psychology

13 articles · All tags

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect
  The Dunning-Kruger effect: why beginners overestimate their skill, what the original psychology studies found, and how to judge yourself fairly.
• Present Bias and Hyperbolic Discounting
  Why the same one-day delay looms larger today than next month: preference reversals, β-δ models, and commitment devices.
• Nudge Theory and Choice Architecture
  How defaults, order, and framing in the choice environment predictably steer decisions without forbidding options or changing incentives.
• Mental Accounting
  Thaler's finding that people partition money into labeled mental accounts and spend, save, and regret differently by account.
• The Framing Effect
  Logically identical choices made differently depending on wording: gains invite caution, losses invite risk.
• Anchoring
  How an initial number — even an arbitrary one — pulls later numerical judgments toward itself, and why expertise barely helps.
• Operant Conditioning
  Learning through consequences: reinforcement increases behavior and punishment decreases it, as studied by B. F. Skinner.
• Classical Conditioning
  The learning process discovered by Ivan Pavlov in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a reflexive response.
• Cognitive Dissonance
  The psychological discomfort caused by holding conflicting beliefs or acting against one's attitudes, and the drive to reduce it.
• Attachment Theory
  The developmental theory that early bonds between infants and caregivers shape later social and emotional development.
• Loss Aversion
  The behavioral-economics finding that losses are felt more strongly than equivalent gains, formalized in prospect theory.
• Working Memory
  The small pool of information the mind actively holds and manipulates, and the classic multicomponent model of how it works.
• Confirmation Bias
  The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember evidence in ways that favor existing beliefs, and how researchers test for it.