Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A character learns about cognitive biases — confirmation bias, anchoring, availability heuristic, Dunning-Kruger effect, etc. — and confidently declares that now that they know about these biases, they're immune to them. This is, of course, itself a cognitive bias (the bias blind spot — the tendency to see biases in others but not in yourself).

The Humor

The meta-joke is perfect: learning about cognitive biases doesn't protect you from cognitive biases, but it does make you feel like it does, which is itself a bias. The character's confidence in their own rationality is inversely proportional to their actual rationality — a beautiful illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect that the character just learned about.

Context

The study of cognitive biases, popularized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work (and Kahneman's bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow), has become widely known. But as the comic points out, knowing the names of biases is not the same as being able to overcome them. Research suggests that bias awareness has minimal effect on actual decision-making.