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
availability bias
“Sometimes, knowing the name is good enough.”
The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.
halo effect
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.
survivorship bias
Our bias is to always add more
But thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken
Zeigarnik effect
About three quarters of students are convinced that revising their answer will hurt their score. Kaplan, the big test-prep company, once warned students to “exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer.4 Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.” With all due respect to the lessons of
... See morefirst-instinct fallacy
the fallacy of “we tried that, didn’t work” via dhh:
no logical fallacy provides as much of an obstacle as “we tried that, didn’t work”. The fallacy that past failed attempts dictates the scope of what's possible.
That just because someone, somewhere, one time attempted something similar and failed, nobody else should try. That lowering our
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