Scientific Definition
Vague personality descriptions feel uniquely accurate.
Plain-English Definition
Vague personality descriptions feel uniquely accurate.
Feynman Explanation
Horoscopes, personality quizzes, and a lot of executive coaching.
Core Principle
Vague personality descriptions feel uniquely accurate.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Vague personality descriptions feel uniquely accurate.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Don't pay for insight that survives any audience.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Horoscopes, personality quizzes, and a lot of executive coaching.
Examples
- 'You're decisive but sometimes second-guess yourself' — true of literally everyone.
- Don't pay for insight that survives any audience.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Demand falsifiable claims: what would NOT be true if this were wrong?
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Demand falsifiable claims: what would NOT be true if this were wrong?
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
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.
We notice what's present more than what's absent.
Doing something good gives us mental permission to do something bad.
We remember the beginning and the end of a list better than the middle.
Looking where the light is, not where the keys are.
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.