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

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by... See more

Tim Gorichanaz • Finding Heroes In A Messy Digital World | NOEMA

We identify people by the worst thing they’ve ever done.

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

Adam Grant • Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

first-instinct fallacy

Utility maximization was first developed by utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In microeconomics, the utility maximization problem is the problem consumers face: "How should I spend my money in order to maximize my utility?" It is a type of optimal decision problem. It consists of choosing how much of each available good... See more

Jonothan Levin • Utility maximization problem

The fundamental problem with an information cascade is that after a certain point it becomes rational for people to stop paying attention to their own knowledge—their private information—and to start looking instead at the actions of others and imitate them. (If everyone has the same likelihood of making the right choice, and everyone before you

James Surowiecki • The Wisdom of Crowds

Another aspect of the unconscious is that it will always seek out the path of least resistance.

Dr. Matthew B. James • Integrate the Shadow, Master Your Path

Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.[1]

Limitations include the difficulty of the problem requiring a decision, the cognitive capability of the mind, and the time available to... See more

Herbert A. Simon • Bounded rationality

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

Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

Zeigarnik effect

the brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

a machine that tries to circumvent thinking

Self-Serving Bias: This is the tendency to blame external forces when bad things happen and to credit ourselves when good things happen. It is based on our lack of development of the three core capacities—locus of control, scope of considering, and source of agency. According to this bias, when I win a poker hand, it is due to my skill at reading

Carol Sanford • No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work

self-serving bias