Mental Model
Self-Interest and Incentive Bias
People's beliefs, judgments, and behaviors are systematically warped by their incentives—and this happens below conscious awareness
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Mental Model
Self-Knowledge
The meta-cognitive capacity to accurately perceive one's own mental states, abilities, patterns, motivations, and blind spots
Mental Model
Self-Organization
The emergence of order in a system without external direction—patterns, structures, and behaviors arise from local interactions following simple rules
Mental Model
Self-Organized Criticality (Bak)
Per Bak's discovery that many complex systems naturally evolve toward a 'critical state'—a state of marginal stability where small perturbations can trigger cascading events of any size
Mental Model
Self-Preservation
Self-preservation names the protection of continued existence, safety, or essential resources
Mental Model
Self-Selection Bias
The distortion that occurs when people choose whether to participate in a group, study, or activity—making the participants systematically different from the non-participants in ways that affect the outcome
Mental Model
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors (skill, effort, intelligence) and our failures to external factors (bad luck, unfair circumstances, other people)
Mental Model
Semantic Engines and Syntactic Engines
Dennett distinguishes semantic competence from the formally and causally specified mechanisms that may realize it
Cognitive Move
semantic network
Links stay close to meaning rather than to events: is a kind of, is part of, has the property, is heard as. Reach for it when one word is quietly doing two jobs, because both meanings end up hanging off that word and the split becomes something you can point at. Small by nature. Six or seven nodes around one contested term is usually the whole drawing.
Mental Model
Semmelweis Reflex (Rejecting New Evidence Against Norms)
The automatic tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms—named after Ignaz Semmelweis, whose evidence that handwashing prevented maternal fever was rejected by the medical e…
Mental Model
Senior Moment vs. Cognitive Reserve
The popular concept of 'senior moments' — brief lapses in memory or word-finding — masks a more nuanced reality described by cognitive reserve theory
Mental Model
Sensate Focus Framework (Masters & Johnson)
Sensate focus, developed by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, is a structured touching exercise that paradoxically improves sexual function by removing sexual performance pressure
Mental Model
Sense of Place and Belonging
Sense of place is the emotional bond between person and location, encompassing place attachment (affective connection) and place meaning (narratives and identity tied to a location)
Mental Model
Sensemaking Bias
The cognitive tendency to construct coherent narratives and causal explanations from random or loosely connected events—seeing meaningful patterns where none exist
Mental Model
Sensitive Periods (Montessori)
Montessori sensitive periods are proposed developmental phases of heightened responsiveness to particular activities
Cognitive Move
Sensitivity
Write down the smallest real change your measure can actually see, given sample size and normal noise. Other slots say what you count; this one says how fine a difference counting can resolve before the result is unreadable.
Mental Model
Sensitivity Analysis
Sensitivity analysis examines how model outputs or decisions change when inputs or assumptions vary
Mental Model
Sensitivity to Fairness
The deep human concern with fairness that extends beyond self-interest—people will sacrifice personal gain to punish unfair behavior and refuse profitable deals that feel inequitable
Cognitive Move
Sensor
Ask whether this entity is where your system first detects that something changed. Not who moves work or stores it, but who registers a signal early. If they go quiet, you stop noticing problems until they are expensive.
Cognitive Move
Separate phases
Cut a stretch you have been treating as one continuous activity into segments that run by different rules. Each segment gets its own goal, its own success test, and its own definition of what confusion or slowness means.
Cognitive Move
Sequence
Here you reorder the steps you already planned, without changing what any of them are. Ask which piece should go first, what should come after it, and whether an earlier step makes a later one easier or unnecessary. Order, not clock time.
Cognitive Move
Sequence / Batch
Put dependent steps in order and group similar work to stop constant switching.
Cognitive Move
Sequence and time
Puts events on one time axis, so the order, the size of the gaps, and the moment something passes to someone else all show.
Cognitive Move
sequence diagram
Every party gets a lifeline. Every message, request, or handoff is an arrow from one lifeline to another, drawn at the point where it happened. Waiting shows up as distance with no arrows in it. The form is unusually good at showing who is blocked and who does not know they are being waited on.