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 this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think, work, and collaborate better without sacrificing our mental health. Alexander Embiricos is the co-founder and CEO of Remotion, a virtual office that connects hybrid-remote teams like everyone’s together with quick calls, coworking rooms, emoji …
Our beliefs can help us navigate the world around us. However, when our beliefs do not line up with reality, they can cause harm to ourselves and others. Also, these beliefs can become so deeply ingrained that they become very challenging to unlearn, even when presented with new information. This phenomenon is called belief perseverance. …
What is something we only become capable of doing after age eleven, that helps us solve complex problems and write poetry, but needs to be yielded carefully? That’s abstract thinking, a powerful tool for creativity and innovation which anyone can learn how to use better. The difference between concrete and abstract thinking Concrete thinking is …
Most people feel that, within the constraints they need to navigate, they are in control of their decisions. But we often automatically follow a train of thought or an external cue without noticing the selective factors in our attention. This phenomenon is called the attentional bias, and it affects many of the decisions we make. …
Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and become more creative and productive. Kevin Lin is the founder of Dendron, a lightning fast, open source personal knowledge management tool that lives in your integrated development environment. Dendron uses schemas and …
Whether it’s a doctor, a financial advisor, or a manager, we sometimes apply whatever an authority figure tells us to do, despite knowing that their recommended approach is inefficient, wrong, and potentially even dangerous. Why is that? One explanation is the authority bias. The authority bias is our tendency to be more influenced by the …
We constantly make decisions that will affect our lives in the future. That future can be one hour from now (what’s for lunch?) or one year from now (should I hire an assistant?). Unfortunately, the brain has a hard time imagining what our future selves will need. Instead, it takes mental shortcuts and makes choices …
When something is described as ambiguous, it means that it is confusing, unclear, or open to different interpretations. Entrepreneurs face ambiguous situations all the time; it’s the nature of the business. For example, entrepreneurs make decisions about pricing, marketing, vendors, and finances that don’t have certain outcomes. In addition, entrepreneurs often have to make choices …
Surely, a knife is made for cutting things. And you can only use a cotton swab to clean your ears — right? Functional fixedness is a form of cognitive bias which makes us automatically narrow down the function of each tool. Although functional fixedness offers great mental shortcuts, it can present barriers to working to …
A eureka moment is that magical epiphany when the solution to a problem seems to appear out of nowhere. Also known as an “Aha!” moment, little beats the sudden clarity you feel at solving a puzzle or finally understanding a previously unfathomable concept. Eureka moments can lead to creative discoveries, the triumphant completion of a …