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Psychology & Cognitive Science
Ellen Langer's finding that people believe they have more influence over random or uncontrollable outcomes than they actually do—especially when superficial features of control are present (choosing your own lottery numb…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Rozenblit and Keil's finding that people believe they understand complex systems and mechanisms FAR more deeply than they actually do—and that this illusion is specific to explanatory knowledge (how things work) rather t…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The false belief that your internal states—thoughts, feelings, intentions—are more visible to others than they actually are
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The deeply rooted human tendency to favor members of one's own group (in-group) and distrust or devalue members of other groups (out-group)—even when group membership is arbitrary
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The deep human tendency to comply with authority figures—even when compliance conflicts with personal judgment, ethics, or evidence
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The comprehensive model of how stress affects cognitive function, decision quality, and behavior across a spectrum from optimal arousal to complete breakdown
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to seek additional information even when it cannot affect the decision—gathering data for comfort rather than for decision quality
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive process of translating between different scales of intensity—mapping a value from one dimension to an 'equivalent' intensity on another
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The statistical error of analyzing only the people who completed a treatment rather than everyone who was assigned to it—creating a biased picture of the treatment's effectiveness
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive process by which meaning is constructed from events—and the transformative power of deliberately reinterpreting past events through new frameworks
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A framework mapping self-knowledge across two dimensions—what you know about yourself and what others know about you—creating four quadrants: Open (known to self and others), Blind Spot (known to others but not to self),…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Steven Pinker's argument that language is not a cultural invention but a biological adaptation—an instinct as natural to humans as web-spinning is to spiders
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Seligman's discovery that when organisms experience repeated, uncontrollable negative events, they learn to stop trying to escape—even when escape becomes possible
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic tendency to evaluate ideas, proposals, and arguments more favorably when they come from people we like—and more critically when they come from people we dislike
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Julian Rotter's concept measuring whether individuals believe outcomes are determined by their own actions (internal locus) or by external forces like luck, fate, or powerful others (external locus)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
People feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as they feel the pleasure of gaining the equivalent
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Nassim Taleb's term for the error of applying neat, game-like probability models to the messy, fat-tailed real world
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Abraham Maslow's observation: 'If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' The tendency to over-rely on familiar tools, frameworks, or approaches regardless of the situation—because the tool you…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Named after Robert McNamara's Vietnam War strategy of measuring success by body counts: the error of making decisions based solely on quantitative metrics while ignoring qualitative factors that are harder to measure but…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Three different ways to measure the 'center' of a distribution, each revealing different information
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive ability to run 'what if' scenarios in your mind—simulating possible futures, rehearsing actions, and predicting outcomes without actually acting
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Robert Zajonc's finding that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it—even without any interaction, reinforcement, or positive association
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The finding that simply ASKING people about a behavior increases the probability of that behavior occurring
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic tendency to overweight vivid, emotional, or personally experienced evidence and underweight statistical, abstract, or base-rate evidence
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological phenomenon where doing something 'good' gives you unconscious permission to do something 'bad'—as if morality works like a bank account where good deeds create credits that can be spent on bad ones
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The human compulsion to create coherent stories from random data—finding causation in correlation, pattern in noise, and meaning in randomness
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Nassim Taleb's extension of the narrative fallacy emphasizing its role in Black Swan blindness: our stories always make the past seem orderly and predictable, which creates the illusion that the future is equally orderly…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The deep human compulsion to organize experience into stories with characters, causation, and meaning—even when the underlying reality is random, complex, or meaningless
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive error of evaluating decisions in isolation rather than as part of a broader portfolio—treating each choice as if it exists independently rather than as one of many decisions you'll make
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to respond to the POSSIBILITY of an event without regard to its PROBABILITY—reacting to whether something CAN happen rather than how LIKELY it is to happen
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Taleb's term for the systematic human bias toward the new over the time-tested—the reflexive assumption that newer means better
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Rolf Dobelli's argument that consuming news creates an illusion of being well-informed while actually degrading understanding
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's distinction between bias (systematic error in one direction) and noise (random, unwanted variability in judgments)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The distortion that occurs when people who don't respond to surveys, studies, or feedback requests differ systematically from those who do respond—making the collected data unrepresentative of the full population
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological tendency to underestimate the probability and impact of disruptions—assuming that because things have been normal, they will continue to be normal
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The organizational tendency to reject external ideas, solutions, or technologies in favor of internally developed alternatives—even when external options are superior
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency for researchers' or evaluators' expectations to influence the outcomes they observe—not through deliberate manipulation but through subtle, unconscious cues that shape the behavior of subjects or the interpr…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful inactions—preferring to let bad things happen through inaction rather than cause them through action, even when the consequences are identical or worse
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Skinner's framework that behavior is shaped by its consequences: reinforcement (positive or negative) increases behavior frequency, while punishment decreases it
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic tendency to overestimate the probability of positive events and underestimate the probability of negative events—seeing the future through rose-colored glasses
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to judge the quality of a decision by its outcome rather than by the quality of the decision-making process at the time it was made
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Charlie Munger's emphasis on the human tendency to give disproportionate weight to evidence that is emotionally vivid, concrete, and easily imagined—while discounting evidence that is abstract, statistical, or pallid
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The human tendency to build overly complex explanations that perfectly fit past data but fail to predict future events—finding patterns in noise and building theories around them
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The state where continued analysis reduces rather than improves decision quality—where gathering more information, considering more scenarios, and deliberating longer produces worse outcomes than deciding with the inform…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The specific form of denial where the psychological pain of acknowledging a reality is so great that the mind refuses to process the information—not through deliberate deception but through unconscious protective filteri…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Barry Schwartz's observation that while some choice is essential for autonomy and satisfaction, too much choice produces paralysis, anxiety, and decreased satisfaction
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive process of recognizing similarities between a current situation and previously encountered situations—the foundation of expert intuition
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to connect two things simply because they occur together, regardless of any causal relationship
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