Super Thinking: Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

The third story, most respectful interpretation, and Hanlon’s razor are all attempts to overcome what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, where you frequently make errors by attributing others’ behaviors to their internal, or fundamental, motivations rather than external factors. You are guilty of the fundamental attribution error whenever you think someone was mean because she is mean rather than thinking she was just having a bad day.

Speaking of privilege, we (the authors) often say we are lucky to have won the birth lottery. Not only were we not born into slavery, but we were also not born into almost any disadvantaged group. At birth, we were no more deserving of an easier run at life than a child who was born into poverty, or with a disability, or any other type of disadvantage. Yet we are the ones who won this lottery since we do not have these disadvantages. It can be challenging to acknowledge that a good portion of your success stems from luck. Many people instead choose to believe that the world is completely fair, orderly, and predictable. This view is called the just world hypothesis, where people always get what they deserve, good or bad, because of their actions alone, with no accounting for luck or randomness. This view is summed up as you reap what you sow. Ironically, belief in a just world can get in the way of actual justice by leading people to victim-blame: The sexual assault victim “should have worn different clothes” or the welfare recipient “is just lazy.” Victims of circumstance are actually blamed for their circumstances,

Semmelweis reflex. Individuals still hang on to old theories in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence—

disconfirmation bias, where you impose a stronger burden of proof on the ideas you don’t want to believe.

Another way to internalize externalities is through a marketplace. Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1991 in part for what has become known as the Coase theorem, essentially a description of how a natural marketplace can internalize a negative externality. Coase showed that an externality can be internalized efficiently without further need for intervention (that is, without a government or other authority regulating the externality) if the following conditions are met: Well-defined property rights Rational actors Low transaction costs When these conditions are met, entities surrounding the externality will transact among themselves until the extra costs are internalized. If you recall the Boston Common example, the externality from overgrazing was internalized by setting a limit on the number of cows per farmer (regulation). There were no property rights though. The Coase theorem holds that instead of limiting the cows, another solution would have been to simply divide the grazing rights to the commons property among the farmers. The farmers could then trade the grazing rights among themselves, creating an efficient marketplace for the use of the commons.

moral hazard, is where you take on more risk, or hazard, once you have information that encourages you to believe you are more protected. It has been a concern of the insurance industry since the seventeenth century!

asymmetric information, where one side of a transaction has different information than the other side; that is, the available information is not symmetrically distributed. Real estate agents have more information about the real estate market than sellers, so it is hard to question their recommendations.

Goodhart’s law summarizes the issue: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Both describe the same basic phenomenon: When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend.

the cobra effect, describing when an attempted solution actually makes the problem worse. This model gets its name from a situation involving actual cobras. When the British were governing India, they were concerned about the number of these deadly snakes, and so they started offering a monetary reward for every snake brought to them. Initially the policy worked well, and the cobra population decreased. But soon, local entrepreneurs started breeding cobras just to collect the bounties. After the government found out and ended the policy, all the cobras that were being used for breeding were released, increasing the cobra population even further.

Sayre’s law, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

Parkinson’s law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

everyone wants to weigh in with their opinion on the bike shed decision because it is easy and familiar relative to the reactor, even though it is also relatively unimportant. This phenomenon has become known as bike-shedding.