Cognitive Bias

Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Emotion Primary driver of political decisions Political psychology Rationalization Brain resolves data-desire conflicts Neural activity studies The Primacy of the Gut: Why Reason Buckles The prevailing vision of democracy—a dispassionate electorate weighing evidence and rationally calculating costs and benefits—bears almost no relation to how the mind actually works during a campaign. When the American public votes, the decisions are invariably driven by emotion and deeply rooted psychological networks, not by dispassionate reasoning. This is true not only for the politically unengaged but also for the most informed partisans. Political persuasion, therefore, operates not in the marketplace of ideas, but primarily in the far more potent marketplace of emotions. ...

The War of Words: The Invisible Logic of Political Language and Automated Influence 1 The War of Words - Part 1: The Invisible Logic of Political Language 2 The War of Words - Part 2: The Tyranny of the Narrating Self 3 The War of Words - Part 3: The STEPPS of Automated Influence ← Series Home The Calculating Machine’s Fatal Flaw The enduring Western ideal of the political actor is framed by the dispassionate mind, a figure often celebrated by philosophers and economists who weighs evidence objectively before making a reasoned decision. This conception gives rise to the belief that citizens should respond primarily to detailed policy arguments, cost-benefit analyses, and factual lists. Yet, decades of scientific inquiry reveal that this vision is fundamentally inconsistent with how the human mind and brain actually function; in reality, decisions are rarely dispassionate, particularly when they involve deeply held political commitments. The profound disconnect between this idealized rationality and the actual workings of human cognition means that political messaging built solely on logic is perpetually vulnerable to defeat by appeals rooted in emotion and narrative coherence. ...

The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Blueprint Was Flawless. The Failure Was Psychological. On April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic departed Southampton carrying 2,224 passengers and crew. Within five days, the ship would sink in the North Atlantic, killing 1,503 people. The tragedy wasn’t caused by incompetent design. Quite the opposite. The Titanic was built by Harland and Wolff, the world’s premier shipbuilder, at a cost equivalent to $200 million today. Its watertight compartments, double bottom, and advanced steam engines represented the cutting edge of 1912 engineering. The ship’s designers were the best available. The technology was state-of-the-art. Yet these advantages became fatal liabilities because they triggered a psychological mechanism so powerful it rendered obvious risks invisible: the expert blind spot combined with systematic normalization of deviance. ...

The Endowment Effect of Digital Ownership: 5 Surprising Truths About Why We Overvalue What We Own Introduction: The Invisible Force Behind Your Possessions Have you ever tried to sell a used car, a piece of furniture, or even an old smartphone, only to feel that every offer you receive is offensively low? Or maybe you’ve felt an irrational attachment to a digital item in a video game that has no real-world value. This feeling isn’t just about sentimentality; it’s the result of a powerful cognitive bias called the “endowment effect”—an invisible force that convinces us our stuff is special, just because it’s ours. ...