Mental models drawn from cognitive science, behavioural economics, and social psychology. Understanding how the human mind actually works — its biases, heuristics, and predictable irrationalities.
Mental models drawn from cognitive science, behavioural economics, and social psychology. Understanding how the human mind actually works — its biases, heuristics, and predictable irrationalities.
Browse all mental models in this discipline below.
Know what you know, know what you don't know, and stay honest about the boundary.
Before starting, imagine the project has already failed. Then figure out why.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance, incompetence, or neglect.
Start with your best guess, then update it proportionally as new evidence arrives.
We instinctively seek out information that confirms what we already believe — and ignore what contradicts it.
People with low competence in a domain tend to overestimate their ability, while experts tend to underestimate theirs.
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good — and this asymmetry distorts nearly every decision you make.
Never ask why someone is behaving a certain way until you understand what they're incentivised to do.
People feel compelled to return favours, match concessions, and treat you the way you treat them.
We study the winners and forget the losers — which distorts our understanding of what actually causes success.
Money, time, or effort already spent should not influence future decisions — but it almost always does.
Separate decision quality from outcome quality. A good decision can have a bad outcome, and vice versa.
The first piece of information you encounter disproportionately shapes all subsequent judgments.
We judge the likelihood of events by how easily examples come to mind — not by actual frequency.
The same information presented differently leads to different decisions — even when the underlying facts are identical.
Humans compulsively construct stories to explain random events, creating false causation and illusory patterns.
We make judgments based on current emotions rather than objective analysis — if something feels scary, we overestimate its risk.
We start from an initial value (the anchor) and adjust insufficiently from it — our final estimate stays too close to the starting point.
The tendency to adopt beliefs and behaviours simply because many other people do.
We ignore how common or rare something is in general, and focus too much on the specific case in front of us.
Focus energy on what you can control, not what you can't. Most worry is spent on the wrong circle.
We see patterns in random data — streaks, clusters, and trends that are actually just statistical noise.
We tend to prefer complex explanations and solutions over simple ones, even when the simple version works better.
Once you know something, you can't imagine not knowing it — making it hard to explain to someone who doesn't know it yet.
Adding a clearly inferior option makes one of the other options look more attractive by comparison.
When comparing options side by side, we notice differences that wouldn't matter in actual use. The comparison mode distorts our evaluation.
People often fail to transfer knowledge from one domain to another, even when the underlying principle is identical.
Humans can maintain meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people. Beyond that, social cohesion requires formal structures.
We value things more once we own them — simply possessing something increases its perceived worth.
Believing that past random events affect the probability of future random events — that a coin 'is due' for heads after several tails.
A positive impression in one area creates a biased positive impression in unrelated areas.
After something happens, we convince ourselves we knew it all along — even when we didn't.
We strongly prefer immediate rewards over future ones, even when waiting would give us much more. $100 today feels better than $120 next month.
We evaluate evidence not by its quality but by whether it supports the identity of the group we belong to.
We overvalue things we helped create, regardless of their objective quality.
Never ask someone for their opinion on something when their income depends on giving you a particular answer.
We treat money differently depending on where it came from or what we've labelled it, even though a dollar is a dollar.
We prefer things simply because we've been exposed to them repeatedly — familiarity breeds liking, not contempt.
We don't want things independently — we want things because other people want them. Desire is borrowed, not original.
The belief that you see the world objectively, and anyone who disagrees must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
We give more weight to negative experiences, information, and emotions than to equally positive ones.
More options don't always make us happier — beyond a threshold, additional choices increase anxiety, regret, and decision paralysis.
We judge experiences primarily by their most intense moment and their ending — not by the average or total.
We systematically underestimate how long tasks will take, even when we have direct experience of past overruns.
When two parties would both benefit from cooperating but each has an individual incentive to defect, the result is often mutual loss.
When people feel their freedom is threatened, they do the opposite of what's being asked — even if compliance would benefit them.
Extreme performances tend to be followed by more average ones — not because of any causal force, but because extreme results are statistically unusual.
Choose the first option that meets your criteria rather than exhaustively searching for the best possible option.
We fail to scale our emotional response proportionally. Saving 200,000 birds doesn't feel 100x more important than saving 2,000.
The sample you're looking at isn't random — it was filtered in ways you may not notice.
People with something to lose make better decisions than those who are insulated from consequences.
We overestimate how much other people notice our appearance, behaviour, and mistakes.
We prefer the current state of affairs simply because it's familiar — even when alternatives are objectively better.
Searching for answers where it's easy to look, rather than where the answers actually are.
People are promoted based on their current performance until they reach a role they're incompetent at — where they remain.
In competitive bidding, the winner often overpays because winning means you valued the item more than everyone else — likely too much.