Knowledge and beliefs about behavioral biases

We study knowledge and beliefs about ten behavioral biases in pre-registered online experiments with 1807 participants from relevant groups in society—i.e., general population, financial professionals, and behavioral scientists. The general population is broadly aware of the content of the biases, with 64% of statements assessed in line with scientific consensus. Behavioral scientists exhibit the highest knowledge, followed by financial professionals and the general population. Beliefs about groups’ modal answers exceed chance, and each group is best predicted by its own members. Furthermore, we document a pronounced agreement bias: measured knowledge is substantially lower when respondents must disagree with an incorrect statement than agree with a correct one. Finally, we conceptually replicate the bias blind spot: participants rate themselves less susceptible than the average person in their peer group for every bias. Moreover, they expect behavioral scientists to be the least and the general population the most prone to biases. Given the well-documented prevalence of behavioral biases across populations with varying levels of education and training in this area, our findings cast doubt on whether knowledge alone is an adequate channel for addressing these biases.