Find a thinking move to make, or a mental model to understand a situation.
Psychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's finding that people judge experiences primarily by their most intense moment (the peak) and their final moment (the end)—not by the average or total of the experience
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Sam Peltzman's finding that safety improvements often fail to reduce overall harm because people compensate by taking more risks—adjusting their behavior to maintain a constant level of perceived risk
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The error of attributing human-like intentions, emotions, and coherent agency to complex systems that have none—treating organizations, markets, governments, and nature as if they were individuals with unified purposes
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency of social sciences, business, and other complex domains to import the precision, mathematical formalism, and deterministic models of physics—even when the underlying phenomena don't support that level of pre…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman and Tversky's finding that people systematically underestimate the time, cost, and risk of future actions while overestimating their benefits—even when they have direct experience with similar past projects that…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The extended model adds to Kahneman's planning fallacy by incorporating Flyvbjerg's finding that STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION (deliberate lying about project prospects) operates alongside genuine cognitive bias—and in man…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The social phenomenon where everyone privately disagrees with a norm but publicly complies because they assume everyone else genuinely supports it—creating a false consensus that nobody actually holds
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic preference for immediate rewards over future rewards, beyond what any constant discount rate would explain—closely related to hyperbolic discounting but emphasizing the behavioral consequences
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The psychological phenomenon where exposure to a stimulus influences subsequent judgment and behavior—often without conscious awareness
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The ancient Greek concept of akrasia—acting against your own better judgment—applied to the modern epidemic of delay
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The robust finding that physical proximity is one of the strongest predictors of relationship formation—people form friendships, partnerships, and romantic relationships disproportionately with those they encounter frequ…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The statistical error of confusing P(evidence|innocent) with P(innocent|evidence)—the probability of seeing this evidence IF someone is innocent versus the probability that someone IS innocent GIVEN this evidence
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel Prize-winning theory that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point (not in absolute terms), feel losses roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains (loss aversion), and are ri…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The systematic distortion of the scientific literature caused by the preferential publication of positive, significant, or novel results—and the suppression of null, negative, or replicating results
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The automatic tendency to devalue a proposal, idea, or concession simply because it comes from an adversary or perceived opponent
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The deep social norm and psychological tendency to RETURN what we receive—favors for favors, concessions for concessions, gifts for gifts, hostility for hostility
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Gigerenzer's finding that when choosing between two options—one recognized and one not—people (and organisms) infer that the recognized option scores higher on the criterion of interest
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The error of attributing regression to the mean to some causal intervention rather than recognizing it as a statistical inevitability
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The finding that subjective satisfaction is determined more by RELATIVE comparisons than by ABSOLUTE conditions—people evaluate their situation by comparing to reference points (peers, past selves, expectations) rather t…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman and Tversky's finding that people judge probability based on how well something REPRESENTS its category—how well a specific case matches the prototype of its category—rather than on statistical base rates
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Systematic distortions in how people respond to surveys, interviews, or research questions—producing data that reflects the measurement process rather than the true state of affairs
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to overweight information that is emotionally striking, unusual, or attention-grabbing—and underweight information that is routine, statistical, or abstract
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The error of drawing conclusions from a sample that doesn't represent the population you're trying to understand—because the sampling process systematically over-includes some types and under-includes others
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Stephen Covey's distinction between two fundamental orientations: scarcity mindset (the belief that resources, opportunities, and success are fixed in quantity—your gain is my loss) and abundance mindset (the belief that…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The failure of human emotion and valuation to scale proportionally with the magnitude of an issue
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The distortion that occurs when the process of selecting a sample systematically excludes certain types of observations—producing a sample that doesn't represent the population
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
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
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors (skill, effort, intelligence) and our failures to external factors (bad luck, unfair circumstances, other people)
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
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 Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The productive counterweight to analysis paralysis: the principle that shipping (releasing, publishing, delivering) an imperfect product is almost always better than perfecting a product that never ships
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The counterintuitive finding that persuasive messages from low-credibility sources become MORE persuasive over time, not less
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The phenomenon where individuals exert less effort in group settings than they would working alone—because individual contribution is less visible and less accountable in groups
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Cialdini's principle that people determine correct behavior by observing what others are doing—especially in uncertain situations
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Cialdini's influence principle that people determine what's correct by observing what others do—especially in uncertain situations where individual judgment feels insufficient
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice and evaluate your appearance, behavior, and performance—believing you're in a 'spotlight' that doesn't actually exist
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The preference for the current state of affairs over change, even when change would be objectively beneficial
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Bent Flyvbjerg's term for the systematic, deliberate distortion of costs, benefits, and risks in project proposals—lying about project prospects to get them approved
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The observational bias of searching for something only where looking is easiest, not where the thing is most likely to be—named after the joke of a drunk looking for keys under a streetlight because 'the light is better…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
A duplicate entry of the Streetlight Effect emphasizing the organizational and strategic dimension: institutions systematically study, fund, and address problems that are easy to investigate rather than problems that mat…
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's meta-heuristic describing how the brain handles difficult questions by substituting an easier question without noticing the swap
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The tendency to continue investing in something because of previously invested resources (time, money, effort) rather than based on future expected value
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The error of drawing conclusions from the survivors of a selection process while ignoring those who didn't survive—producing a systematically distorted picture
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Rolf Dobelli's concept: people assume swimmers have great bodies BECAUSE they swim, when actually people with great bodies are SELECTED into competitive swimming
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Kahneman's dual-process framework: System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional, and effortless—it generates impressions, feelings, and quick judgments without conscious effort
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Munger's unified treatment of how both positive and negative emotional orientation toward a person systematically distorts all related cognition
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Munger's inclusion of envy as a fundamental psychological force that drives an enormous amount of human behavior while being almost universally denied
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
Organisms conserve energy whenever possible—taking shortcuts, choosing the path of least resistance, and defaulting to habits over deliberate thought
Cognitive Biases & HeuristicsPsychology & Cognitive Science
The cognitive bias of assuming that people's behavior is more consistent across situations than it actually is—overestimating the role of personality traits and underestimating the role of situational factors
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