“Heuristics and biases” is the rather opaque name for one of the most exciting efforts to tease out the secrets of thinking. In this case, “bias” isn’t meant to be an insult. It’s a tendency, nothing more. If you read a shopping list on which one of the items is written in green ink while all the rest are blue, you will tend to remember the one green item. That’s the Von Restorff effect—a bias in favor of remembering the unusual. It’s only one of a long list of biases uncovered by psychologists. Some—like the Von Restorff effect—are pretty obvious. Others are more surprising, as we will see.
