Scientific Definition
A controlled scenario, often impossible, used to isolate a variable and test an intuition or theory.
Plain-English Definition
A controlled scenario, often impossible, used to isolate a variable and test an intuition or theory.
Feynman Explanation
If you can't run the experiment in the world, sometimes the mind has the laboratory.
Core Principle
A controlled scenario, often impossible, used to isolate a variable and test an intuition or theory.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
A controlled scenario, often impossible, used to isolate a variable and test an intuition or theory.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Strategy offsites that don't run thought experiments are wasting the format.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
If you can't run the experiment in the world, sometimes the mind has the laboratory.
Examples
- Galileo's falling bodies; Einstein's elevator; Searle's Chinese Room; Rawls's veil of ignorance.
- Strategy offsites that don't run thought experiments are wasting the format.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- For any big bet, design a thought experiment that would change your mind. Run it.
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.
- For any big bet, design a thought experiment that would change your mind. Run it.
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.
Reading micro-shifts in another person's state — breath, color, micro-expression — in real time.
Tools, notebooks, and trusted others are literally part of your cognitive system — not just aids to it.
Eye movements that loosely correlate with which representational system is active — visual, auditory, kinesthetic.
The sense of the internal state of the body — heartbeat, hunger, tension.
Brain region for planning, impulse control, and executive function.
The sense of where the body is in space.
Changing the meaning of an experience by changing the frame around it.
The fine-grained sensory qualities of internal experience — brightness, distance, volume, location.
The conditions under which a target accepts an influence attempt without scrutiny.
What we wear influences how we think and perform.
People will obey authority even when asked to harm others.
Practicing a way of thinking until it runs without conscious effort.