Biases

It was years ago. I was working on a billing system. It was designed to bill based on the amount of time used. It billed in six second increments – 10ths of a minute. It was late, and I noticed something odd. There was a bit of math, but it didn’t add...

We like to believe that we’re rational creatures, but we’re not.  In The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves , Dan Ariely explains what we know about managing our dishonesty in ways that allows us to still believ...

It’s what we know that ain’t so that gets us in trouble. Whether you prefer that Artemus Ward quote from To Kill a Mockingbird  or you attribute the saying to Mark Twain, the sentiment is the same. Knowing something rarely gets us in trouble. Thinking that ...

Neurology isn’t a particular favorite of mine as I mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence . Honestly I feel a bit like it’s trying to dissect a live cow. Sure you can come to know all of the parts but there’s an emergence that happens when y...

Gorillas aren't exactly easy to miss. If you saw one, you'd expect to realize it. However, our expectations and reality aren't always the same. In a famous experiment, Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons, and their colleagues showed people a video asking...

It’s shocking really. The lengths that we’ll go to when defending our position. It’s scary to think that one small move begets the next move and so on such that most people will administer what they believe to be life threatening levels of electrical shock...

We’ve all seen things that aren’t there.  The stick that looks like a snake.  Shadows that move in the darkness that look eerily like the monsters of our childhood.  Sometimes, we’ve also failed to see what is clearly there.  We’ve missed stop signs ...

It’s not unusual to perceive others as irrational. We can’t make sense of what other people do while assuming that we ourselves are completely rational. However, Dan Ariely points out in Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions  th...

The man born as Samuel Clemens but better known as Mark Twain has a famous quote: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Our certainty that we know how things work and what the right...