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.
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
Yesterday at lunch time, while I was sipping tea and casually going through Instagram stories to see what my friends were up to (not the best kind of work break, but we are human after all), I was shown an advert for a website I had never heard about before. It’s called Gaia, and it … Read More
FEATURED TOOL Welcome to this edition of our tools for thought series, where we interview founders of companies on a mission to help you live, work, and think better. Jeremy Hurst is the co-founder of a software company called Idenati, started in 2019 as a side project at first. On the surface, Idenati helps people … Read More
Do you prefer your yoghurt with 10% fat or 90% fat-free? Should the label on your disinfectant say it kills 99% of germs, or that it only spares 1% of them? Marketers know which framing will result in more sales. This is called the framing effect: a cognitive bias where people decide on options based … Read More
Have you ever felt like you are too tired to make the right choice between several options, especially after a long series of decisions? Decision fatigue can lead to poor choices and irrational trade-offs in decision making. It refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions after a long session of decision making. Too many decisions … Read More
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist,” once said French author Guy de Maupassant. Whether it’s short-term memory allowing us to perform simple calculations on the fly, long-term memory which can store larger quantities of information, sometimes for a whole life span, … Read More