The World's Best Book Summaries
What was the purpose of the Stanford Prison Experiment? What were its findings? What does it say about our tendency to overestimate the importance of personality traits over social pressures? We’ll cover the purpose and findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment and discuss its implications.
What is the fundamental attribution error? Do you make it? How is it related to the power of social context? The Fundamental Attribution Error is a psychological term for humans’ tendency to overestimate the importance of fundamental personality traits in explaining people’s behaviors, and underestimate the role of context. In other words, when we see someone behave a certain way, we’re more likely to assume it’s a fundamental personality trait, rather than the influence of temporary context. We’ll cover the fundamental attribution error and look at examples of the fundamental attribution error, or fundamental attribution bias.
What are “unknown unknowns.” Why do we have the tendency to avoid them? We’ll cover why unknown unknowns are so hard to see (we don’t know that we do don’t know them!) and how our tendency to “tunnel” gives us an inaccurate picture of the world.
What is empirical skepticism philosophy? In what ways does it resist faulty reasoning and cognitive bias? Empirical skepticism philosophy is a skeptical approach steeped in fact and observation. It was practiced by philosophers such as Sextus Empiricus and David Hume. We’ll cover the history of empirical skepticism philosophy and how it resists five common cognitive errors.
What is confirmation bias? What is the confirmation bias definition, and what are some clear confirmation bias examples? Confirmation bias is the tendency to only see the evidence that confirms the beliefs you already hold. We select evidence on the basis of preconceived frameworks, biases, or hypotheses. We’ll cover how confirmation bias occurs and why it means that “experts” often aren’t experts at all.
What is transactive memory? How does it work, and how does it depend on your relationships? Transactive memory is the process of relying on the people we have close relationships with to hold information for us. We often depend on transactive memory becomes our own individual memories have limited space. We’ll cover how the transactive memory system works and why it makes small groups and companies functions better.
What is the “Power of Context”? Where does it come from? Why is it important in business, sales, and marketing? The Power of Context is the idea that the environment in which the message or idea is delivered can have a huge impact on whether enough people adopt and spread it to create an epidemic. This idea was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. We’ll cover examples of the power of context and look at why the context of a message can make all the difference.
What is an example of a weak inductive argument? Why are so many inductive arguments weak? We’ll cover some famously weak inductive arguments and explore two ways to be a better, more logical thinker.
What is the Rule of 150? What does it say about how we function and cooperate in large and small groups? The Rule of 150 is a concept in sociology that says that social structures function best at or under 150 people. Groups bigger than 150 people tend to break into smaller groups in order to function. We’ll look at an example of the Rule of 150 to see how it functions in business organizations.
What is the narrative fallacy? How does our natural tendency to tell stories get in our way? The narrative fallacy is the cognitive bias that puts us in danger of ascribing meaning or cause to random events. Humans are evolutionarily conditioned—by the development of the left hemisphere of our brains—to reduce the complexity of the world’s information; and the most efficient way of simplifying that complexity is through storytelling. We’ll cover the narrative fallacy, look at narrative fallacy examples, and suggest two ways to counter it.