Psychology
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
Cognitive Bias
Knowing a bias has a name turns out not to protect you from it. Here is what does.
Knowing the name of a bias raises a practical question: what would you change about the decision in front of you? These essays explore planning fallacy, hindsight, optimism, and survivorship bias. Choose the article that matches your problem: estimating a task, remembering a prediction, starting a project, or evaluating advice. Read the proposed checks as approaches to examine, rather than guarantees of an unbiased decision.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.
Psychology
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.