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

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

Daniel Kahneman • Thinking, Fast and Slow

priming effects

Sunk Cost Fallacy: The most common way in which people plan vacations is to decide where and when they want to travel, and only later do they consider the fares. (More on the fallacy of this approach and a superior strategy in Chapter 3.) Once we’ve mentally committed ourselves to a specific trip, not going or going somewhere else doesn’t feel like

Scott Keyes • Take More Vacations: How to Search Better, Book Cheaper, and Travel the World

How to free yourself from "hindsight bias”

Josh Kaufman bigthink.com

Anchors can even influence how you think your life is going. In one experiment, college students were asked two questions: (a) How happy are you? (b) How often are you dating?

Richard H. Thaler • Nudge: The Final Edition

the anchoring effect

The urge to blame is based . . . on the fear of being blamed

Sheila Heen • Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

It’s a simple idea, but incredibly difficult in practice. Most of the time... See more

Louis Chew • The Steel Man Technique: How To Argue Better And Be More Persuasive

Steel Man technique and why it is hard to apply

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable. When we say, “I should have known that would happen,” or, “I should have seen it coming,” we are succumbing to hindsight bias.

Annie Duke • Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

hindsight bias

In psychology, the Ovsiankina effect describes the innate human urge to finish tasks we've initiated. This tendency to resume an interrupted action is especially prevalent when the action hasn't yet been achieved.[1] The effect is named after Maria Ovsiankina, who conducted research on this behavior.

Maria Ovsiankina • Ovsiankina effect

Ovsiankina effect

The planning fallacy describes our natural bias when forecasting our own productivity: we focus on the best-case scenario, or something dangerously close to it. Rarely does that scenario play out.

David Epstein • Why You Should Plan To Get Less Done

planning fallacy