Situations / Evaluating a claim
Evaluating a claim
Deciding whether to believe something you’ve read, heard or been told.
Traps you might be in
- No. 0012 Ad HominemYou question a friend’s medical claim, and the reply reminds everyone that you failed biology in high school.
- No. 0064 Authority BiasYou shelve your doubts about a risky purchase after noticing the recommendation comes from a famous professor.
- No. 0068 Availability HeuristicAfter watching a clip of a shark attack, you cancel a beach swim you were looking forward to.
- No. 0074 Bandwagon EffectYou join the long line at a food truck before looking at its menu.
- No. 0077 Base Rate FallacyYour screening result comes back positive, and you assume you’re almost certain to have the disease.
- No. 0100 Bias Blind SpotYour colleague’s preferred candidate looks like favoritism; your own preferred candidate just seems obviously right for the job.
- No. 0140 Cherry PickingThe sales deck celebrates three happy customers, while the cancellation spreadsheet stays closed on the presenter’s laptop.
- No. 0191 Confirmation BiasYou decide a job offer is right, then spend the evening reading only the reviews that make it sound good.
- No. 0196 Conjunction FallacyIn the forecast meeting, a detailed story about a recession and a market crash feels likelier than a recession alone.
- No. 0217 Correlation-Causation FallacyYour best salespeople use the new dashboard most, so you make everyone use it.
- No. 0295 Dunning-Kruger EffectYou finish your first practice exam feeling ready, then the answer key reveals mistakes you didn’t even know to check.
- No. 0310 Ego DepletionAfter a day of biting your tongue, you open the snack cupboard and feel too worn out to resist.
- No. 0367 False Consensus EffectYou choose a remote cabin for the group trip, sure everyone wants to escape the city.
- No. 0368 False DilemmaYour manager offers two options: approve the weekend deadline, or admit you don’t care about the customers.
- No. 0403 Framing EffectYou feel safer choosing surgery with a 90% survival rate than surgery with a 10% death rate.
- No. 0450 Halo EffectThe candidate gives a dazzling presentation, and you give their untested management skills a higher score.
- No. 0476 Hot Hand FallacyAfter three winning roulette bets, you double your next stake because tonight you feel unstoppable.
- No. 0483 Illusion of ControlYou choose the lottery numbers yourself, then feel less willing to swap your ticket for one the machine picked.
- No. 0484 Illusion of Explanatory DepthYou tell your child you know how a zipper works, then run out of words after the teeth come together.
- No. 0490 Illusory Truth EffectBy the third time you see the same headline in your feed, it seems less like a rumor and more like something you know.
- No. 0635 Motivated ReasoningYou want the apartment, so you read the glowing reviews once and reread the complaints until they sound unreasonable.
- No. 0637 Motte-and-Bailey FallacyYou challenge a proposal to track every employee, and suddenly you’re defending whether managers should know what work gets done.
- No. 0650 Naive RealismYou leave a meeting certain the facts were obvious, wondering how your colleague could possibly have missed them.
- No. 0663 Negativity BiasYou reread the one harsh comment on your presentation while the ten thank-you messages sit unopened.
- No. 0681 Not-Invented-Here SyndromeA colleague offers a tool that does the job, and your team starts planning its own version without even opening the demo.
- No. 0775 Probability NeglectYou cancel a flight after picturing a crash, without checking how likely a crash is.
- No. 0895 Selection BiasYou read glowing reviews of a difficult course, then notice that every reviewer made it to the final lesson.
- No. 0944 Slippery Slope FallacyYour committee rejects one late application because, by next year, nobody will respect the deadline.
- No. 0990 Straw ManYou suggest fewer weekend emails, and your manager starts defending the need to work hard.
- No. 1008 Survivorship BiasYou scroll through traders’ success stories and start planning how to quit your job.
- No. 1027 Texas Sharpshooter FallacyAfter trying twenty cuts of a sales dashboard, you find one winning customer group and call it the campaign’s intended audience.
- No. 1085 WhataboutismYou ask why your teammate shared a client’s private file, and suddenly you’re discussing a competitor’s data breach.
Tools to try
- No. 0087 Bayesian UpdatingThe fraud alert looks damning, until you learn how often it flags perfectly ordinary purchases.
- No. 0199 Consider-the-Opposite StrategyBefore sending a furious reply, you jot down three reasons your coworker’s message might not be an insult.
- No. 0381 Fermi EstimationThe launch meeting starts in ten minutes, and you still need a defensible guess at how many support agents to book.
- No. 0382 Feynman TechniqueYou can follow every sentence of the chapter, but your explanation stalls as soon as you close the book.
- No. 0686 Occam’s RazorThree apps stop working at once, and you start reinstalling each one before checking the shared connection.
- No. 0820 Red TeamingYour launch review is all green until a separate team tries to make the plan fail.
- No. 0980 SteelmanningBefore sending your rebuttal, you rewrite your coworker’s office policy proposal in a form they could recognize and defend.
Patterns at play
- No. 0512 Information CascadeYou approve the supplier despite a bad test result, assuming the three people who approved it before you know something you don’t.
- No. 0574 Lindy EffectYou reach past this year’s bestseller for the book people are still recommending fifty years after it appeared.
- No. 0936 Simpson’s ParadoxYour team’s conversion rate rises on both phones and computers, but the overall rate falls.
- No. 0956 Social ProofYou walk past an empty restaurant and join the line outside the one next door.
Concepts to know
- No. 0084 Bayes’ TheoremYour screening result comes back positive, and you start making plans as if the diagnosis is settled.
- No. 0193 ConfoundingYou buy the supplement used by the healthiest people at your gym, without asking what else they do.
- No. 0292 Dual-Process TheoryYou reread an email you nearly sent and realize your first reply would have made the argument worse.
- No. 0307 Effect SizeThe tutoring program boasts a statistically significant gain; you look closer and find an average improvement of one test point.
- No. 0551 Law of Large NumbersYour first ten coin flips produce eight heads, and you start wondering whether the coin is fair.
- No. 0599 Mean vs. MedianYour boss announces that average pay is $100,000, and nobody at your lunch table earns anything close to it.
- No. 0659 Necessary vs. Sufficient ConditionsYour application meets every published minimum, but the rejection email still arrives.
- No. 0830 Regression to the MeanAfter your lowest sales month all year, you take a course and celebrate when the next month’s numbers bounce back.