Mental Model
In-Group Favoritism / Out-Group Bias
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
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Cognitive Move
Incentive mismatch
The person, company, or tool you depend on is rewarded for hitting its own number, which is not the same thing as getting you the result you actually came for.
Mental Model
Incentives
Incentives are anticipated consequences that can influence the attractiveness of actions
Mental Model
Income Diversification Strategy
Income diversification applies portfolio theory to earned income: construct multiple uncorrelated sources rather than relying on one job or client
Mental Model
Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
Munger's term for the brain's powerful drive to maintain consistency between beliefs, actions, and identity—resisting any change that would create internal contradiction
Mental Model
Incremental Degradation
A pattern in which small changes accumulate into a meaningful decline in quality, reliability, or alignment with an intended standard
Mental Model
Indaba (Inclusive Decision-Making Assembly)
Indaba is a Zulu and Xhosa tradition of inclusive deliberative assembly where all stakeholders gather to address a significant community matter
Cognitive Move
Independence
Check whether your multiple sources actually have different failure modes or are secretly the same source repeated.
Cognitive Move
Independent replication or triangulation
Repeat the check with different people, methods, or samples whose errors would point in different directions.
Cognitive Move
index card
Small enough to carry, so it holds one claim and a sketch and nothing more. The size is the editor. What it buys is not depth but re-encounter: the card comes back into your hand before the moment it applies, which is the only time reading it changes anything.
Cognitive Move
Index-to-baseline
Pick one reference point, call it 100, and restate every other value as a percentage of it. Unlike a fairer denominator, this fixes a common starting line, so series in different units can share one chart and be read against each other.
Mental Model
Indian Cyclical Time (Kala and Yuga)
Indian cosmology conceives time as fundamentally cyclical across nested scales
Cognitive Move
Indicators
Pull out the items that are only measurements standing in for something else. They are readings on a dial, not the goal, function, or mechanism itself. Once labeled this way, they stop competing with the things they were meant to track.
Cognitive Move
Indirect parties
People who never show up on the plan but absorb its knock-on effects. They don't attend, decide, or operate anything. They feel it one step removed, through a schedule that shifts, work that gets covered, or a cost that lands somewhere else.
Mental Model
Individualism-Collectivism Spectrum
The most researched dimension in cross-cultural psychology describes whether a culture's primary social unit is the autonomous self or the embedded group
Mental Model
Inert Historical Facts
Dennett examines historical facts that leave no discernible trace in a later state, using digital information preservation and discarded physical distinctions as examples.
Mental Model
Inertia
Newton's first law describes constant velocity under zero net external force in an inertial frame
Cognitive Move
Inference
This link is the reasoning that turns recorded numbers into a conclusion: the comparison you picked, the baseline, the causal story, the statistical method. Ask what else the data would have to rule out for that conclusion to hold.
Cognitive Move
Inference changes
Demand a downstream difference you can name: some prediction, question, measurement, test, or action comes out differently than it would have under the old frame. Where "helps" asks if the same work got easier, this asks whether the output itself changed.
Mental Model
Inflammation as Root Cause
Chronic low-grade inflammation has emerged as a unifying mechanism underlying most major age-related diseases: cardiovascular disease (atherosclerosis is fundamentally an inflammatory process), cancer (inflammatory envir…
Mental Model
Inflation
Inflation is an increase in a general price level over a specified period, measured using a defined index
Mental Model
Inflection Point
A mathematical inflection point is a point where a curve changes concavity
Cognitive Move
Inflows
List every transfer that adds to a stock, name where each one comes from, and attach a rate and amount to it. Sources you forgot to count are why a balance behaves better than your arithmetic predicts.
Mental Model
Influence Diagrams
A visual decision-modeling tool that maps the relationships between decisions (rectangles), uncertainties (ovals), and outcomes (rounded rectangles) with arrows showing influence