🧠 mental models

The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute another's actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.

The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, and even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort".

Mental accounting is a behavioral economics concept that describes how individuals assign different values to the same amount of money based on subjective criteria, leading to irrational decisions.

The just-world fallacy, or just-world hypothesis, is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve" – that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor.

At its core, this concept is simple:

Humans (and animals) change their behavior dramatically in response to rewards and punishments.

But the power lies not in its simplicity — it’s in how often we underestimate or misuse it.

Munger argues that incentives are so powerful that even well-intentioned systems can produce perverse outcomesif the rewards and punishments are misaligned.

Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid(1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:[1][2]

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.[2]

The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Monthor extreme programming.[3]