Scientific Definition
Claiming something is true because it has not been proven false.
Plain-English Definition
Claiming something is true because it has not been proven false.
Feynman Explanation
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Core Principle
Claiming something is true because it has not been proven false.
Mechanisms
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Claiming something is true because it has not been proven false.
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Risk plans often fail because a threat has not yet appeared.
Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Examples
- 'We have never had a security breach, so we are secure.'
- Risk plans often fail because a threat has not yet appeared.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- List what would prove the claim false and look for it.
Measurement Approaches
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Evidence
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The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- List what would prove the claim false and look for it.
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Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Using an authority's opinion as evidence, regardless of its merits.
Concluding that a claim is false because the argument for it is flawed.
Saying it often enough until objections fade.
Drawing a conclusion from the absence of evidence rather than its presence.
Deriving general rules from specific examples; the leap from instance to concept.
The brain evolved to reason adaptively, not always truthfully, to reduce the cost of errors.
We solve problems by adding, even when subtracting would be better.
Assuming that if one option is true, another must be false, when both can be true.
Presuming a purposeful actor behind events that may have no actor at all.
What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
A finite set of well-defined instructions for solving a problem or performing a computation.
Every model simplifies reality; some are still useful.