Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking

The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and what you can do about them is now available from Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble as an e-book and from Lulu as a paperback...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-critical-thinkers-dictionary.html

This will be last blog post for Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking. Instead of introducing another cognitive bias or logical fallacy, this final post will be devoted to considering whe...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-wisdom-of-not-thinking-too-much.html

Change blindness is the failure to detect non-trivial changes in the visual field. The failure to see things changing right before your eyes may seem like a design fault, but it is actually a sig...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/01/change-blindness.html

The bias blind spot was described by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues (2002) as the tendency to perceive cognitive and motivational biases much more in others tha...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/01/bias-blind-spot.html

A cogent argument presents all the relevant evidence. An argument that omits relevant evidence appears stronger and more cogent than it is. The fallacy of suppressed evidence occurs when an arg...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/01/suppressed-evidence.html

Testimonials and anecdotes are used to support claims in many fields. Advertisers often rely on testimonials to persuade consumers of the effectiveness or value of their products or services. Oth...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2013/01/anecdotal-evidence-testimonials.html

Human behavior can be understood as issuing from "internal" factors or personal characteristics--such as motives, intentions, or personality traits--and from "external" factors--such as the physi...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/12/attribution-biases.html

A control group study uses a control group to compare to an experimental group in a test of a causal hypothesis. The control and experimental groups must be identical in all relevant ways except ...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/12/control-group-study.html

A false memory is a memory that is a distortion of an actual experience or a confabulation of an imagined one. Many false memories involve confusing or mixing fragments of memory events, some of...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/12/false-memories.html

The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements were not made about them personally and could apply ...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/12/forer-effect.html

The optimistic bias is an expression used by Daniel Kahneman to describe the idea that "most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they ...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-optimistic-bias.html

>  ...magical thinking is "a fundamental dimension of a child's > thinking." --Zusne and Jones >  Magical thinking is a belief in the interconnectedness of all things through for...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/11/magical-thinking.html

A causal fallacy involves making the claim that something (call it 'x') causes something else (call it 'y') when the evidence presented is insufficient to establish either that x is a necessary c...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/11/causal-fallacies.html

>   "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred > with their bones." --Marc Antony, Julius Caesar by Shakespeare (act > 3, scene ii) > "I hate�...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/11/negativity-bias.html

Logical fallacies are errors that occur in arguments. In logic, an argument is the giving of reasons (called premises) to support some claim (called the conclusion). Arguments may be classified a...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/11/informal-fallacies-of-reasoning.html

The ideomotor effect refers to the influence of suggestion or expectation on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior. The movement of pointers on Ouija boards , of a facilitator's hands in fac...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/10/ideomotor-effect.html

Cognitive dissonance is a theory of human motivation that asserts that it is psychologically uncomfortable to hold contradictory cognitions. The theory is that dissonance, being unpleasant, moti...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/10/cognitive-dissonance.html

Begging the question is a fallacy in reasoning whereby one assumes what one claims to be proving. An argument is a form of reasoning in which one gives a reason or reasons in support of some cl...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/10/begging-question.html

The irrelevant appeal to tradition is a fallacy in reasoning in which one argues that a practice or a belief is justifiable simply because it has a long and established history. An example of thi...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/10/irrelevant-appeal-to-tradition.html

Wishful thinking is interpreting facts, reports, events, perceptions, etc., according to what one would like to be the case rather than according to the actual evidence. Wishful thinking is often...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/10/wishful-thinking.html

> "The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making > organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our > view of the world to accom...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/09/hindsight-bias.html

Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. Predicting the future in the short term, even for highly changeable event...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/09/recency-bias.html

Shoehorning is the process of force-fitting some current affair into one's personal, political, or religious agenda. So-called psychics frequently shoehorn events to fit vague statements they ma...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/09/shoehorning.html

Have you ever told a story that you embellished by putting yourself at the center when you knew that you weren’t even there? Or have you ever been absolutely sure you remembered something corre...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/09/confabulation.html

Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what co...

http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/08/confirmation-bias.html