Incentives Lab — Extra Models

Deriving general rules from specific examples; the leap from instance to concept.

Holding a different — and correct — set of tools than everyone else.

Presuming a purposeful actor behind events that may have no actor at all.

Forgetting to compare an offer with the next-best alternative.

Preferring options with known probabilities over options with unknown ones.

Claiming something is true or better because most people believe it.

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.

Disagreement grows more extreme as the parties think more about the issue.

Systematic errors in explaining the causes of behavior — yours or others'.

Favoring suggestions from automated systems over conflicting human judgment.

Relying on examples that come to mind easily, not on actual frequency.

Update beliefs in proportion to the strength of new evidence.

Adding the word 'because' (with any reason) increases compliance dramatically.

Behaviors spread through groups via observation and imitation.

Evaluating an argument's logic based on whether you agree with the conclusion.

We come to like people we've done a favor for, more than people who've helped us.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Subconscious preference for numbers (and letters) that appear in our own name or birthday.

A system's throughput is constrained by its single slowest step.

Remembering more context around a scene than was actually present.

Decisions are constrained by available information, cognitive limits, and time.

The mind can be socially influenced toward conclusions that bypass scrutiny.

Offering value in exchange for influence over a decision.

Small visible disorders signal that bigger ones will be tolerated.

Assuming the opponent is wrong, then explaining why they came to that wrong belief.

Deliberate, sustained effort to damage someone's reputation.

Knowledge from someone who can recite the answers but doesn't understand them.

Inputs combine under conditions to produce new outputs — sometimes irreversibly.

Adults can't recall early childhood; the memories never consolidated.

Temporal illusion where the first moment after a fast event seems stretched.

The rate at which customers (or employees) leave over a period.

Higher rates of mistreatment toward stepchildren than biological children.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Associating a neutral stimulus with a meaningful one until the neutral one triggers the response.

Systematic deviations from rationality in judgment.

Psychological stress from holding contradictory beliefs; usually resolved by changing the easier one.

Striking pattern that is statistically expected in large samples.

Treating multiple data points as independent when they came from one source.

Complements raise each other's value; substitutes lower it.

Many interacting parts producing emergent behavior nobody designed.

Producing fabricated memories or explanations without intent to deceive.

Exploiting trust to defraud — only works because the mark wants to believe.

A hidden variable that influences both supposed cause and supposed effect.

Testing hypotheses only by looking for confirming evidence.

Evaluations are warped by what came immediately before.

Coordinated action that produces outcomes unavailable to individual actors.

Fixed costs don't scale with output; variable costs do.

Imagining what could have happened instead of what did.

Winning the disputed population, not just defeating the visible opponent.

Countering hostile narratives with truthful, well-timed alternatives.

Giving polite rather than honest answers to avoid offense.

The threshold at which a system becomes self-sustaining.

We recognize faces from our own race more accurately than others.

Influencing the beliefs and actions of a crowd through psychological techniques.

Experiencing a remembered idea as if it were original.

Failure to recall when the retrieval cue is absent.

The best way to get a right answer online is to post a wrong one.

The drive to explore and understand for its own sake.

Believing that society or one's institution is in inexorable decline.

Unconscious psychological strategies that protect self-image.

Attributing causes to protect oneself from blame or vulnerability.

Seeing every problem through the lens of one's profession.

Eroding the will to act, even when capacity remains.

Refusing to accept reality, despite evidence.

We spend less when holding large bills than small ones — same money, different behavior.

Munger's principle: the surest way to get something is to deserve it.

Designing systems for the lowest-capability user produces resilience for everyone.

Applying higher scrutiny to evidence we disagree with than to evidence we agree with.

Actively seeking evidence that would disprove your hypothesis.

Deliberately false information spread to deceive.

We dismiss the ideas and merits of people we dislike.

Selling winners too early and holding losers too long.

Two options seen side-by-side look more different than they are in isolation.

Reasoning in distributions — ranges and probabilities — rather than points.

Insights from one domain don't automatically transfer to another.

Resolving doubt by jumping to a conclusion — any conclusion — quickly.

Dread weighs roughly double in our calculus what the equivalent gain does.

Substance dependence distorts judgment and accelerates decline.

~150 — the cognitive limit on stable social relationships.

We remember peaks and ends, not the duration in between.

Inability to think rationally despite adequate intelligence.

Drawing conclusions about individuals from group-level data.

Interdependent network of actors evolving together.

We value outcomes more when we worked hard for them.

Over-weighting one's own perspective when reconstructing events.

What we wear influences how we think and perform.

The brain minimizes effort by default — most cognition is on cruise control.

Systems tend toward disorder unless energy is invested to maintain order.

We measure ourselves against peers, not against our past selves.

Systems maintain stability by self-regulating around a setpoint.

Two things may be equivalent in effect but not in form.

Remembering past experiences as more positive than they were.

Variation, selection, retention — the engine of cumulative change.

Assuming something exists because we can name or define it.

Ignoring the size of a sample or population in our judgments.

Believing others are motivated by extrinsic rewards while we are motivated intrinsically.

Negative emotions fade faster than positive ones.

False information presented as legitimate journalism.

Errors in reasoning that undermine the logic of an argument.

Reasoning that two things are alike based on shallow similarity.

Crediting a source or cause that isn't actually responsible.

Assuming that because B followed A, A caused B.

An act committed to look like it was done by someone else.

Underestimating how common our positive traits and behaviors are.

A strategy to influence behavior by amplifying fear and uncertainty.

We notice what's present more than what's absent.

Reasoning from foundational truths rather than from analogy or convention.

Mind latches onto the first plausible explanation and resists alternatives.

Who, what, when, where, why — the minimum facts for any account.

Symptoms or beliefs spread through a group with no underlying physical cause.

When a system in equilibrium is disturbed, it shifts to counteract the change.

Behavior shaped by reinforcement and punishment over repeated trials.

Ideas, behaviors, and attitudes spread through social networks.