Pareidolia

Have you ever seen familiar and improbable shapes in those puffy white cumulus clouds as they pass overhead? Notice the squirrel or dinosaur in the image to the right. Some of you may have you seen the recent American Express commercial that portrays items positioned in such a way that we perceive them as sad …

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Moral Instinct

Two years ago Steven Pinker wrote an intriguing piece in the New York Times entitled The Moral Instinct. Dr. Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University who conducts research on language and cognition. This article in many ways stirred me and lead to a …

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Rules of Thought

We are innately intuitive thinkers inclined toward making all sorts of cognitive errors as we muddle through our lives. The consequences in many cases are benign enough; however, I dare say that many an interpersonal conflict stems from such thinking. However, the consequences of this type of thinking can be huge in some circumstances. For …

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Global Consequences of Cognitive Biases

My previous posts addressed several common cognitive biases while briefly touching on their subsequent consequences.  In review, the Fundamental Attribution Error leads us to make hasty and often erroneous conclusions about others’ personal attributes based on our superficial observations.  Generally such conclusions are in fact erroneous because we lack a sufficient understanding of the situational …

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Spinoza’s Conjecture

Last week I discussed fundamental attribution error, leaving confirmation bias and Spinoza’s Conjuncture left to explore.  Today I’m going to delve into the latter.  Benedict Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch philosopher, wrote with great insight that “mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of …

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Attribution Error

In my Cognitive Biases piece last week, I briefly introduced three common errors in thinking. In today’s post I am going to expand upon Attribution Error.  Before I explain this cognitive bias, let’s look at some situations where such erroneous thinking occurs.   Where I work, at a preschool for children with substantial developmental delays, …

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Time Is [Like] Money, Except, You Can’t Get A Refund

Perhaps the most valuable asset we have is Time.  Its value is set by the fact that we have a finite supply of it.  Equally influential is the reality that there are multiple competing demands for it.  These factors contend with one another, the outcome often being that aching feeling that we just don’t have …

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