Humans are prone to cognitive biases. Don’t rely on your intuition to make important decisions. Instead, understand the most common mental models to improve your thinking. Build your very own metacognition toolkit to face choices with a calm, informed mind.
Popular articles in this category include be careful of the optionality fallacy and the Occam’s razor fallacy, avoid falling prey to illusory correlations, use checklists when you can’t trust your brain. Learn about the curse of knowledge, The Cobra Effect, and Parkinson’s Law.
Welcome to a new edition of our interview series, where we ask researchers, creators, and entrepreneurs questions about how to make the most of our mind. Very excited to welcome Dr. Emily Anhalt, clinical psychologist, emotional fitness expert, speaker, author, and co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, the world’s first “gym for the mind”. …
Read moreEmotional fitness and leadership with Dr. Emily Anhalt
Developing metacognitive skills is essential to being productive while taking care of your mental health. While some tools such as journaling or the Eisenhower matrix are already well known, there are other tools borrowed from the world of education. Here are five thinking tools you can add to your metacognitive toolbox. 1. Bloom’s taxonomy of …
Read more5 thinking tools to add to your metacognitive toolbox
The butterfly effect teaches us to ackowledge the chaotic nature of life, to be mindful of our starting conditions, to generate the best catalysts to achieve our goals, and to constantly adjust our forecast. What do predicting the weather, studying cognitive processes, and starting a war have in common? They all require to take into …
Read moreThe butterfly effect: the impact of deterministic chaos on our lives
Efficacy, effectiveness, efficiency… These terms sound confusingly similar. Commonly used in medical research, project management, and decision science, they are often mixed up in everyday conversations. If you’re in a hurry, here’s the difference: Efficacy means getting things done Effectiveness means doing the right things Efficiency means doing things right Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, I …
Read moreThe difference between efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency
Most scientists agree: it’s impossible to prove the truth. However, by using inductive and deductive reasoning, we can get closer. While both are based on evidence, they provide two different ways of solving problems, making decisions, and evaluating facts. But before we take a closer look at the difference between inductive versus deductive reasoning, what …
Read moreInductive versus deductive reasoning: how to make stronger arguments
“Wait, I swear, I know this!” you say. “Give me a second, it’s on the tip of my tongue… Does it start with a K? Maybe a C?” You feel like you are just about to remember, but somehow the memory feels stuck in your mouth. This is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, also known as lethologica. …
Read moreLethologica: what happens when a word is on the tip of the tongue
How many times have you forgotten where you left your keys? What about your friend who always seems to make up events that never happened? Do you ever struggle to remember someone’s name? Don’t worry—you’re not the only one. Our memory is far from perfect, and the memory bias effect doesn’t help. A memory bias …
Read moreMemory bias: how selective recall can impact your memories
In French, we have an expression to describe a situation where someone makes too much of a minor issue: “C’est une tempête dans un verre d’eau.” It’s a storm in a glass of water. Funnily enough, British people talk about a storm in a teacup, and American people talk about a tempest in a teapot. …
Read moreExaggeration: why we make a mountain out of a molehill
Historians and physicians alike are constantly fighting an invisible beast: the hindsight bias, also known as creeping determinism, which is the tendency for people to perceive past outcomes as having been more predictable than they actually were. Linked to distortions of our memories, the hindsight bias causes us to think we knew how an event …
For a text to be interpreted, you need a text and an interpreter. This may seem obvious, but too often we forget that our interpretation of a text is shaped by our pre-existing beliefs, knowledge, and expectations. Hermeneutics is the branch of research that deals with interpretation. When we interpret a text, it’s not a …