# everyday life

Anchoring Bias

The first piece of information you encounter disproportionately shapes everything that follows.

Arrival Fallacy

The belief that achieving a particular goal will make you permanently happy - followed by the discovery that it doesn't.

Attentional Bias

The tendency for your perception to be shaped by what you're already thinking about, worrying about, or primed to notice.

Authority Bias

We give disproportionate weight to the opinions of people we perceive as authorities - even outside their expertise.

Availability Heuristic

We judge how likely something is based on how easily we can think of an example - not on how often it actually happens.

Bandwagon Effect

The tendency to adopt beliefs, behaviours, or trends because other people are doing so.

Ben Franklin Effect

We grow to like people we've done favours for, not just people who've done favours for us.

Choice Overload

When having too many options makes it harder to choose at all - and less satisfying when you do.

Clustering Illusion

The tendency to see meaningful patterns in small clusters of random data, when the clusters are exactly what randomness looks like.

Cognitive Dissonance

The uncomfortable tension we feel when holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

Cognitive Load

When the demands on your working memory exceed its capacity, your ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and resist manipulation drops sharply.

Technology & Society

Cognitive Offloading

Handing mental work to external tools - and the risk that the thinking we stop doing is the thinking we lose.

Commodification

The process of turning things that aren't naturally products - ideas, identity, relationships, rest - into things that can be bought and sold.

Complexity Bias

The tendency to prefer complex explanations over simple ones, and to mistrust simple solutions to problems that feel complicated.

Conceptual Gentrification

When ideas are stripped of their challenging, uncomfortable, or radical parts and repackaged for comfortable mainstream consumption.

Manipulation Tactic

Dark Patterns

Deliberately deceptive design choices that trick people into doing things they didn't intend to do.

Decision Fatigue

The deterioration in the quality of decisions made by a person after a long session of decision-making, as mental energy depletes.

Desensitisation

When repeated exposure to something shocking, disturbing, or morally uncomfortable gradually reduces your emotional response to it - until it barely registers at all.

Technology & Society

Digital Amnesia

Digital amnesia is forgetting what we let our devices remember for us. The 'Google effect', why it happens, and what it costs.

Technology & Society

Doomscrolling

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.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The less you know about something, the more confident you're likely to feel about it.

Effort Justification

The harder we work for something, the more we convince ourselves it was worth it - regardless of whether it was.

False Consensus Effect

We tend to assume that most people think the way we do - and we're usually wrong.

Systems Thinking

Feedback Loops

When the output of a system feeds back in as input, either amplifying or dampening the original effect.

Frequency Illusion

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.

Functional Fixedness

The tendency to see objects, tools, and ideas only in terms of their conventional use, making it harder to find creative solutions.

Halo Effect

One positive trait colours your entire perception of a person, product, or idea.

Law of the Instrument

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.

Loss Aversion

Losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good.

Microaggressions

Small, everyday slights and indignities - often unintentional - that communicate hostility or prejudice toward members of marginalised groups.

Moral Hypocrisy Judgement

We punish the contradiction between someone's stated values and their behaviour more harshly than we punish the behaviour alone.

Psychological Defence

Motivated Reasoning

When we use reasoning not to find the truth, but to defend what we already believe.

Normalisation

The gradual process by which the previously unthinkable becomes acceptable, then expected, then invisible - the slow drift of what a culture treats as normal.

Omission Bias

The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful inactions, even when doing nothing causes more damage.

Pareidolia

The tendency to see recognisable shapes - especially faces - in random patterns, clouds, textures, and noise.

Planning Fallacy

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.

Priming

When exposure to one stimulus unconsciously influences your response to a subsequent one - shaping your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour without your awareness.

Recency Bias

Giving disproportionate weight to the most recent events, experiences, or information - as though what happened last is what matters most.

Logical Fallacy

Red Herring

Introducing an irrelevant topic to divert attention from the original issue.

Mental Model

Regression to the Mean

Extreme results tend to be followed by more average ones - not because of any intervention, but because that's how variation works.

Relative Deprivation

Feeling worse off based on who you compare yourself to, not on what you actually have.

Social Proof

We look at what other people are doing to decide what we should do - especially when we're uncertain.

Spotlight Effect

The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your appearance, behaviour, and mistakes.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Continuing to invest in something because of what you've already put in, not because of what you'll get out.

Survivorship Bias

Focusing on the people or things that succeeded while overlooking those that didn't - and drawing false conclusions from the incomplete picture.

The Attention Economy

A system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource to be harvested, bought, sold, and competed for - reshaping culture around it.

Systems Thinking

Unintended Consequences

Actions in complex systems produce outcomes nobody planned for - sometimes worse than the original problem.