Critical thinking

False premise

A false premise is a mistaken starting assumption. You can build a long chain of reasoning where every step is logically correct, yet the argument is still unsound—because it inherits that original mistake.

Example (false premise): “For any two people, the one who talks more during a conversation is more knowledgeable about the topic.”
Follow it logically and you get: the most talkative person is the expert → measure airtime to find experts → you don’t need to check facts → a stopwatch could replace interviews. The logic is consistent, but the result is ridiculous because the premise confuses confidence with competence.

In everyday life, we stack reasonable-sounding inferences on top of hidden assumptions. It helps to slow down and ask: What premise am I taking for granted here—and is it actually true?

If you want a playful way to practice questioning your own premises and staying anchored to your values, there’s a Telegram bot game called MindWarrior:
https://t.me/MindWarriorGame_Bot

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: mindwarriorgame.org

Ben Franklin effect
(reading time – 50 sec.)

The Ben Franklin effect is a proposed psychological phenomenon: a person who has already performed a favor for another is more likely to do another favor for the other than if they had received a favor from that person. An explanation for this is cognitive dissonance. People reason that they help others because they like them, even if they do not, because their minds struggle to maintain logical consistency between their actions and perceptions.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: Wikipedia

Knew-It-All-Along Phenomenon

It's the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were

The phenomenonis more likely to occur when the outcome of an event is negative rather than positive. This is a phenomenon consistent with the general tendency for people to pay more attention to negative outcomes of events than positive outcomes.

Financial bubbles are often heavily biased with phenomenon after they burst. After the worldwide dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the Great Recession of 2008, many economists have suggested that conditions that seemed insignificant at the time were harbingers of future financial collapse.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Endowment effect

The endowment effect, also known as divestiture aversion, is the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.

One of the most famous examples of the endowment effect in the literature is from a study by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch & Richard Thaler,[4] in which Cornell University undergraduates were given a mug and then offered the chance to sell it or trade it for an equally valued alternative (pens). They found that the amount participants required as compensation for the mug once their ownership of the mug had been established ("willingness to accept") was approximately twice as high as the amount they were willing to pay to acquire the mug ("willingness to pay").

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Impostor Phenomenon
(reading time – 30 sec.)

Impostor phenomenon, or impostor syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon where individuals doubt their abilities and fear being exposed as frauds, despite evidence of their competence. Those experiencing it often attribute their achievements to luck or deception, downplay their skills, and dismiss positive feedback.

This phenomenon is not limited by demographics and can affect individuals in various professions and backgrounds. Impostor syndrome may lead to increased stress, anxiety, and a reluctance to pursue new opportunities. Overcoming it involves acknowledging one's accomplishments, internalizing positive feedback, and seeking support from mentors or mental health professionals.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Belief Perseverance
(reading time – 30 sec.)

Belief perseverance refers to the tendency of people to cling to their existing beliefs even when presented with evidence that contradicts those beliefs. In other words, individuals may continue to maintain their initial beliefs despite encountering information that challenges or disconfirms those beliefs.

This phenomenon can be powerful and persistent because people often find it uncomfortable or threatening to change their long-held beliefs. Cognitive dissonance, a psychological theory developed by Leon Festinger, suggests that when individuals are faced with information that conflicts with their existing beliefs, they may experience discomfort. In an effort to alleviate this discomfort, they may be inclined to reject or dismiss the conflicting information, rather than adjusting their beliefs.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Hindsight Bias
(reading time – 30 sec.)

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after an event has occurred, that one would have predicted or expected the outcome.

For example, after a sports team wins a championship, fans and analysts may claim they knew the team would win all along, even if they didn't actually have that level of confidence before the event took place. Another example is a stock market investor who claims they knew a particular stock would rise in value after it has already gone up, even though they may not have made that investment before the rise occurred.

Hindsight bias can lead to overconfidence in one's ability to predict future events and a distorted view of past events.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Curse of Knowledge
(reading time – 40 sec.)

The curse of knowledge bias occurs when individuals assume that others have the same level of understanding or knowledge as they do.

For instance, a teacher may assume that all of their students understand a concept that was just taught, when in reality some students are still struggling to grasp the idea. Another example is a technical expert who is unable to explain a complex concept in simple terms to a layman because they are too familiar with the subject and cannot imagine not knowing the information.

The curse of knowledge bias can lead to ineffective communication and poor decision-making as people overestimate others' understanding and may neglect to provide necessary clarification or details.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: wikipedia.org

Default Effect
(reading time – 30 sec.)

One example of the default effect cognitive bias is when individuals are more likely to choose the option that is set as the default in a decision-making scenario. For instance, when signing up for a new service, if opting-in to a certain feature is set as the default, people are more likely to go along with it and not change the setting, even if they might have preferred a different option if they had actively made a choice.

This highlights how people have a tendency to stick with the default option due to convenience, lack of effort, or simply not being fully aware of the implications of their choice.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Halo Effect
(reading time – 30 sec.)

The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person ("He is nice!") impacts your evaluations of that person's specific traits ("He is also smart!"). Perceptions of a single trait can carry over to how people perceive other aspects of that person.

One great example of the halo effect in action is our overall impression of celebrities. People perceive them as attractive, successful, and often likable, so people also tend to see them as intelligent, kind, and funny.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: verywellmind.com

Fundamental Attribution Error
(reading time – 20 sec.)

The fundamental attribution error (FAE) describes how, when making judgments about people’s behavior, we often overemphasize dispositional factors and downplay situational ones.5 In other words, we believe that people’s personality traits have more influence on their actions, compared to the other factors over which they don’t have control.

Let’s say you’re driving to work one day, and somebody cuts you off. Furious, you decide that the other driver is a selfish person, who doesn’t care about other people’s safety. In fact, the other driver rarely cuts people off, and normally they are very careful about safety—but right now they’re on the way to a hospital for a family emergency, so they’re acting differently than they usually would.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: thedecisionlab.com

Apophenia 
(reading time – 20 sec.)

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things

For example, gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers that appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels, where no such patterns exist. A common example of this is the gambler's fallacy.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: www.wikipedia.org

Choice-supportive biase
(reading time – 30 sec.)

Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options.

It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B. Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the advantages of option A and not notice or de-emphasize those of option B.

Real life example: IPhone owners tend to think that their devices better than Android owners have. And vice versa

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: wikipedia.org

Neglect of probability
(reading time – 40 sec.)

Very few of us have a problem getting into a car and going for a drive, but many of us experience great trepidation about stepping inside an airplane and flying at 35,000 feet.

Flying, quite obviously, is a wholly unnatural and seemingly hazardous activity. Yet virtually all of us know and acknowledge the fact that the probability of dying in an auto accident is significantly greater than getting killed in a plane crash — but our brains won't release us from this crystal clear logic (statistically, we have a 1 in 84 chance of dying in a vehicular accident, as compared to a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying in an plane crash [other sources indicate odds as high as 1 in 20,000]).

It's the same phenomenon that makes us worry about getting killed in an act of terrorism as opposed to something far more probable, like falling down the stairs or accidental poisoning.

This is what the social psychologist Cass Sunstein calls probability neglect — our inability to properly grasp a proper sense of peril and risk — which often leads us to overstate the risks of relatively harmless activities, while forcing us to overrate more dangerous ones.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: wikipedia.org

Empathy Gap
(reading time – 1 min.)

The empathy gap is a cognitive bias that causes people to struggle to understand mental states that are different from their present state, or to struggle to consider how such states affect people’s judgment and decision-making. Essentially, the empathy gap means that when people are in a certain mental state (e.g. happy or angry), they struggle to understand the perspective or predict the actions of someone who is in a different mental state, whether that person is their future self or someone else.

For example, if a person is currently feeling calm, the empathy gap can cause them to struggle to predict how they will act when they’re angry. Similarly, if a person who is on a diet is currently full, the empathy gap can cause them to struggle to assess how well they will be able to handle the temptation to eat when they’re hungry.

Furthermore, when it comes to misjudging other people’s perspective, the empathy gap can cause someone who feels safe to struggle to imagine the perspective of someone who feels scared. Similarly, the empathy gap can cause someone who is looking for a fight to struggle to imagine the perspective of someone who is looking for a peaceful solution.

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: effectiviology.com

Identifiable Victim Effect
(reading time – 30 sec.)

The identifiable victim effect describes the likelihood that we feel greater empathy, and an urge to help, in situations where tragedies are about a specific, identifiable individual, compared to situations where the victims are a larger, vaguer group of people.

Joseph Stalin, the former Premier of the Soviet Union, is often attributed to have introduced the idea of the identifiable victim effect when he made the statement:

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: thedecisionlab.com

Overconfidence phenomenon
(reading time – 30 sec.)

The phenomenon occurs when people's confidence in their abilities is greater than their accuracy. In other words, people are more confident in their judgment than they are correct

For example, at work, people assume themselves to be better than most others. Due to this overconfidence, the need to learn and improve seems unnecessary. Over a while, employees stagnate at what they do. This leads to lower annual raises, lack of promotions or even layoffs. In such scenarios, people blame their organization or their bosses but never themselves.


Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: verywellmind.com

Hi subscribers!

I often receive messages where you ask me to recommend books or other resources regarding psychology and critical thinking.

I decided to post recommendations on this channel which you will be able to find under #Books tag

The first author I would like you to recommend is Daniel Khaneman. He is an Israeli psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

He has written a book (which you probably already heard about) Thinking, Fast and Slow. This book is really mustread for everybody interested in cognitive biases.

You can get acknowledged with this and his other books here - amzn.to/36oww7v

Topic: #Books

The Bizarreness Effect
(reading time – 40 sec.)

People show better memory for bizarre sentences relative to common sentences, a finding referred to as the bizarrness effect.

Interestingly, this effect is typically only obtained using a mixed-list design, in which participants study common and bizarre sentences in the same list.

Participants studied common sentences in one room under one set of instructions, and bizarre sentences in another room under another set of instructions. At test, participants recalled the common and bizarre sentences either together or separately.

The results showed that the bizarreness effect was only obtained when participants recalled the common and bizarre items together

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: link.springer.com

Representativeness Heuristic
(reading time – 30 sec.)

The representativeness heuristic involves estimating the likelihood of an event by comparing it to an existing prototype that already exists in our minds. This prototype is what we think is the most relevant or typical example of a particular event or object. The problem with this is that people often overestimate the similarity between the two things they are comparing.

When making decisions or judgments, we often use mental shortcuts or "rules of thumb" known as heuristics. For every decision, we don't always have the time or resources to compare all the information before we make a choice, so we use heuristics to help us reach decisions quickly and efficiently

Representativeness can affect the judgments we make when meeting new people. It may lead us to form inaccurate impressions of others, such as misjudging a new acquaintance or blind date

Topic: #CognitiveBiases
Source: verywellmind.com