrong ~65% of the time)

  • Bayes' theorem applied to the stated fiction: P(K|flag) = (0.12×0.80) / (0.12×0.80 + 0.88×0.20) ≈ 0.35. The mice are fictional; the arithmetic is not.

One more disclosure: this game measures nothing about real intelligence. Falling for these traps is the default behavior of healthy human brains — including the brains of the researchers who discovered them. That's the whole point.