Search results for: “cognitive bias”

  • Using Cognitive Bias: Politics and Policy

    You may have noticed that I’ve recently been fascinated by everything cognitive bias. With the release of Nudge—a book looking at how politicians around the world are using cognitive bias—the general public are now going to be hearing about it a lot more too. The Times has a nice case-study where the theories are used…

  • List of Cognitive Biases

    I love lists, and so every day this week I’ll give you one to chew on. To start us off is this wonderful list of cognitive biases. To try and become a better thinker I’m studying cognitive biases in order to (attempt to) overcome them. This in itself is attempting to overcome the bias blind…

  • On Bias, Rhetoric, and Cognitive Dissonance

    Author of The New York Times’ Consumed column, Rob Walker, dissects a Weekly Standard article discussing the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain to answer the question: what’s the difference between rhetoric and cognitive dissonance? Both can result in points of view that are so biased that they have no connection to reality. But…

  • Testing Rationality and Bias

    How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like?  Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…

  • Derren Brown’s Bertram Effect Experiment Text

    I love the Bertram effect. It’s likely the cognitive bias / psychological experiment that I think of the most. While the text from the original experiment is good, it’s from 1948. In the brilliant Tricks of the Mind and his 2000s TV show of the same name, Derren Brown updated the experiment, using his own text (reproduced…

  • Year One in Review

    366 days, 616 posts and 15,144 spam comments later, I am happy and proud to announce that Lone Gunman is now one year old (founded on February 29th 2008, I suppose it’s not even that, is it?). LG has evolved into something completely different to what I had first envisaged and the whole experience of…

  • Action Through Advertising

    Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas: The ads avoided the negatives…

  • List of Thought Processes

    Thoughts – or specifically the mental processes enabling us to think – allow beings to be conscious, to make decisions, and to imagine. Thoughts are what define us as individuals. This list of thought processes is a (big) list of thinking styles, methods of thinking (thinking skills), and types of thought. When you have some…

  • List of Logical Fallacies

    First cognitive science, now logic: a list of logical fallacies. A fallacy is a component of an argument which, being demonstrably flawed in its logic or form, renders the argument invalid in whole. I prefer the many informal fallacies: an important one of which is that correlation does not imply causation (cum hoc ergo propter…

  • CIA Guide to Optimised Thinking

    Complex situations are – by their very nature – difficult to understand. Compound this with the fact that in any given situation we’re all going to have cognitive biases that make us view situations differently and inaccurately, and you’re going to have a bit of a mess when it comes to thinking about and analysing…