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
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
In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices, no longer curious about where it’s imperfect and where it could improve.
frozen ‘best practices’
The concept of a shutdown ritual might at first seem extreme, but there’s a good reason for it: the Zeigarnik effect. This effect, which is named for the experimental work of the early-twentieth-century psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, describes the ability of incomplete tasks to dominate our attention. It tells us that if you simply stop whatever you
... See morethe Zeigarnik effect
In The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that infinite choice – whether of mutual funds, breakfast cereals or lovers – is exhausting to the human psyche and leads to greater dissatisfaction. When presented with too many choices, we are not only stunned, like a kid in the proverbial candy shop, but also less satisfied with
... See morethe paradox of choice
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse... See more
The spotlight effect is what happens when we imagine that our lives are performative, or “on display” for others to consume.
spotlight effect
Zeigarnik effect vs Ovsiankina effect