Scientific Definition
Your sample isn't random.
Plain-English Definition
Your sample isn't random.
Feynman Explanation
Surveys of your best customers are not surveys of your customers.
Core Principle
Your sample isn't random.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Your sample isn't random.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Strategy decisions distorted by non-random data.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Surveys of your best customers are not surveys of your customers.
Examples
- Customer feedback dominated by power users.
- Strategy decisions distorted by non-random data.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Always ask: 'Who's not in this data?'
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.
- Always ask: 'Who's not in this data?'
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 judge probability by absolute counts rather than ratios.
Ignoring general statistics in favor of specific, vivid information.
Posterior = (likelihood × prior) / evidence.
Update beliefs in proportion to the strength of new evidence.
Start with a prior; update with new evidence.
Novices experiencing early success, often due to variance and small samples.
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Striking pattern that is statistically expected in large samples.
Reasoning in distributions — ranges and probabilities — rather than points.
Average outcomes across the population differ from outcomes across time for one person.
A rough calculation using order-of-magnitude reasoning.
In quantum mechanics, certain pairs of properties cannot both be precisely known.