mind traps

“In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life (...) we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”

from Think Again by Adam Grant

baja

Even though it isn’t necessarily true, people equate having choices with having control.

Susan Weinschenk • 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

I am giving you a choice (this or that) so don’t complain, you have control

By delaying the task of fleshing out and firming up the speech, King allowed Jones to benefit from the Zeigarnik effect. In 1927, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. (Page 99)

Adam Grant • Originals – Adam Grant

Zeigarnik effect

Our prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain that regulates our thoughts, actions, and emotions — has a ‘novelty bias,’ meaning that its attention is easily hijacked by something new, whether it’s a bird landing on your balcony’s rail to rest (one did just as I was writing this sentence) a text from a friend or a breaking news notification.

How Too Much Information Can Make Us Stupid and Miserable

novelty bias

Publication bias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientific literature is full of positive results. Null or negative results have traditionally been hard to publish and are often relegated to abandoned hard drives, despite the fact that they represent valuable knowledge claims. Research users looking for evidence get a distorted view, which — like... See more

An “Omics” Answer to the Replication Crisis

publication bias

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.

The real reason some people are instantly likable

In data analysis, survival bias is taking the known into account while neglecting the unknown (which nevertheless exists).

Roman Zykov • Roman's Data Science: How to monetize your data

survivorship bias

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart

Jonathan Haidt • The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2]

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse

Charles Goodhart • Goodhart's law

Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.

thekcpgroup.com • The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

confirmation bias