Cognitive Bias
The Risk You Fear Most Is the One You Saw Most Recently
Availability is why a plane crash in the news outweighs a car ride's real odds. The bias isn't that you fear rare things — it's that vividness stands in for probability.
Psychology
Why people do the thing rather than the sensible thing, including us. Reported from experiments we ran on ourselves.
Reported by Ade Balogun.
Cognitive Bias
The Halo Effect: You Trust the Polished Person Before They Have Said Anything
The halo effect is one good trait, like confidence or polish, colouring every other judgement you make about a person. Here's what actually blunts it.
Cognitive Bias
Sunk Cost Is the Reason You Finish the Book You Hate
You keep going because you've already paid, and the money you spent is the one thing your future choices can't get back. What the sunk-cost effect is, when it's strongest, and the questions that reliably break it.
Cognitive Bias
The Decision You Didn't Make: How the Default Option Already Chose for You
Most of what you do this week was never a decision — it was a default someone else set, and you only notice it when it costs you. The default effect, and the one question that undoes it.
Cognitive Bias
You Don't Evaluate Evidence, You Defend the Conclusion You Already Reached
Motivated reasoning means the facts arrive last, as ammunition for a verdict you reached first. What it looks like in a real week, and the question that breaks it.
Cognitive Bias
The Advice You Read Is Mostly From the Survivors
The advice you read comes from people it worked for, while everyone who failed stays silent. That's survivorship bias — and how to ask for the denominator.
Cognitive Bias
I Estimated Five Tasks and Timed Them. The Planning Fallacy Measured.
I know the planning fallacy by name, and I still fell for it on five out of five tasks. Here are the numbers, and the one fix that actually helped.
Decision Making
I Made the Decision Two Weeks Before I Had to, and It Finally Stuck
The version of me who decides in advance and the version who decides in the moment are not the same person, and only one of them is reliable. What pre-committing actually does, and the one place it backfired.
Emotions
I Wrote Down Who I Envied for Three Months, and It Was a Better Career Assessment Than Any I Have Done
The feeling is unpleasant and socially unmentionable, which is why it goes unexamined. It is also unusually specific about what you actually want.
Habits
The Only Exercise Habit I Ever Kept Is the One I Deliberately Made Less Good
Four attempts at a proper routine, all abandoned inside two months. The fifth was worse in every measurable way and has run for three years.
Cognitive Bias
Some of My Biases Are Doing a Job, and Removing Them Made Things Worse
I tried to correct my optimism about new projects. It worked, and I started fewer things, and the ones I started were not better.
Decision Making
When Both Options Are Good, You Are Not Choosing Between Them
The hardest decisions are the close ones, and I think that is backwards. A close decision is by definition low-stakes; what makes it hard is something else entirely.
Motivation
I Did the Same Task Well in March and Badly in June. The Difference Was Not Me.
Looking back at when I have worked well, the pattern had nothing to do with discipline and almost everything to do with two conditions I had never tracked.
Decision Making
Most of My Big Decisions Were Made by Deferring Them
I went back through six years of major choices and found that in most of them I never chose. The deadline chose, or the option expired, and I experienced it as a decision.
Motivation
The Only Reliable Motivation I Have Found Is Another Person Waiting
I tested five ways of getting myself to do things I did not feel like doing. Four are variations on self-discipline and none of them worked twice.
Habits
I Started Tracking a Habit and It Immediately Got Worse
The streak worked for eleven weeks and then became the point. What happened next made me change how I measure anything I want to keep doing.
Emotions
I Stopped Treating Boredom as a Failure of Attention
Every time I was bored at work for six weeks, I wrote down what I was doing. The pattern was not what I expected and it changed what I delegate.
Cognitive Bias
I Wrote Down My Predictions for a Year. I Had Remembered Being Right.
Forty-one predictions, sealed and dated. The gap between what I predicted and what I remembered predicting is the most uncomfortable thing I have measured about myself.
Emotions
My Anger Is Almost Always About Something That Happened Earlier
I kept a log of every time I was disproportionately annoyed. In four cases out of five the actual cause was hours old and had nothing to do with the trigger.
Motivation
I Was Never Unmotivated. The Task Was Underspecified.
Every time I could not get started on something for a year, I wrote down what the next action actually was. In most cases there wasn't one yet, which is a different problem.
Cognitive Bias
I Can Name Twenty Cognitive Biases and It Has Never Once Stopped Me
Knowing a bias has a name is knowledge about a category, and the bias operates on the instance. Here is what did work, on one of them.
Decision Making
Nine Hundred Interviews Later, I Stopped Believing the Reason People Give
Not because anyone lies. Because the account arrives after the choice, and it is built to be tellable rather than to be accurate.
Habits
Habits Do Not Die in Week One. They Die in Week Three, and For a Different Reason.
The failure everyone plans for is motivation running out. The one that actually happens is the first disruption, and almost no advice addresses it.