A field guide to the mind
The mental tricks we play on ourselves - and the ones that get played on us.
206 concepts
Attacking the person making the argument instead of the argument itself.
When your feelings about something shape what you believe to be true about it.
AI slop is low-quality content mass-produced by generative AI - made for clicks, not for you. How to spot it, and why it is everywhere.
AI sycophancy is the habit AI assistants have of telling you what you want to hear rather than what is true - why it happens, and why it matters.
The feeling of being disconnected from your work, from other people, and from yourself by the structures you live within.
The first piece of information you encounter disproportionately shapes everything that follows.
The assumption that human needs, perspectives, and values are the central or most important frame for understanding the world.
The tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns, or intentions in random or unrelated information.
Using 'it's just common sense' as a substitute for evidence or argument, treating intuition as self-evident truth.
Using feelings rather than evidence to persuade - bypassing the argument and going straight for the heart.
Using an expert's opinion as evidence when they have no relevant expertise - fame and credentials aren't the same thing.
Arguing that something is good because it's natural, or bad because it's artificial - as though nature is always benign.
The assumption that something is better, correct, or preferable simply because it's the way things have always been done.
Claiming that something must be true because it hasn't been proven false, or false because it hasn't been proven true.
The belief that achieving a particular goal will make you permanently happy - followed by the discovery that it doesn't.
Creating the appearance of widespread grassroots support for a position when the support is manufactured, funded, or coordinated from above.
The tendency for your perception to be shaped by what you're already thinking about, worrying about, or primed to notice.
We give disproportionate weight to the opinions of people we perceive as authorities - even outside their expertise.
Automation bias is trusting a machine's judgement over our own - following its advice, or missing what it fails to flag, even when we could see better.
We judge how likely something is based on how easily we can think of an example - not on how often it actually happens.
When people who genuinely believe they are not prejudiced still harbour unconscious biases that shape their behaviour in subtle ways.
When correcting someone's false belief makes them believe it even more strongly.
The tendency to adopt beliefs, behaviours, or trends because other people are doing so.
Ignoring general statistical information in favour of specific but less reliable details about an individual case.
We grow to like people we've done favours for, not just people who've done favours for us.
We'd rather face a worse outcome from chance than a better one that carries any risk of being betrayed by another person.
The tendency to recognise cognitive biases in others while failing to see them in yourself.
Keeping a population content through entertainment and material comfort so they don't question the systems they live under.
The obligation to provide evidence rests with the person making the claim - not with the person questioning it.
The more people who witness a problem, the less likely any one of them is to help.
The pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable system - not because it's the best, but because alternatives have become unthinkable.
Before you remove something, make sure you understand why it was put there in the first place.
When having too many options makes it harder to choose at all - and less satisfying when you do.
Knowing the boundaries of what you genuinely understand - and having the discipline to stay inside them when it matters.
An argument that uses its own conclusion as one of its premises - going round in circles without proving anything.
The tendency to see meaningful patterns in small clusters of random data, when the clusters are exactly what randomness looks like.
The uncomfortable tension we feel when holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
When the demands on your working memory exceed its capacity, your ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and resist manipulation drops sharply.
Handing mental work to external tools - and the risk that the thinking we stop doing is the thinking we lose.
How societies forget inconvenient histories, allowing harmful patterns to repeat unchallenged.
The process of turning things that aren't naturally products - ideas, identity, relationships, rest - into things that can be bought and sold.
Keeping contradictory beliefs, values, or behaviours in separate mental boxes so they never have to confront each other.
When constant exposure to suffering erodes your ability to care, not because you're heartless but because you're human.
The tendency for groups in conflict to compete over who has suffered more, using their pain to claim moral authority and deflect accountability.
The tendency to prefer complex explanations over simple ones, and to mistrust simple solutions to problems that feel complicated.
When ideas are stripped of their challenging, uncomfortable, or radical parts and repackaged for comfortable mainstream consumption.
Disguising hostile opposition as caring advice to undermine a cause from within.
We seek out information that supports what we already believe, and ignore what doesn't.
The pull to adjust your beliefs, behaviours, or opinions to match those of the group around you.
The tendency for your judgement of something to shift depending on what you compare it to.
The power to decide what a story is about - and, just as importantly, what it isn't about.
The unexamined norms we follow simply because they're treated as standard.
When the dominant group's ideas become everyone's 'common sense' - accepted as natural rather than constructed.
The difficulty of imagining what it's like not to know something you already know.
Deliberately deceptive design choices that trick people into doing things they didn't intend to do.
A manipulation pattern where the offender denies wrongdoing, attacks the accuser, and reverses victim and offender roles.
The idea that tech firms extract data from human life the way old empires seized land, claiming our experience as territory to be owned and mined.
Dead internet theory claims bots and AI now generate most of the internet, with humans at the margins. What is true in it, and what overreaches.
The deterioration in the quality of decisions made by a person after a long session of decision-making, as mental energy depletes.
A deepfake is AI-generated video, audio or imagery showing real people doing things they never did, and why it breaks our trust in recordings.
The refusal to accept an uncomfortable truth, even when the evidence is overwhelming.
When repeated exposure to something shocking, disturbing, or morally uncomfortable gradually reduces your emotional response to it - until it barely registers at all.
The blurring of left and right into one anti-establishment current - where wellness, spirituality and conspiracy fuse and drift rightward.
The tendency to feel less personally responsible for taking action when others are present.
Digital amnesia is forgetting what we let our devices remember for us. The 'Google effect', why it happens, and what it costs.
Redirecting an emotional response - usually anger or frustration - away from its real source and onto a safer, less threatening target.
A strategy of breaking apart alliances and turning potential allies against each other to maintain control.
Using coded language that sounds innocent to most people but carries a hidden message to a specific audience.
Doomscrolling is compulsively scrolling through bad news that leaves you worse off but unable to stop. Why we do it, and how feeds exploit it.
The less you know about something, the more confident you're likely to feel about it.
The harder we work for something, the more we convince ourselves it was worth it - regardless of whether it was.
When extreme views take hold among the powerful and spread downward - reversing the usual idea that radicalisation starts at the margins.
Complex behaviours arising from simple rules, with no central plan or control.
Enshittification is how online platforms decay - good to you at first, then squeezed for profit until barely usable. The pattern, and why it happens.
Softening harsh realities with gentler language - sometimes kindly, sometimes to hide the truth.
When someone breaks from expected behaviour, you don't just notice - you react more strongly than the behaviour itself would normally warrant.
Presenting two sides as equally valid when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one.
Supporting systems that work against your own interests because the culture has made them feel natural and inevitable.
We tend to assume that most people think the way we do - and we're usually wrong.
Presenting only two options when more exist - forcing a choice between extremes and ignoring everything in between.
Treating two things as equally valid or important when they clearly aren't.
A revolutionary, anti-democratic movement built on the myth of a nation reborn from decline, by purging its enemies and rallying behind one leader.
When the output of a system feeds back in as input, either amplifying or dampening the original effect.
Overwhelming audiences with a rapid, continuous flood of disinformation so that truth becomes impossible to defend.
Breaking a problem down to its most basic truths and building up from there, rather than reasoning by analogy.
A manipulation pattern that uses fear, obligation, and guilt to control another person's behaviour and override their independent decision-making.
The way information is presented changes how we respond to it - even when the underlying facts are identical.
Once you notice something for the first time, you suddenly seem to see it everywhere - not because it's more common, but because you're now looking for it.
The tendency to see objects, tools, and ideas only in terms of their conventional use, making it harder to find creative solutions.
The tendency to explain other people's behaviour as a result of their character while explaining your own as a result of your circumstances.
Manipulating someone into doubting their own perception, memory, or sanity.
Overwhelming an opponent with a rapid flood of arguments, regardless of accuracy, so that none can be adequately addressed.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
When the desire for harmony in a group overrides honest analysis, leading to poor decisions nobody individually would have made.
One positive trait colours your entire perception of a person, product, or idea.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance, carelessness, or incompetence.
Drawing a broad conclusion from too few examples - treating a small sample as though it represents the whole picture.
The tendency to believe, after an event has occurred, that you knew it was going to happen all along.
Perceiving a relationship between two things when no meaningful connection exists - or when the connection is far weaker than it appears.
Repeat something often enough and people start to believe it - not because it's true, but because it's familiar.
The automatic, unconscious mental connections between concepts, groups, and attributes that shape perception and behaviour without conscious awareness.
The tendency to favour people in your own group and view those outside it with suspicion, distrust, or hostility.
Forming your own judgement about an idea or claim before looking at what everyone else thinks.
Instead of asking how to succeed, ask what would guarantee failure - then avoid those things.
The belief that people get what they deserve - that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - the tendency to over-rely on a familiar tool or approach for every problem.
When repeated failure teaches you to stop trying - even when the situation has changed and escape is possible.
The two broad families of political belief, born from where people sat in 1789 - and still tracking, underneath, your attitude to equality and hierarchy.
The liar's dividend is the advantage liars gain once fakes are known to exist: they can wave away genuine, damaging recordings as just a deepfake.
Words chosen to trigger an emotional reaction rather than communicate neutral information.
A question that contains a built-in assumption, making it impossible to answer without appearing to accept that assumption.
Losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good.
Overwhelming someone with excessive affection, attention, and praise early in a relationship to create emotional dependency and control.
The mistaken belief that there is a fixed amount of work available in an economy, so one group's gain must be another's loss.
When media systems produce public agreement with elite interests - not through censorship, but through structure.
The systematic creation of wants that didn't previously exist, turning luxuries into perceived necessities.
Every model, theory, or description of reality is a simplification - useful, but never the whole picture.
The tendency to develop a preference for things simply because you've encountered them before.
Small, everyday slights and indignities - often unintentional - that communicate hostility or prejudice toward members of marginalised groups.
Judging others by a stricter moral standard than the one you apply to yourself.
We punish the contradiction between someone's stated values and their behaviour more harshly than we punish the behaviour alone.
The psychological loophole where doing something good gives you permission to do something bad.
Intense public fear about a perceived threat, amplified by media, disproportionate to the actual danger.
When we use reasoning not to find the truth, but to defend what we already believe.
Defending a controversial claim by retreating to an uncontroversial one, then acting as if they are the same thing.
Changing the criteria for proof or success after they've been met - ensuring that no evidence is ever good enough.
The belief that you see the world as it objectively is - and that anyone who disagrees must be biased, uninformed, or irrational.
The tendency for negative experiences, information, and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.
The political project that made free-market competition the default logic of everything, from public services to how we see ourselves.
When a product, platform, or system becomes more valuable to each user as more people use it - creating powerful winner-take-all dynamics.
When someone redefines a group to exclude counterexamples rather than accepting that the counterexamples disprove their claim.
The tendency to underestimate the likelihood and impact of a disaster or major disruption because things have always been fine before.
The gradual process by which the previously unthinkable becomes acceptable, then expected, then invisible - the slow drift of what a culture treats as normal.
The tendency for people to comply with instructions from a perceived authority figure, even when those instructions conflict with their own conscience.
When you have competing explanations for the same thing, the simplest one - the one with the fewest assumptions - is usually right.
The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful inactions, even when doing nothing causes more damage.
Every choice has a hidden price tag: the value of the next-best thing you gave up by choosing this one.
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones happening to you.
Judging the quality of a decision by how things turned out, rather than by whether the reasoning was sound at the time.
The range of ideas the public considers acceptable at any given time - and how that range can be deliberately shifted.
A tolerant society that tolerates intolerance will eventually be destroyed by it.
Parasocial bonds are the one-sided closeness we feel towards people who do not know we exist - and how platforms and AI now turn it into a product.
The tendency to see recognisable shapes - especially faces - in random patterns, clouds, textures, and noise.
Where you end up depends on where you started - and the route you took matters more than the destination you intended.
Planned obsolescence is designing products to wear out or feel outdated, so you keep buying replacements. How it works, and why it shapes what you own.
The tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, how much it will cost, and how many things will go wrong along the way.
When everyone privately disagrees with something but goes along with it because they assume everyone else agrees.
Discrediting a person or source before they've even spoken, so that anything they say is automatically dismissed.
A way of doing politics that pits 'the pure people' against 'a corrupt elite' - and claims to be the one true voice of the people.
Assuming that because one thing happened after another, the first thing caused the second - confusing sequence with causation.
When exposure to one stimulus unconsciously influences your response to a subsequent one - shaping your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour without your awareness.
Thinking in terms of likelihoods and ranges of outcomes rather than certainties, so you make better decisions under uncertainty.
Attributing your own uncomfortable feelings, motives, or traits to someone else.
Constructing a logical-sounding explanation for a decision or behaviour that was actually driven by emotion.
The instinct to resist or do the opposite when you feel your freedom of choice is being threatened or taken away.
Unconsciously expressing the opposite of what you truly feel, turning unacceptable impulses into exaggerated displays of the reverse.
Giving disproportionate weight to the most recent events, experiences, or information - as though what happened last is what matters most.
When radical ideas are absorbed by the system they opposed and sold back as products - neutralising dissent by turning it into commerce.
Introducing an irrelevant topic to divert attention from the original issue.
Extreme results tend to be followed by more average ones - not because of any intervention, but because that's how variation works.
When the agencies meant to regulate an industry end up serving its interests instead.
Treating human-made ideas, systems, and social arrangements as if they were natural, fixed, and unchangeable things.
Feeling worse off based on who you compare yourself to, not on what you actually have.
The rhetorical strategy of making a claim more believable, more familiar, and more powerful simply by saying it again and again.
Achieving a large objective by slicing it into small, individually insignificant steps that each seem too minor to resist.
The tendency to give disproportionate weight to prominent, vivid, or emotionally striking information while overlooking quieter details.
Blaming a person or group for problems they didn't cause, diverting attention from the real source.
Disguising harassment as polite, persistent requests for evidence and debate that are never made in good faith.
Thinking beyond the immediate consequences of a decision to consider what happens next - and what happens after that.
The tendency to credit your successes to skill and your failures to circumstances.
Arguing that one small step will inevitably lead to a chain of increasingly extreme consequences, without evidence that the chain is likely.
We look at what other people are doing to decide what we should do - especially when we're uncertain.
Passing unreliable information through a chain of increasingly credible-looking sources until it appears legitimate.
The tendency for people to stay silent when they believe their opinion is in the minority, causing that opinion to seem even rarer than it is.
The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your appearance, behaviour, and mistakes.
The unconscious belief about whether people are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally cooperative - and how that shapes everything else you think.
The preference for the current state of affairs, where any change is perceived as a loss.
The practice of engaging with the strongest possible version of someone's argument, rather than the weakest - the opposite of a straw man.
Misrepresenting someone's argument to make it easier to attack.
When attempting to suppress, censor, or hide information backfires by drawing far more attention to it than it would have received otherwise.
Harm built into the design of social systems rather than inflicted by any individual act of aggression.
Continuing to invest in something because of what you've already put in, not because of what you'll get out.
The business model that turns your everyday behaviour into free raw material, then sells predictions about what you'll do next.
Focusing on the people or things that succeeded while overlooking those that didn't - and drawing false conclusions from the incomplete picture.
When prejudice hides behind the language of fairness - opposing policies that help marginalised groups while insisting the opposition isn't racial.
The claim that big tech has replaced capitalism with a new feudal order, where we labour like serfs and pay rent to use digital land we never own.
A system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource to be harvested, bought, sold, and competed for - reshaping culture around it.
A falsehood so enormous that people struggle to believe anyone would fabricate it - which is precisely why they accept it.
When culture is mass-produced to pacify rather than challenge, turning art and entertainment into instruments of conformity.
A way of reaching the truth through the structured clash of opposing ideas, where the aim is not to win the argument but to be changed by it.
The ELIZA effect is our habit of reading real understanding, empathy or intelligence into a machine, simply because it answers us in fluent language.
The belief that success is earned purely through talent and effort, hiding the structural advantages that shape outcomes.
When temporary expansions of power become permanent - because the emergency passes but the authority never gets handed back.
The idea that legitimate authority rests on an unspoken bargain - we trade some freedom for order and protection, and can withdraw consent if it breaks.
When life is experienced through images and representations rather than lived directly.
A commonly used phrase that shuts down critical thinking by making further discussion feel unnecessary.
The critical threshold at which a small change triggers a rapid, often irreversible shift in the behaviour of a system.
Dismissing someone's argument by criticising how they expressed it rather than engaging with what they said.
When individuals acting in their own rational interest collectively destroy a shared resource.
Actions in complex systems produce outcomes nobody planned for - sometimes worse than the original problem.
Groups that have suffered persecution can, once they gain power, go on to persecute others - often using their past suffering as justification.
When despair is deliberately cultivated to stop people from acting - because people who believe nothing can change won't try to change anything.
Vague qualifiers that create the impression of a meaningful claim while committing to nothing.
Responding to a criticism by pointing to someone else's wrongdoing instead of addressing the original point.
When a claim gets cited so often that people assume it's been proven - even though the evidence behind it is thin or nonexistent.
The assumption that any situation is a competition where one person's gain must be another's loss.