The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly

Source: en.wikipedia.org · 99 items in the source's own order.

1. 1Survivorship bias
   Drawing conclusions from the winners who remain visible while overlooking the many that dropped out, so success looks easier or likelier than it is.
2. 2Swimmer's body illusion
   Mistaking a trait that selected people into a group for an effect of the group's activity.
3. 3Clustering illusion
   Seeing meaningful streaks, clusters or patterns in random data.
4. 4Social proof
   Deciding what is correct or appropriate by looking at what others do, especially similar others, when we are uncertain.
5. 5Sunk cost fallacy → Sunk-cost fallacy
   Continuing an endeavour because of what has already been invested (time, money, effort) rather than by weighing future costs and benefits.
6. 6Reciprocity
   Feeling obliged to return favours, gifts and concessions, even small or unrequested ones.
7. 7Confirmation bias (part 1) → Confirmation bias
   The tendency to look for, notice, favour and remember information that confirms what we already believe, and to discount what contradicts it.
8. 8Confirmation bias (part 2) → Confirmation bias
   The tendency to look for, notice, favour and remember information that confirms what we already believe, and to discount what contradicts it.
9. 9Authority bias
   Giving undue weight to the opinion or commands of an authority figure, in matters even outside their expertise.
10. 10Contrast effect
    Judging something by comparison with what was just seen rather than on its own merits.
11. 11Availability bias → Availability heuristic
    Judging how likely or frequent something is by how easily examples come to mind, so vivid, recent or emotional events get overweighted.
12. 12The It'll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better fallacy → "Get worse before it gets better" fallacy
    A claim that gets worse before it improves is unfalsifiable: if things worsen it is "part of the process", and if they improve the claim is confirmed.
13. 13Story bias → Narrative fallacy
    Weaving scattered facts into a tidy cause-and-effect story, and trusting the story because it is coherent rather than because it is true.
14. 14Hindsight bias
    After learning the outcome, believing we knew it all along and that it was predictable.
15. 15Overconfidence effect
    Being more certain of our judgments, knowledge and forecasts than their accuracy justifies.
16. 16Chauffeur knowledge
    Mistaking the ability to talk fluently about a subject for real understanding.
17. 17Illusion of control
    Overestimating how much influence we have over outcomes that are largely chance.
18. 18Incentive super-response tendency
    People respond to rewards and punishments far more strongly and creatively than expected, often by gaming the metric rather than serving its purpose.
19. 19Regression to mean → Regression to the mean
    Extreme results tend to be followed by more ordinary ones, and we invent causes for this natural drift.
20. 20Outcome bias
    Judging a decision by how it turned out rather than by the quality of the reasoning at the time it was made.
21. 21The paradox of choice → Paradox of choice
    More options can make decisions harder, less satisfying and more regretful.
22. 22Liking bias
    Being more easily persuaded by, and more generous to, people we like, who are attractive, similar to us or flatter us.
23. 23Endowment effect
    Valuing something more simply because we own it.
24. 24Coincidence → Coincidences and unlikely events
    Improbable things are bound to happen somewhere given enough chances, yet we read each one as meaningful.
25. 25Groupthink
    A group's desire for harmony and consensus suppresses dissent and realistic appraisal of alternatives.
26. 26Neglect of probability
    Focusing on how big or how dreadful an outcome would be and ignoring how likely it is, which is why tiny chances of huge prizes or disasters dominate decisions.
27. 27Scarcity error
    Valuing something more when it appears limited in supply or time.
28. 28Base-rate neglect
    Ignoring how common something is in general when judging a specific case, and focusing on the vivid details instead.
29. 29Gambler's fallacy
    Believes that past random outcomes change the odds of the next one ("it's due").
30. 30The anchor → Anchoring
    Relying too heavily on the first number or piece of information encountered (the anchor) and adjusting too little from it.
31. 31Induction → Problem of induction
    Past regularities do not guarantee future ones.
32. 32Loss aversion
    Feeling a loss roughly twice as strongly as an equal gain, which makes us cling to what we have and avoid risk when ahead.
33. 33Social loafing
    People exert less effort in a group than alone when their contribution is not individually visible.
34. 34Exponential growth → Exponential growth bias
    Underestimating how quickly quantities grow when they compound.
35. 35Winner's curse
    In an auction with uncertain value, the winner tends to be the one who overestimated most, and so overpays.
36. 36Fundamental attribution error
    Explaining other people's behaviour by their character while explaining our own by circumstances.
37. 37False causality → Post hoc ergo propter hoc
    Assumes that because one event followed another, the first caused the second.
38. 38Halo effect
    Letting one good impression (looks, charm, one success) colour judgment of unrelated traits; the reverse, from one bad trait, is the horn effect.
39. 39Alternative paths
    Judging a risky choice only by what happened, not by the other outcomes that could have happened.
40. 40Forecast illusion
    Trusting precise predictions about complex systems (economies, markets, elections) far more than their track record deserves.
41. 41Conjunction fallacy
    Judges a combination of events as more probable than one of them alone, though a conjunction can never be more likely than either part.
42. 42Framing → Framing effect
    Reacting differently to the same facts depending on how they are presented, for instance as a gain or a loss, a percentage or a count.
43. 43Action bias
    Preferring to do something, even something useless or harmful, over doing nothing in uncertain situations.
44. 44Omission bias
    Judging harm caused by action as worse than equal harm caused by inaction.
45. 45Self-serving bias
    Crediting our successes to our own ability and our failures to circumstances or other people.
46. 46Hedonic treadmill
    We return to a baseline level of happiness after good or bad changes, so we underestimate adaptation and overestimate how much a purchase or promotion will help.
47. 47Self-selection bias
    Samples that choose themselves (volunteers, respondents, subscribers) differ systematically from the population, skewing conclusions.
48. 48Association bias
    Linking things that merely occur together or resemble each other, so we like or dislike something because of what it is associated with.
49. 49Beginner's luck
    Early success in a risky field is mostly chance, yet it can encourage overconfidence and more risk.
50. 50Cognitive dissonance
    The discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs or acting against our beliefs, which we reduce by changing the belief, the behaviour or the interpretation, usually the easiest of the three.
51. 51Hyperbolic discounting
    Preferring a smaller reward now to a larger one later, with the preference flipping as the "now" gets closer.
52. 52'Because' justification → "Because" justification
    People are more willing to comply when a request comes with a reason, even a meaningless one ("because I need to").
53. 53Decision fatigue
    The quality of decisions can deteriorate after a long run of choices, pushing people toward defaults or shortcuts.
54. 54Contagion bias
    Believing that a thing keeps the "essence" of what it touched, so objects associated with disliked people feel contaminated and those associated with admired ones feel special.
55. 55The problem with averages
    An average can hide wide spread, skew and outliers, so it may describe nobody in the group.
56. 56Motivation crowding
    Paying for something people did out of intrinsic motivation can reduce their willingness to do it unpaid.
57. 57Twaddle tendency
    Filling one's mind and conversation with trivia, noise and empty talk that crowds out what matters.
58. 58Will Rogers phenomenon
    Moving an item from one group to another can raise the average of both groups, making things look better though nothing changed.
59. 59Information bias
    Seeking more information even when it cannot change the decision, which delays action.
60. 60Effort justification
    Valuing an outcome more because we worked hard for it.
61. 61The law of small numbers → Law of small numbers
    Expecting small samples to look like the whole population and drawing strong conclusions from a handful of cases.
62. 62Expectations → Expectation effect
    What we expect to happen changes what we perceive and sometimes what happens, through attention, behaviour and belief.
63. 63Simple logic → Wason selection task
    Even simple "if P then Q" rules are often tested the wrong way: people look for confirming cases rather than the cases that could falsify the rule.
64. 64Forer effect
    Accepting vague, general descriptions as personal and accurate, which is why horoscopes and some personality tests feel uncannily right.
65. 65Volunteer's folly
    Dobelli's argument that donating money earned doing what you do best often helps a cause more than volunteering time on tasks others could do more cheaply.
66. 66Affect heuristic
    Letting how we feel about something ("good" or "bad") stand in for a judgment of its risks and benefits.
67. 67Introspection illusion
    Believing we know why we think, feel or choose as we do by looking inward, when the real causes are often hidden from us.
68. 68The inability to close doors → Inability to close doors
    Keeping options open at a high cost in time, attention and money, even when they are nearly worthless.
69. 69Neomania
    An excessive attraction to what is new, and an assumption that newer means better.
70. 70Sleeper effect
    A message from a low-credibility source gradually becomes more persuasive as people forget where it came from while remembering the message.
71. 71Alternative blindness
    Judging an option on its own merits without asking "compared to what?", so a mediocre choice looks fine because the better alternatives never come into view.
72. 72Social comparison bias
    Judging our worth by comparison with others, and tending to dislike or undermine people who are better than us at something.
73. 73Primacy and recency effects
    Remembering, and weighting, the first and last items in a sequence more than those in the middle.
74. 74Not-invented-here syndrome
    Rejecting ideas, products or research because they came from outside one's own group.
75. 75The black swan → Black swan events
    Rare, high-impact events that nobody expected are explained away afterwards as if they had been predictable.
76. 76Domain dependence
    Knowledge and skill that work in one context often fail to transfer to another, although we assume they will.
77. 77False-consensus effect
    Overestimating how widely our own opinions and behaviours are shared.
78. 78Falsification of history
    Rewriting our own or collective past, consciously or not, to fit our present beliefs and self-image.
79. 79In-group out-group bias → In-group bias
    Favouring members of our own group and viewing outsiders less generously.
80. 80Ambiguity aversion
    Preferring a known risk over an unknown one, even when the unknown one might be better.
81. 81Default effect
    Sticking with the pre-selected option, which is why defaults strongly shape behaviour.
82. 82Fear of regret
    Avoiding choices we might later regret, which can push us toward the safe or conventional option.
83. 83Salience effect → Salience bias
    Overweighting what stands out (vivid, unusual, emotional) and underweighting what is dull but important.
84. 84House-money effect
    Taking bigger risks with money that was won or windfall, as though it were not "really" yours.
85. 85Procrastination
    Delaying tasks despite expecting to be worse off for the delay, often because present comfort outweighs future benefit.
86. 86Envy
    Resentment at others' advantages, which makes us judge by comparison and sometimes harm our own interests to reduce theirs.
87. 87Personification
    Attributing human intentions, emotions or character to things, organizations and abstractions.
88. 88Illusion of attention → Inattentional blindness
    Failing to notice clearly visible things when attention is elsewhere, while believing we see everything.
89. 89Strategic misrepresentation
    Deliberately understating costs and overstating benefits to win approval for a project.
90. 90Overthinking
    Analysing a decision at length to the point where it hurts the result, especially for intuitive or skilled tasks.
91. 91Planning fallacy
    Underestimating the time, cost and risk of our own plans while knowing similar plans overran, because we picture the best case.
92. 92Deformation professionnelle → Déformation professionnelle
    Seeing every problem through the lens of one's own profession or favourite tool.
93. 93Zeigarnik effect
    Unfinished tasks stay in mind more than finished ones, which can nag us or be exploited by cliffhangers.
94. 94Illusion of skill
    Mistaking luck for skill, especially where outcomes are largely random, such as stock picking.
95. 95Feature-positive effect
    Noticing what is present far more than what is absent, so missing evidence and missing features go unnoticed.
96. 96Cherry-picking → Cherry picking
    Presents only the evidence that supports a conclusion and ignores or hides the rest.
97. 97Fallacy of the single cause
    Attributes an outcome to one cause when it had several that interacted.
98. 98Intention-to-treat error
    Judging a treatment or programme only by the people who completed it, ignoring those who dropped out, who may have left because it was not working.
99. 99News illusion
    Consuming the news as if it made us better informed, when most of it is irrelevant, sensational, fleeting and crowds out deeper understanding.

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