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The 100 Traps of Your Mind: Biases, Manipulations and Dirty Tricks Used on You Every Day (and How to Shield Yourself)
Paperback
Series: 100 Curiosities
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 30 2026
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.53 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Why does everything cost 9.99? Why do you buy more when it says only 2 left? Why do you vividly remember things that never happened? And why are you so sure nobody fools you... which is exactly what everybody thinks?
Your brain is an extraordinary machine for surviving and, at the same time, a dreadful one for judging a price, recalling a conversation or deciding whether that person is good for you. It isn't your fault: biases are not the failings of fools, they are standard features of the human brain. The Nobel laureate has them and so does your brother-in-law. The difference lies in knowing they're there.
This book gathers ONE HUNDRED of these traps, arranged in six blocks, and each one ends with a practical ANTIDOTE so you can defend yourself:
- Your senses and memory: the gorilla you don't see, the memories implanted in you, the faces in plug sockets.
- Numbers: anchoring, the sunk cost, why losing hurts twice as much as winning.
- Whoever wants to sell you something: the cinema decoy, the magnet of the word free, the struck-through price that was never real.
- Emotional manipulation: gaslighting, the after all I've done for you guilt trip, the reward that hooks you like a slot machine.
- The group and authority: why you obey a white coat and call the short line the long one if everybody else does.
- Yourself: the subtlest traps, the ones you set so as not to admit you were wrong.
Written by an engineer with a warm, mischievous tone, grounded in real scientific psychology (Kahneman, Cialdini, Ariely, Asch, Milgram, Loftus...) and without a single page of motivational filler. Each trap runs to a page or two: perfect for reading in sips, on the train, or before your next purchase.
A self-defence manual for your mind. Illustrated with 32 original full-colour illustrations.
For the curious, the sceptical, sellers, buyers, the manipulated and the manipulators. In other words: for everyone.
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