Gurwinder Bhogal
Modern popularizer who reintroduced dozens of obscure biases and effects to a wide online audience.
Popularised
Sources · Registry of first observers
Origins
The registry of the people who discovered, coined, popularised or researched the biases, effects and tools CogniqOS maps — each linked back to the concepts they put on the record.
- 630Concepts
- 264Originators
- 265Discovered
- 93Popularised
- 7Coined
- 66Researched
The provenance web — every mind wired to the concepts they put on the record. White-ringed nodes are concepts credited to two or more people, joining their originators. Drag to explore · click a concept to open its page.
Daniel Kahneman
Proved judgement runs on fast, biased heuristics - the foundation the whole field stands on.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Named the blind spots around rare, high-impact events that models ignore.
Originated
Amos Tversky
Kahneman's co-author; formalised how people misjudge probability and risk.
Originated
The Availability HeuristicThe Framing EffectInsensitivity to Sample SizeThe Conjunction FallacyRelevance Neglect
Lee Ross
Showed we over-blame character and under-blame situation - the attribution error.
Originated
The Fundamental Attribution ErrorEgocentric BiasReactive DevaluationFalse Consensus EffectNaive Realism
Thomas Schelling
Turned strategy and commitment into a science of focal points and credible threats.
Originated
©Scott Alexander
Blogger whose essays gave names to social-epistemic traps like the motte-and-bailey.
Originated
Concealed Ovulation (Cryptic Ovulation)Motte-and-BaileyThe Toxoplasma of RageScissor Statements
Robert Trivers
Built the evolutionary logic of reciprocity, self-deception and parental investment.
Originated
Reciprocal Altruism (Trivers)AnisogamyParental Investment TheoryTrivers-Willard Hypothesis
Aristotle
Catalogued the first fallacies and rhetorical appeals we still teach today.
Originated
The Ambiguity FallacyAppeal to EmotionBegging the QuestionThe Golden Mean
Richard Thaler
Built behavioural economics around mental accounting and the endowment effect.
Originated
©Christopher Hsee
Showed how choices flip depending on whether options are judged together or apart.
Originated
©Sarah Lichtenstein
Co-discovered preference reversal and overconfidence in human calibration.
George Loewenstein
Mapped how present feelings hijack predictions about our future selves.
Leon Festinger
Discovered cognitive dissonance - the discomfort that quietly rewrites belief.
Originated
Daniel Gilbert
Showed we are terrible at predicting what will make our future selves happy.
©Sam Peltzman
Found that safety measures get partly cancelled by riskier behaviour.
Originated
Regulatory CaptureMoral HazardRisk Compensation (The Peltzman Effect)
Robert Axelrod
Ran the tournaments that showed why cooperation beats defection over time.
Originated
Prisoner’s DilemmaTit for TatIterated Games vs One-Shot Games
Thomas Gilovich
Showed how much we overestimate how much others notice us - the spotlight effect.
Popularised
©Ilana Ritov
Co-discovered omission bias with the vaccine-reluctance studies.
Researched
©Jonathan Baron
Named and mapped omission bias - harms from acts judged worse than equal harms from inaction.
Researched
Emily Pronin
Documented the bias blind spot - we see bias in others, never in ourselves.
Originated
The Bias Blind SpotCompassion Fade
Justin Kruger
Co-authored the Dunning-Kruger effect on confidence outrunning competence.
Originated
The Dunning-Kruger EffectNaive Cynicism
Richard E. Nisbett
Showed we confabulate reasons for behaviour we can't actually introspect.
Originated
Solomon Asch
His conformity experiments showed how easily a group bends what we report seeing.
Originated
Negativity BiasConformity Bias
John M. Darley
Co-discovered the bystander effect after the Kitty Genovese case.
Originated
The Take-the-Best HeuristicThe Bystander Effect
Roy Baumeister
Advanced ego depletion and the outsized weight of the negative.
Originated
©George Ainslie
Mapped hyperbolic discounting - why the near reward always looms larger.
Originated
©Hal Arkes
Clarified why sunk costs and path dependence trap otherwise rational choices.
Martin Gardner
Popularised the secretary problem and a generation of recreational maths.
Popularised
The Secretary Problem (The 37% Rule)Hamilton’s Spite
©Jack Brehm
Discovered reactance - the push-back that makes us want what we're denied.
Originated
Choice-Supportive BiasThe Boomerang Effect
©Daniel Schacter
Catalogued the seven sins of memory, from cryptomnesia to source confusion.
Originated
Timur Kuran
Explained preference falsification - why people hide their true beliefs until they cascade.
Originated
Preference FalsificationAvailability Cascade
James Clear
Popularised identity-based habits and environment design for behaviour change.
Popularised
Elizabeth Loftus
Proved memory is reconstructive and can be seeded with events that never happened.
Originated
©Bennet Murdock
Charted the serial-position curve behind primacy and recency in memory.
Karl Popper
Made falsifiability the line between science and everything that only sounds like it.
Originated
UnfalsifiabilityThe Paradox of Tolerance
Henri Tajfel
Showed the barest hint of a group is enough to trigger in-group favouritism.
Originated
In-Group BiasOut-Group Derogation
John Jost
Built system-justification theory - why people defend the very systems that fail them.
Originated
Outgroup FavoritismSystem Justification
Robert Cialdini
Codified the levers of persuasion, from social proof to authority.
Originated
Social ProofThe Messenger Effect
Charles Goodhart
Gave us Goodhart's law - a measure that becomes a target stops being a good measure.
Originated
Goodhart’s LawThe Noble Edge Effect
Robert Rosenthal
Demonstrated how an observer's expectations quietly shape the result they get.
Originated
Observer Expectancy EffectThe Pygmalion Effect
Robert Sapolsky
Traces how stress and biology quietly steer behaviour we call choice.
Originated
Sapolsky's FogThe Sapolsky Stress Model
C. Northcote Parkinson
Coined Parkinson's law - work expands to fill the time available.
Originated
Parkinson’s LawBikeshedding (Law of Triviality)
John von Neumann
Founded game theory - the maths of dominant strategies and zero-sum thinking.
Originated
Dominant StrategyZero-Sum vs Positive-Sum Framing
Paul Lazarsfeld
Founded the study of how influence flows through people, not just media.
Popularised
The Two-Step Flow TheoryHomophily
©Irving Copi
His textbook fixed the modern catalogue of informal fallacies.
Originated
The Composition and Division FallaciesArgument from Ignorance
Victoria Medvec
Found bronze medallists are often happier than silver - counterfactual comparison.
Originated
Edward L. Thorndike
Named the halo effect after officers rated soldiers' looks, character and skill as one blur.
Originated
The Halo EffectGamma Bias
David Laibson
Modelled present bias with quasi-hyperbolic (beta-delta) discounting - the 'golden eggs' paper.
Researched
©Douglas A. Wiegmann
Showed pilots fly on into bad weather when they misjudge it, not from pure stubbornness.
©Juliana Goh
Co-author of the 2002 pilot weather-continuation study.
©David O'Hare
Studies pilot judgement; co-author of the 2002 VFR-into-IMC study.
©Dale T. Miller
Co-wrote Norm Theory with Kahneman: outcomes are judged against easily imagined alternatives.
Researched
Paul Slovic
Discovered the affect heuristic - feeling first, reasoning after.
Originated
Timothy Caulfield
Debunks pseudoscience and named the celebrity-driven distortion of health advice.
Popularised
Herbert A. Simon
Introduced bounded rationality - we satisfice within limits, not optimise.
Originated
©Donella Meadows
Taught a generation to see leverage points and feedback in complex systems.
Popularised
©Peter Wason
Invented the selection task that exposed confirmation bias in plain reasoning.
Originated
©Abraham Luchins
His water-jar studies named the Einstellung effect - a learned method that blinds you to a simpler one.
Originated
Piotr Winkielman
Showed processing fluency shapes judgements of truth, liking and risk.
Originated
©Karl Duncker
His candle problem defined functional fixedness - we only see an object’s usual use.
Originated
Baruch Fischhoff
Discovered hindsight bias - the knew-it-all-along rewrite of the past.
Originated
©Loren Chapman
His studies named illusory correlation - seeing links in data that are not there.
Originated
©Patrick Leman
Proportionality bias - big events must have big causes, so we invent them.
Originated
John A. Swets
Co-founded signal detection theory - separating true signal from noise and bias.
Originated
Anthony Patt
Action bias - the urge to do something even when doing nothing is better.
Originated
Daniel Ellsberg
His paradox showed people flee ambiguity even when the odds are identical.
Originated
Sheena Iyengar
The jam-shelf study proved more choice can freeze rather than free us.
Originated
©Donald Redelmeier
With Kahneman, showed we judge episodes by their peak and end, not their duration.
Originated
©Jerker Denrell
The hot-stove effect - one bad outcome can stop us ever sampling an option again.
©Mark Spranca
Documented omission bias - we judge harm by action more harshly than by inaction.
Originated
Barry Schwartz
Named the paradox of choice - abundance breeds regret, not satisfaction.
Originated
Anthony Pratkanis
Mapped how a withdrawn option still warps the choice it left behind.
Originated
©Gary Klein
Devised the premortem - imagine the failure first, then work back to prevent it.
Originated
Marcel Zeelenberg
Showed anticipated regret quietly shapes the choices we make now.
Originated
©William Samuelson
With Zeckhauser, named status quo bias - the pull of leaving things as they are.
Originated
Bluma Zeigarnik
Found that unfinished tasks nag at memory more than finished ones.
Originated
Cass Sunstein
Co-built nudge theory - choice architecture that steers without forcing.
Popularised
Sendhil Mullainathan
Showed scarcity itself taxes attention, a bandwidth tax on the poor and busy.
Originated
Jerry Suls
False uniqueness - we underestimate how many people share our better traits.
Originated
©Pauline Rose Clance
Named impostor syndrome - competence that never feels like enough.
Originated
Benoît Monin
Moral licensing - a good deed can grant permission for a worse one.
Originated
Thomas Nagel
Framed moral luck - we judge people for outcomes they did not control.
Originated
Ziva Kunda
Showed reasoning bends to reach the conclusion we already want.
Originated
©Dan Galai
The ostrich effect - avoiding financial information when it might bring bad news.
Originated
©John A. Nevin
Behavioural momentum - established habits resist disruption like a moving mass.
Originated
Charles Duhigg
Popularised the habit loop and commitment devices for a mass audience.
Originated
Walter Mischel
The marshmallow test turned delayed gratification into a measurable trait.
Originated
Ann Graybiel
Traced the basal-ganglia circuits that turn repeated acts into habits.
Popularised
©Peter Gollwitzer
Implementation intentions - if-then plans that convert goals into action.
Originated
©Timothy Pychyl
Reframed procrastination as an emotion-regulation failure, not laziness.
Originated
Katy Milkman
Reward substitution and temptation bundling - pairing a chore with a treat.
Popularised
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema
Named rumination - the depressive loop of replaying what went wrong.
Originated
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Plotted the forgetting curve, the first hard law of memory over time.
Originated
©Jeffrey Karpicke
Showed retrieval practice beats rereading - the generation effect at work.
Originated
©Melody Wiseheart (published as Nicholas Cepeda)
Quantified the lag effect - spaced study outlasts crammed study.
Originated
Constantine Sedikides
Reframed nostalgia as a resource that steadies mood and meaning.
Popularised
©Scott Wetzler
The reminiscence bump - we recall our teens and twenties most vividly.
Originated
©Terence Mitchell
Named rosy retrospection - memory paints past events better than we felt them.
Originated
©Henry L. Roediger III
Proved testing is not just measurement but one of the strongest ways to learn.
Originated
©Shai Danziger
The hungry-judge study - parole rulings swing with the time since lunch.
Originated
Michael Norton
The IKEA effect - we overvalue what we build ourselves.
Originated
©Leonid Rozenblit
The illusion of explanatory depth - we think we understand more than we can explain.
Originated
©Loran Nordgren
The restraint bias - we overrate our power to resist temptation.
Originated
Mike Alder
Newton’s flaming laser sword - what cannot be tested is not worth debating.
Thomas Bayes
His theorem is the maths of updating belief as evidence arrives.
Originated
Richard Feynman
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself” - the razor named for him.
Originated
Nate Silver
Made separating signal from noise a public discipline of prediction.
Originated
Kenneth Savitsky
The illusion of asymmetric insight - we think we read others better than they read us.
Originated
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight
©Ola Svenson
Found most drivers rate themselves above average - illusory superiority in one line.
Originated
Illusory Superiority
Adam Waytz
Motive attribution asymmetry - each side thinks the other is driven by hate.
Originated
Motive Attribution Asymmetry
Sigmund Freud
Named the narcissism of small differences - we reserve our fiercest disputes for near-neighbours.
Originated
Narcissism of Small Differences
Morton Deutsch
Named normative social influence - conforming to be liked, not to be right.
Originated
Normative Social Influence
George Quattrone
Outgroup homogeneity - they all look alike, we are all individuals.
Originated
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias
Elliot Aronson
The pratfall effect - a visible flaw can make the competent more likeable.
Originated
The Pratfall Effect
Muzafer Sherif
His Robbers Cave study showed how fast groups form norms and rivalries.
Originated
Social Norms
Anthony Greenwald
Built the Implicit Association Test that put implicit bias on the map.
Originated
Unconscious Bias (Implicit Bias)
G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton’s fence - do not remove a rule until you know why it was built.
Originated
Chesterton’s Fence
Douglas Walton
Formalised the straw man and the catalogue of everyday fallacies.
Originated
The Straw Man Fallacy
Kenneth Arrow
Proved no voting system can fairly satisfy every reasonable rule at once.
Originated
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem
©Daniel Yankelovich
Named the McNamara fallacy - what cannot be measured is dismissed as unreal.
Originated
The McNamara Fallacy
Garrett Hardin
The tragedy of the commons - shared resources ruined by rational self-interest.
Originated
The Tragedy of the Commons
©Maya Bar-Hillel
Documented the base-rate fallacy - vivid detail drowns out the odds.
Originated
The Base Rate Fallacy
©David M. Eddy
Showed how a rare disease turns a positive test into a likely false alarm.
Popularised
The False Positive Paradox
©Scott Feld
The friendship paradox - on average your friends have more friends than you do.
Originated
The Friendship Paradox
©Steve Selvin
Posed the Monty Hall problem, the switch that our intuition always gets wrong.
Popularised
The Monty Hall Problem
©Vladimir Vapnik
His theory pinned down overfitting - a model that memorises noise, not signal.
Originated
Overfitting
©Uri Simonsohn
Named p-hacking - torturing data until it confesses a false result.
Originated
P-Hacking
Francis Galton
Discovered regression to the mean, the trap behind most illusory trends.
Originated
Regression to the Mean Blindness
Abraham Wald
His wartime bullet-hole analysis is the founding case of survivorship bias.
Originated
George Akerlof
The market for lemons showed how hidden information wrecks a market.
Originated
Adverse Selection
Drazen Prelec
Showed cards make us spend more - the pain of paying is deferred.
Originated
The Cashless Effect
©Joel Huber
The decoy effect - a third, worse option flips which of two you prefer.
Originated
The Decoy Effect
©Priya Raghubir
The denomination effect - we spend small coins faster than one large note.
Originated
The Denomination Effect
©Hermann Heinrich Gossen
First stated diminishing marginal utility - each extra unit is worth less.
Originated
Diminishing Marginal Utility
Hersh Shefrin
The disposition effect - we sell winners too early and ride losers too long.
Originated
The Disposition Effect
©Chip Heath
Extrinsic incentive bias - we assume others work for money more than we do.
Originated
Extrinsic Incentive Bias
©Shlomo Benartzi
Naive diversification - splitting evenly across options rather than wisely.
Originated
Naive Allocation
Mark Lepper
The overjustification effect - paying for play can kill the love of it.
Originated
The Overjustification Effect
©Else Frenkel-Brunswik
Named intolerance of ambiguity, later tied to the authoritarian personality.
Originated
Ambiguity Tolerance
Gilbert Ryle
Named the category mistake - treating one kind of thing as another.
Originated
Category Error
Alfred Korzybski
“The map is not the territory” - our models are never the thing itself.
Originated
Map vs Territory
©Vincent Felitti
The ACE study tied childhood adversity to lifelong health outcomes.
Originated
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE Score)
Ivan Pavlov
Classical conditioning - the reflex that learns to fire on a cue.
Originated
Classical Conditioning (Pavlovian Association)
Raymond Cattell
Split intelligence into fluid and crystallised - raw problem-solving vs stored knowledge.
Originated
Crystallised Intelligence
Robin Dunbar
Dunbar’s number - the ceiling on how many real relationships a mind can hold.
Originated
The Grooming Gap
Donald O. Hebb
Neurons that fire together wire together - the rule behind learning in the brain.
Originated
Hebb’s Rule
Ivan Illich
Named iatrogenesis - the harm caused by the very system meant to help.
Originated
Iatrogenesis
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Discovered mirror neurons, cells that fire both when we act and when we watch.
Originated
Mirror Neurons
©Maria Ovsiankina
The Ovsiankina effect - an interrupted task pulls us back to finish it.
Popularised
The Ovsiankina Effect (Hemingway Effect)
C. Sue Carter
Mapped how oxytocin and vasopressin shape bonding and trust.
Originated
Oxytocin vs. Vasopressin
©Fabrizio Benedetti
Mapped the biology of the placebo effect - expectation altering the body.
Originated
The Placebo Effect
©Stewart Wolf
The Roseto effect - tight community ties protecting a town’s heart health.
Originated
The Roseto Effect
©David E. Meyer
Measured switch cost - the hidden tax every time attention changes task.
Originated
The Switch Cost Effect
Kent Berridge
Split wanting from liking - desire and pleasure run on different brain systems.
Originated
The Want-Like Split (Berridge's Paradox)
Robert Plomin
The Wilson effect - heritability of intelligence rises with age, not falls.
Originated
The Wilson Effect
Elaine Morgan
Popularised the aquatic ape hypothesis of human origins.
Popularised
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
Daniel Fessler
The crazy-bastard hypothesis - reckless risk-taking as a costly signal of formidability.
Originated
The Crazy Bastard Hypothesis
Amotz Zahavi
The handicap principle - costly signals are trusted because they are costly.
Originated
The Handicap Principle
W. D. Hamilton
Kin selection - altruism pays when it helps copies of your own genes.
Originated
Kin Selection (Hamilton’s Rule)
©Malte Andersson
Tested sexual selection and the lek - where males display and females choose.
Popularised
The Lek Hypothesis
©S. Boyd Eaton
Mismatch theory - modern bodies built for a vanished environment.
Originated
Mismatch Theory
©Steven Gangestad
Studied the ovulatory-shift hypothesis in human mate preference.
Originated
Ovulatory Shift Hypothesis
Leigh Van Valen
The Red Queen - species must keep evolving just to hold their ground.
Originated
The Red Queen Hypothesis
©Sarah Brosnan
Showed capuchins reject unequal pay - fairness runs deeper than humans.
Originated
Sensitivity to Fairness
Ronald Fisher
The sexy-son hypothesis - attractiveness itself can be the trait selected for.
Originated
The Sexy Son Hypothesis
Edvard Westermarck
The Westermarck effect - childhood closeness suppresses later attraction.
Originated
The Westermarck Effect
©Roy Malpass
Documented the cross-race effect - faces of other groups are harder to tell apart.
Originated
Cross-Race Effect
Carl Sagan
Popularised pareidolia - the face in the clouds, the pattern in the noise.
Originated
Pareidolia
Daniel Oppenheimer
Showed disfluency can deepen thought - harder-to-read text is better remembered.
Originated
Processing Difficulty Effect
©Albert Hastorf
“They saw a game” - selective perception, where each side sees a different match.
Originated
Selective Perception
©Antonia Abbey
Documented sexual overperception - misreading friendliness as sexual interest.
Popularised
Sexual Overperception Bias
©Peter Sifneos
Coined alexithymia - the inability to name one’s own emotions.
Originated
Alexithymia
Elaine Hatfield
Documented emotional contagion - moods spread from person to person.
Originated
Emotional Contagion
C. Daniel Batson
The empathy-altruism hypothesis - empathy can produce genuinely selfless help.
Originated
Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Named flow - total absorption where challenge and skill meet.
Originated
The Flow State
©Philip Brickman
The hedonic treadmill - happiness resets to baseline after fortune or ruin.
Originated
The Hedonic Treadmill
Martin Seligman
Discovered learned helplessness, then built positive psychology around its cure.
Originated
Learned Helplessness
Joseph LeDoux
Traced the fast fear pathway behind the emotional hijack of the amygdala.
Originated
Limbic Hijacking
©Ernest Becker
The denial of death seeds terror management - culture as a shield against mortality.
Originated
Terror Management Theory
Lisanne Bainbridge
The ironies of automation - automating a task can deskill the human who oversees it.
Originated
Automation Bias
©Betsy Sparrow
The Google effect - we remember where to find facts, not the facts themselves.
Originated
The Google Effect
©Riley Goodside
Named prompt injection - hijacking a language model through its own input.
Originated
Prompt Injection
©Michael Jensen
Formalised the principal-agent problem - when the agent’s interests diverge from yours.
Originated
The Principal-Agent Problem
©Garold Stasser
The shared-information bias - groups dwell on what everyone already knows.
Originated
Shared Information Bias
Jon Jecker
The Ben Franklin effect - doing someone a favour makes you like them more.
Originated
The Benjamin Franklin Effect
David Ricardo
Comparative advantage - even the weaker party gains from specialising and trading.
Originated
Comparative Advantage
Joseph Schumpeter
Creative destruction - the storm of innovation that scraps the old to build the new.
Originated
Creative Destruction
Thomas Gresham
Gresham’s law - bad money drives out good when both must trade at par.
Originated
Gresham's Law
Charlie Munger
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” - incentive design in one line.
Originated
Incentive Design
Robert Zajonc
The mere-exposure effect - familiarity alone breeds liking.
Originated
The Mere Exposure Effect
Robert Solow
Named the productivity paradox - computers everywhere except in the statistics.
Originated
The Productivity Paradox
William F. Sharpe
The risk premium and CAPM - the price the market pays you to bear risk.
Originated
Risk Premium
Oliver Williamson
Built transaction-cost economics - why firms exist instead of pure markets.
Originated
Transaction Costs
Lewis Fry Richardson
Modelled arms races as coupled equations of mutual escalation.
Originated
The Arms Race Dynamic
Mancur Olson
The free-rider problem - why groups under-supply the goods everyone wants.
Originated
The Free Rider Problem
John Nash
The Nash equilibrium - the point where no player gains by moving alone.
Originated
Nash Equilibrium
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The stag hunt - the dilemma of trust between cooperation and safe self-interest.
Originated
The Stag Hunt
Brendan Nyhan
Studied belief perseverance - corrections that fail to dislodge a false belief.
Originated
Belief Perseverance
©Lynn Hasher
The illusory truth effect - repetition alone makes a claim feel true.
Originated
The Illusory Truth Effect
Mike Masnick
Coined the Streisand effect - suppressing information only spreads it.
Originated
The Streisand Effect
©Masaaki Kurosu
The aesthetic-usability effect - pretty interfaces feel easier to use.
Originated
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Richard Dawkins
Coined the meme - an idea that spreads and mutates like a gene.
Originated
Meme Theory
©Hans Moravec
Moravec’s paradox - what is hard for machines is easy for us, and vice versa.
Originated
Moravec’s Paradox
Jonathan Haidt
Named safetyism - the overprotection that leaves people more fragile.
Popularised
Safetyism
©Eliyahu Goldratt
The theory of constraints - a system is only as fast as its tightest bottleneck.
Originated
Bottlenecks (Theory of Constraints)
Norbert Wiener
Founded cybernetics - the science of feedback loops and control.
Originated
Feedback Loops
Elon Musk
Popularised first-principles thinking - reason up from physics, not analogy.
Popularised
First Principles Thinking
Benjamin Graham
Margin of safety - buy with a buffer wide enough to survive being wrong.
Originated
Margin of Safety
Malcolm Gladwell
Popularised the tipping point - the threshold where change goes vertical.
Originated
Phase Transitions
Antony Flew
The no-true-Scotsman move - redefining a term to dodge a counterexample.
Originated
No True Scotsman
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
His theory of stupidity - the compliant crowd is more dangerous than malice.
Popularised
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Enrico Fermi
The Fermi paradox - if the universe should teem with life, where is everybody?
Originated
The Fermi Paradox
Jim Collins
The Stockdale paradox - confront brutal facts yet never lose faith in the end.
Popularised
The Stockdale Paradox
©Timothy D. Wilson
Showed people confidently explain choices with reasons that did not cause them.
Researched
©Jonathan W. Schooler
Found that analysing your reasons can make your preferences worse, not better.
Researched
©Petter Johansson
Co-discovered choice blindness: people defend choices they never made.
Researched
©Lars Hall
Co-discovered choice blindness with the swapped-photo experiment.
Researched
©Sverker Sikström
Co-author of the choice-blindness study in Science (2005).
Researched
©Andreas Olsson
Co-author of the choice-blindness study in Science (2005).
Researched
©Ted O'Donoghue
Showed how naive vs sophisticated present-biased people procrastinate differently.
Researched
Matthew Rabin
Formalised present bias and procrastination with O'Donoghue - 'Doing it now or later'.
Researched
Catherine Blumer
Co-ran the 1985 theatre-ticket experiments that defined the sunk cost effect.
Researched
©Stefan Roth
Led the meta-analysis showing the sunk-cost effect is robust across studies.
Researched
©Thomas Robbert
Co-author of the 2015 sunk-cost meta-analysis.
Researched
©Lennart Straus
Co-author of the 2015 sunk-cost meta-analysis.
Researched
Teck-Hua Ho
Found Singapore car owners drive more after paying more for the right to own a car.
Researched
©Ivan Png
Co-author of the costliest-cars sunk-cost field study (2018).
Researched
©Sadat Reza
Co-author of the costliest-cars sunk-cost field study (2018).
Researched
©Nava Ashraf
Tested in Zambia whether paying more for a product makes people use it more.
Researched
©James Berry
Co-author of the Zambia water-purifier price experiment (2010).
Researched
©Jesse M. Shapiro
Co-author of the Zambia price-and-use field experiment (2010).
Researched
©
©Siu Kit Yeung
Led the 2022 preregistered meta-analysis of omission bias.
Researched
©
©Gilad Feldman
Runs large replication projects on classic judgement and decision effects.
Researched
©Peter DeScioli
Argued people choose omissions strategically, to avoid being blamed.
Researched
©Robert Kurzban
Co-author of 'The omission strategy' - omission as blame avoidance.
Researched
©Judith Orasanu
Named plan continuation errors from NTSB accident analyses.
Researched
©Lynne Martin
Co-author of the NASA plan-continuation studies (1998, 2001).
Researched
Jeannie Davison
Co-author of the NASA plan-continuation studies (1998, 2001).
Researched
©Cynthia H. Null
Co-author of the 1998 NASA report on aviation decision errors.
Researched
©Barry M. Staw
Coined escalation of commitment - 'Knee-deep in the big muddy' (1976).
Researched
©R. Key Dismukes
Showed expert pilots fail in airline accidents through ordinary, shared cognitive limits.
Researched
©Benjamin A. Berman
Co-author of 'The Limits of Expertise' (2007).
Researched
©Loukia Loukopoulos
Co-author of 'The Limits of Expertise' (2007).
Researched
©Dan Lovallo
With Kahneman, split timid choices from bold forecasts - the inside view.
Researched
Michael Bar-Eli
Showed goalkeepers dive on penalties when staying central would save more.
Researched
©Yael Keidar-Levin
Co-author of the goalkeeper action-bias study (2007).
Researched
Galit Schein
Co-author of the goalkeeper action-bias study (2007).
Researched
Richard Zeckhauser
Co-named action bias in environmental decisions with Patt (2000).
Researched
©
©
©
©Melissa L. Finucane
Led the 2000 study naming the affect heuristic: liking something shrinks its perceived risk.
Researched
©Ali Alhakami
Co-author of the 2000 affect-heuristic paper; earlier showed risk and benefit judgements move inversely.
Researched
Stephen M. Johnson
Co-author of the 2000 affect-heuristic paper.
Researched
Ellen Peters
Studies how feelings and numeracy shape risk judgements; co-developed the affect heuristic.
Researched
©Donald G. MacGregor
Co-author of the affect-heuristic papers (2002, 2005).
Researched
Paul Ekman
Mapped microexpressions and the leakage that betrays concealed emotion.
Originated
Colin Camerer
Co-named the curse of knowledge: once you know something you can't judge it as someone who doesn't.
Originated
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Scott AlexanderAstral Codex TenConcealed Ovulation (Cryptic Ovulation) · Motte-and-Bailey · The Toxoplasma of Rage +1
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Amos Tversky1937–1996Insensitivity to Sample Size · The Availability Heuristic · The Framing Effect +2
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No originator matches those filters.
Portraits are licence-clean images from Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain / Creative Commons), credited on hover; people with no free photo keep a monogram. Built from the Credit: lines in the Lexicon. This is the first 264 of a growing registry.