mind traps

Research by Danu Anthony Stinson and colleagues calls this the “acceptance prophecy”— the psychological phenomenon where your expectation of being accepted or rejected subtly shapes your behavior, which in turn influences whether others actually accept or reject you.

Co-authors Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, on finding the right frame:

“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”

Occam’s broom is used to describe people’s tendency to sweep relevant facts “under the rug.” No doubt you’ve experienced Occam’s broom in an argument before — when the other person simply refuses to engage with a fact you’ve laid out in favor of your side.

A Rube Goldberg machine , named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.

For hundreds of years, “Occam’s razor” has been a go-to in any critical thinker’s mental toolbox. Also known as the “principle of parsimony,” this heuristic (read: a mental shortcut) is often summarized as: “When you have two competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simpler one is the better.”