Find a thinking move to make, or a mental model to understand a situation.
Psychology & Cognitive Science
Herbert Simon's foundational insight that human decision-makers are NOT the rational optimizers assumed by classical economics—they operate under three constraints that bound their rationality: limited information (you c…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The well-documented finding that the probability of any individual helping in an emergency DECREASES as the number of bystanders increases—the more people present, the less likely any single person is to act
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The logical fallacy of selecting only the data, examples, or evidence that supports your conclusion while ignoring the much larger body of evidence that contradicts it
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Pavlov's discovery that neutral stimuli, when paired repeatedly with stimuli that naturally produce responses, eventually produce those responses on their own
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random sequences—seeing 'streaks' and 'clusters' in data that are actually expected from randomness
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Leon Festinger's theory that holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously produces psychological discomfort (dissonance) that the mind resolves by changing one of the beliefs, adding a rationalizing belief, or reduci…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's observation that the human brain finds coherent narratives more compelling than accurate statistics—and when the two conflict, the narrative usually wins
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Cialdini's principle that once people make a commitment (especially publicly), they experience strong internal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment—even when new evidence suggests changing course
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The error of judging a specific, detailed scenario as MORE probable than a general one that contains it—violating the basic law that a subset cannot be more probable than its superset
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The intrinsic human drive to seek novel information and experiences—a motivation as fundamental as hunger or fear
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where, once you know something, you can't accurately reconstruct what it's like NOT to know it—making it difficult to communicate with or design for people who lack your knowledge
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's framework for reducing noise (unwanted variability) in judgment through procedural discipline—the decision-making equivalent of surgical hygiene
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A pricing and choice architecture phenomenon where introducing a clearly inferior third option (the decoy) shifts preference between the original two options
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A psychological defense mechanism where the mind refuses to acknowledge an uncomfortable reality—not as a deliberate lie but as an unconscious protective process that shields the ego from threatening information
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to focus on the numerator (the number of events) while ignoring the denominator (the total number of opportunities)—making large numbers of events seem alarming regardless of the base rate
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The phenomenon where the presence of others reduces each individual's sense of personal responsibility to act—because each person assumes someone else will handle it
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological principle that the perceived difference between two stimuli decreases as their absolute magnitude increases
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The asymmetry in how people evaluate evidence: evidence that CONFIRMS existing beliefs is accepted quickly and uncritically, while evidence that DISCONFIRMS existing beliefs is scrutinized intensely, picked apart, and di…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The investor behavior of selling winning investments too early (locking in gains to avoid the pain of watching them reverse) and holding losing investments too long (avoiding the pain of realizing a loss)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Rolf Dobelli's term for the failure to transfer knowledge and skills from one domain where you possess them to another domain where they'd be equally applicable
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological finding that people's retrospective evaluation of an experience is largely insensitive to its duration—a 3-minute cold-water immersion and a 30-minute one are remembered similarly if the peak intensity…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The French term for the tendency to view the world through the narrow lens of one's professional training—a more elegant and precise version of Maslow's Hammer applied specifically to professional expertise
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to judge the value of a product, service, or performance by the effort that went into it rather than by its actual quality or utility
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The (debated but practically useful) model that self-control draws from a limited resource that gets depleted through use—like a muscle that fatigues
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The phenomenon where a known solution method prevents the discovery of a better one—your familiarity with one approach to a problem literally blocks you from seeing superior alternatives
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where people value things they already possess more highly than identical things they don't—simply because they own them
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The persistent tendency to ignore the prior probability (base rate) of an event when evaluating new evidence—focusing on how well the evidence matches a scenario rather than how common the scenario is
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The broader cognitive failure of not noticing when detailed, specific stories are being treated as more probable than their component parts warrant—an extension of the conjunction fallacy into everyday reasoning
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive error of attributing an outcome to one cause when it actually results from multiple interacting causes—oversimplifying complex causation into a simple story
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A claim is meaningful and testable only if there exists some possible observation that could prove it wrong (Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where the presence of a feature is more noticeable and influential than its absence—we notice what IS there more readily than what ISN'T there
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to lock onto the first plausible explanation or solution and then selectively seek confirming evidence—closing the hypothesis space prematurely
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Csikszentmihalyi's psychological model identifying the conditions for optimal experience: flow occurs when challenge level closely matches skill level, goals are clear, feedback is immediate, and the activity demands ful…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Dobelli's term for the persistent belief that experts can predict the future—despite overwhelming evidence that expert predictions are barely better than chance for most complex domains
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
How information is presented dramatically affects how it's perceived and what decisions follow
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where you see an object or concept only in terms of its conventional use—unable to perceive alternative functions
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The false belief that past random events affect future random events—that a coin that has landed heads 10 times in a row is 'due' for tails
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Nassim Taleb's concept from a trader who made millions in lumber futures while believing 'green lumber' meant lumber painted green (it actually means freshly cut, unseasoned wood)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Irving Janis's concept describing a mode of thinking where the desire for group harmony and conformity overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives—producing irrational or dysfunctional decisions
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where a positive impression in one domain creates a positive bias across ALL domains—and a negative impression in one domain contaminates all others
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological phenomenon where people rapidly adapt to both positive and negative life changes, returning to a relatively stable baseline level of happiness
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that simplifies complex decisions into manageable judgments—producing quick, usually-good-enough answers without exhaustive analysis
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to believe, after an event has occurred, that you 'knew it all along'—retroactively adjusting your memory of previous expectations to align with the actual outcome
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to take excessive risks with money or resources perceived as 'gains' or 'winnings' rather than 'earned' income—as if house money (casino profits) is less real than your own money
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic tendency to prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later rewards—with the preference being disproportionately strong for immediate versus near-future rewards
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias where people place disproportionately high value on things they've personally created or assembled—even when the result is objectively inferior to alternatives
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic distortion of evidence evaluation based on political or ideological commitments—where people accept evidence that supports their ideology and reject evidence that challenges it, regardless of the evidence'…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The false belief that we notice everything important in our visual and cognitive field—when in reality, attention is extremely selective and we miss enormous amounts of information that we're 'looking at.' Simons and Cha…
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