mind traps

Because people with ADHD feel things so strongly, our brains often make the wrong prediction. The intensity level of our response does not match the gravity of the situation.

Collaboration and reciprocity are natural, and yet in the world we inhabit, competition and the fear of scarcity often block us from seeing these ways of being with one another.

Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers:10 we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.

The converse of the halo effect is the horns effect: All perceived negative qualities correlate. If Stalin is evil, then everything he says should be false. You wouldn’t want to agree with Stalin, would you?

Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by

Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency. A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. No one who’s driven home drunk has woken up the next day and seen it as a good decision just because they

I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.

A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me

We fall victim to the fat-cat syndrome,32 resting on our laurels instead of pressure-testing our beliefs.