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Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems.
Logical fallacies are like math problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing it.
When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming.
Jonah Lehrer wrote extensively about this division in his book How We Decide.
Just remember, you are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances.
But the big picture is a lie, nurtured by your constant and unconscious confabulation, adding up to a story of who you are, what you have done, and why.
what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds . . . Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.
fear of embarrassment plays into group dynamics.
Knowing that, you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help—or attempt escape—because you can be certain no one else will.
Feeling inadequate or incompetent is paralyzing—you have to plow through those emotions to get out of bed.
Compare and contrast and eat some humble pie.
1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany.
when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month.
So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate.
Ad hominem is Latin for “to the person,” which is where you sometimes take the argument when things get out of hand.
dismissing the other person’s argument by attacking the person instead of the claim.
When everyone is happy and all egos are free from harm it tends to increase productivity.
You know instinctively that dissent leads to chaos, so you avoid it.
If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.
It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated.
Research says the situation can be avoided if the boss is not allowed to express his or her expectations,
Finally, assign one person the role of asshole and charge that person with the responsibility of finding fault in the plan.
The mouse has a primitive brain, so it can’t base its choices on reason, on a careful analysis of economic benefits versus systemic losses.
It feels its way through life with the rodent equivalent of intuition.
When you are doing well, you think you are to blame. When you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame.
Be aware: Your desire to conform is strong and unconscious.
Maximilien Ringelmann, who discovered in 1913 that if he had people get together in groups to pull on a strain gauge, their combined efforts would tally up to be less than the sum of their individual strength measurements on the same instrument.
Seligman, he grafted cancer cells into rats so they would develop fatal tumors.
You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride.
Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.
2010 study conducted by Josh Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera,
résumés as being more impressive if those résumés were attached to heavy clipboards.
1970s Richard Haines at NASA was testing heads-up displays on commercial airliners.
THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.
when you receive new information that threatens your self-image, you react quickly to reaffirm your identity.
most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control.
Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country.
