Foibles,

Faults,

and

Fallacies

Poems by Tom Sharp

Foibles, Faults, and Fallacies

• About this book
• Zeigarnik effect
• We remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
• Twinkie defense
• We accept shoddy reasons when they support our needs.
• Trait ascription bias
• We think others’ personalities are more predictable than our own.
• Tip of the tongue phenomenon
• Often when we fail to recall a detail, it seems close to mind.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• We think something happened because we believed it would.
• Salience bias
• Focus on striking or tragic elements skews our perception of the whole.
• Rhyme as reason effect
• We feel a statement is more truthful if it rhymes.
• Pareidolia
• We recognize things that aren’t there in vague or random inputs.
• Normalcy bias
• We refuse to plan for, or react to, a disaster we’ve never experienced before.
• Mind projection fallacy
• We think nature conforms to our ideas of it.
• Illusory superiority
• We overestimate our own qualities and abilities.
• Humor effect
• We more easily remember humorous items.
• False memory
• We mistake something we imagined for a memory.
• End-of-history illusion
• We think we will change less in the future than we have in the past.
• Context effect
• It’s harder for us to remember things out of context.
• Confirmation bias
• We look for and focus on confirmations of our own opinions and beliefs.
• Chronological snobbery
• We think the works of earlier times are inherently inferior.
• Barnum effect
• We think general personality descriptions apply to ourselves particularly.
• Anthropomorphism
• We project human emotions and behavior on things and other animals.