Chapter 15 Exercises: Cognitive Biases — A Field Guide for Platform Designers

Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1 [Reflection] Think about a streak you currently maintain or have maintained on a social media or productivity app (Snapchat, Duolingo, etc.). Write two paragraphs: one describing the emotional experience of maintaining the streak, and one analyzing that experience through the lens of loss aversion. Has understanding the loss aversion mechanism changed how you feel about the streak? If not, what does that tell you about the relationship between cognitive knowledge and behavioral change?

Exercise 2 [Reflection] Recall a time when you checked a social media post's like count or view count before deciding how much attention to give it. Be specific about the situation and the content. Now analyze: was your engagement with the content positively correlated with its like count in ways that went beyond the information the count actually provided? Write a paragraph assessing your personal susceptibility to social proof in content evaluation.

Exercise 3 [Reflection] Think about your relationship with notification badges. Do you find unread notification counts distressing? Do you feel compelled to clear them even when you don't actually want to engage with what they indicate? Write a reflection on your personal experience of the Zeigarnik effect in your digital life, and assess whether awareness of the mechanism has changed your response to it.

Exercise 4 [Reflection] The chapter discusses the availability heuristic and how viral social media content warps perception of what is common. Identify a topic on which you suspect your social media consumption may have distorted your perception of prevalence or frequency. (Possibilities: crime rates, political views in your community, health risks, relationship norms.) Research the actual statistics. Write a reflection on the gap between your intuitive estimate and the data.

Exercise 5 [Reflection] The optimism bias suggests that most people believe documented social media harms apply to others more than to themselves. Honestly assess: do you believe you are personally affected by social media in the ways described in this chapter? Write an honest self-assessment that tries to account for the optimism bias distortion. What evidence from your own behavior would a neutral observer use to assess your actual relationship with social media?

Exercise 6 [Reflection] The Zeigarnik effect drives completion-seeking behavior — the need to clear notification badges, finish a scrolling session at a "natural stopping point," and so on. Write a journal entry from a day when you deliberately resisted this effect — when you closed an app without resolving a Zeigarnik tension. Describe the experience. If you have not done this, try it today and then write the reflection.

Exercise 7 [Reflection] The chapter describes Maya discovering that her Instagram Explore page had filled with diet content after an initial period of engagement with body-conscious content. Have you experienced a similar algorithmic feedback loop — where early engagement with content led to an increasingly specific content environment that may not have reflected your actual long-term interests? Describe the experience and analyze it using the anchoring and confirmation bias concepts from this chapter.

Research Exercises

Exercise 8 [Research] Find and read the abstract and key findings of Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) prospect theory paper or a reliable summary of it. Write a 300-word explanation of loss aversion in your own words. Then identify three social media features (beyond the streak mechanic mentioned in the chapter) that you believe exploit loss aversion. For each, explain the mechanism.

Exercise 9 [Research] Research Nir Eyal's Hooked model. Find the chapter or section describing the "Variable Reward" component and explain how it draws on behavioral psychology research (particularly B.F. Skinner's work on reinforcement schedules). Then find at least one critical review or academic analysis of the Hooked model's ethical implications. Summarize the critique.

Exercise 10 [Research] Read Kramer et al. (2014), "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Note: the full text is available through many university library systems. Summarize: (a) the experimental design, (b) the findings, (c) the authors' statement about ethics, and (d) the subsequent debate about the experiment's ethics in academic and journalistic sources.

Exercise 11 [Research] Research the history of the Instagram like count: in 2019, Instagram began hiding like counts from public view in some markets. Find reporting or academic analysis of this experiment. What were the results? Did hiding like counts affect user wellbeing, posting behavior, or engagement? Why did Instagram ultimately not universally implement the change? Analyze what this history tells us about the tension between social proof mechanisms and platform revenue.

Exercise 12 [Research] Find Brady et al. (2017), "Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks" (PNAS). Summarize the key finding about the relationship between moral-emotional language and retweet rates. Then analyze: what does this finding imply for the content that algorithmic amplification systematically advantages? What types of content does it disadvantage?

Exercise 13 [Research] Research the history of the Facebook "Reactions" feature (the extension of the "Like" button to include Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry reactions). Find any reporting on how these reactions were weighted in Facebook's engagement algorithm and how this weighting may have contributed to the amplification of outrage content. Write a 400-word analysis connecting the Reactions design decision to the cognitive biases discussed in this chapter.

Exercise 14 [Research] Research Robert Cialdini's concept of social proof. Find one example of research (beyond what is cited in this chapter) that demonstrates social proof's effect in a digital or online context. Summarize the research and analyze its implications for social media design ethics.

Analysis Exercises

Exercise 15 [Analysis] Map each of the twelve cognitive biases covered in this chapter onto specific design features of one social media platform you use regularly. Create a table with three columns: Cognitive Bias, Platform Feature That Exploits It, and Brief Analysis of the Mechanism. Complete the table for all twelve biases, noting where you cannot find a corresponding feature (and analyzing why).

Exercise 16 [Analysis] The Hooked model describes a Trigger-Action-Variable Reward-Investment cycle. Trace one complete Hooked cycle for a specific social media app you use: identify the specific trigger (internal or external), the action, the variable reward mechanism, and the investment element. Analyze which cognitive biases are activated at each step of the cycle.

Exercise 17 [Analysis] The chapter argues that confirmation bias, combined with algorithmic recommendation, creates echo chambers. But some researchers argue that algorithmic echo chambers are less significant than the echo chambers created by social network structure and individual choice. Research this debate and write a 500-word analysis arguing for one side. Use specific evidence to support your position.

Exercise 18 [Analysis] Analyze the authority bias as it applies to three different types of verified accounts: (a) a celebrity with a verified account endorsing a health product, (b) a verified account claiming scientific expertise making a claim that contradicts scientific consensus, and (c) a verified journalist making an error in a report. For each, analyze: what does the verification checkmark signal, what does it fail to signal, and what would a user need to know to correctly calibrate their trust?

Exercise 19 [Analysis] The availability heuristic distorts perception of what is common. Design a study to test whether a specific type of social media content (e.g., crime news, relationship drama, political conflict) produces availability heuristic-driven distortions in users' estimates of real-world frequencies. What would your study measure, how would you measure it, and what controls would you need?

Exercise 20 [Analysis] The in-group/out-group bias drives engagement with tribal content. Analyze your own social media feed for evidence of this: over a period of one week, note any content that frames issues in terms of in-group versus out-group dynamics (political, cultural, aesthetic, etc.). How much of this content appears in your feed? Is the proportion greater than you would expect based on the proportion of such content in the world? Analyze what this tells you about your algorithm's optimization priorities.

Exercise 21 [Analysis] The chapter describes the mere exposure effect as creating familiarity-based attachment to platforms independent of their objective value. Design a test for your own mere exposure effect with one social media platform: spend one week actively comparing the platform to two alternatives on specific criteria (content quality, user wellbeing impact, time efficiency). Then write an honest assessment of whether your preference for the familiar platform is based on the evaluation criteria or on familiarity.

Creative Exercises

Exercise 22 [Creative] Write a "day in the life" narrative from the perspective of a social media algorithm over the course of one user session with Maya. The algorithm should narrate its own decision-making, including which biases it is "aware of" (in the sense of having learned through optimization), which content it selects and why, and what metrics it is optimizing for. The narrative should be technically accurate to how recommendation algorithms work while being accessible as creative writing.

Exercise 23 [Creative] You are Dr. Aisha Johnson, Velocity Media's Head of Ethics, and you have been asked to present a bias audit report to the board. Write the executive summary of that report (approximately 500 words) identifying which cognitive biases are currently being exploited by Velocity Media's platform design, the magnitude of concern for each, and your recommended response. The report should feel like an actual corporate ethics document.

Exercise 24 [Creative] Design a social media platform that is explicitly engineered to counteract the cognitive biases discussed in this chapter rather than exploit them. For each of the twelve biases, propose a specific design feature that would reduce its exploitation. You do not need to make the platform commercially viable — but you should acknowledge, in your design document, what engagement metrics would likely be sacrificed by each design choice.

Exercise 25 [Creative] Write the pitch deck for a startup called "Lucid Feed" that sells a social media experience specifically designed to counteract cognitive bias exploitation. Your pitch deck should include: the problem (bias exploitation), the solution (specific design choices), the target market, the revenue model (how do you make money without advertising?), and a response to the objection that users have demonstrated through their behavior that they prefer engaging design over "bias-neutral" design.

Exercise 26 [Creative] Write a short story (500–800 words) in which Maya, having read a chapter about cognitive biases in social media, attempts to use the knowledge to navigate one hour of Instagram use differently. The story should be realistic: show both moments where the knowledge changes her behavior and moments where she knows what is happening and clicks anyway. The story should not be didactic or moralistic — just accurate.

Group Exercises

Exercise 27 [Group] Bias scavenger hunt: As a group, spend 30 minutes each on your respective social media feeds, specifically looking for examples of each of the twelve cognitive biases in action. Pool your examples in a shared document. At the end, discuss: which biases were easiest to find? Which were hardest? Were there platforms where certain biases were more prominent than others?

Exercise 28 [Group] Simulate a product design session at a social media company. The team's goal is to design a new "Daily Digest" feature that increases daily active users by 15%. Half the group plays designers who must consider the cognitive bias implications of their design choices; the other half plays product managers focused on the engagement metric. After 30 minutes of design work, debrief: what biases ended up embedded in the design, and how did the tension between ethics and metrics play out?

Exercise 29 [Group] Conduct a social proof experiment: each group member posts identical content on a social media platform (or uses existing posts), but with artificially varied levels of prior engagement (using different accounts, or posting to different size audiences). Compare the engagement each version receives. Write a group analysis of what you found and what it implies about the relationship between social proof and content quality.

Exercise 30 [Group] Debate: "The cognitive biases discussed in this chapter are exploited by platforms, but users exploit them too — they game the like count, they use reciprocity norms strategically, they perform for the algorithm. The relationship between platforms and users is mutual exploitation, not one-sided manipulation." Divide into teams and debate this proposition. Use evidence from the chapter and your own experience.

Exercise 31 [Group] Design a "cognitive bias literacy" curriculum for high school students. Working in groups, develop a lesson plan (not longer than two class periods) that teaches the five cognitive biases you consider most important for teenagers to understand in the context of social media use. Your curriculum should be honest about what understanding the bias can and cannot do for students' behavior.

Exercise 32 [Group] Role-play the Facebook board meeting at which the Emotional Contagion experiment's publication was being discussed. Roles: Mark Zuckerberg (CEO), Sheryl Sandberg (COO), Adam Kramer (data scientist who led the study), the General Counsel, a board member representing institutional investors, and a newly appointed ethics advisor. The meeting has been called because a journalist is about to publish a story about the experiment. What does the company decide to do?

Extended Research Projects

Exercise 33 [Research/Analysis] Conduct a personal behavioral experiment over 30 days: in the first two weeks, use social media as you normally would, keeping a brief daily log of usage patterns, emotional states before and after sessions, and specific content you engaged with. In weeks three and four, actively try to counteract one cognitive bias per week (e.g., week three: deliberately engage with low-like-count content; week four: deliberately ignore notification badges for two hours each morning). Write a 1,500-word analysis of your findings.

Exercise 34 [Research/Creative] Investigate the history of persuasive psychology applied to commercial contexts before digital media: Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), BJ Fogg's captology work, and the behavioral economics revolution. Write a 1,500-word historical essay tracing how psychological knowledge about cognitive bias has been applied to commercial persuasion from mid-century advertising to contemporary platform design. Identify the continuities and the qualitative breaks.

Exercise 35 [Research/Analysis] Conduct a systematic analysis of the academic literature on one of the twelve biases covered in this chapter. Find at least five peer-reviewed studies on the bias and its exploitation in digital contexts. For each study, note: the research design, the key finding, the effect size (if reported), and any limitations the authors acknowledge. Write a 2,000-word literature review that synthesizes these findings and assesses: how strong is the evidence that this bias is exploited by social media platforms, and what are the gaps in the current research?