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Psychology of Decisions

How we actually decide — biases, heuristics, and how to do better.

22 posts · Thinking & Decisions

  1. 1

    What Psychology Is, and Why "Rational" People Decide Irrationally

    Welcome. Before we explore how people make choices, let's start with the simplest possible question: what is psychology, really?
  2. 2

    Two Minds in One Head: Fast Thinking vs Slow Thinking

    Try this. Read the next line and answer as fast as you can, out loud: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
  3. 3

    How the Brain Actually Decides: Emotion, Memory & Attention

    So far you have learned that people are not perfectly logical — they are predictably imperfect. But why?
  4. 4

    What People Really Want: Needs, Motivation & Reward

    Every choice a person makes is powered by something underneath it — a need, a craving, a hope, a fear.
  5. 5

    Mental Shortcuts: How Heuristics Help and Trick Us

    Imagine you had to think through every choice from scratch — which shoe to put on first, whether the milk is safe, how worried to be about the loud noise…
  6. 6

    The Big Biases I: Anchoring, Framing, Availability & Defaults

    Here is a strange and important truth about your mind: the same fact , presented two different ways, can make you decide two opposite things.
  7. 7

    The Big Biases II: Loss Aversion, Sunk Cost, Confirmation & Overconfidence

    In the last chapter we met biases that distort how we judge the world — how likely something is, how big a number should be.
  8. 8

    Prospect Theory & Behavioral Economics: How We Weigh Gains, Losses & Risk

    For a long time, economists assumed people were rational money-machines. Give a person the facts, the prices, and the odds, and they would calmly pick whatever…
  9. 9

    Feelings First: How Emotions Steer Every Choice

    Imagine you are about to make a "rational" decision — which apartment to rent, which job to take, whether to buy a stock. You feel calm and logical.
  10. 10

    The Six Levers of Influence: How People Get Persuaded

    Every day, hundreds of people try to get you to say "yes." Salespeople, advertisers, charities, your kids, your boss, and websites all want a decision from you.
  11. 11

    Memory, Attention & Perception: Why What We Notice Becomes What We Decide

    Here is a strange truth about being human: you do not decide based on what actually happened to you.
  12. 12

    Understanding Customers: Why People Really Buy

    Imagine you run a small print shop and you have made the most beautiful, highest-quality business cards in town.
  13. 13

    Understanding Employees & Teams: What Truly Motivates People at Work

    Most people believe motivation is simple: pay people more and they will work harder. It turns out the human mind is far stranger than that.
  14. 14

    Understanding Managers, Leaders & Investors

    So far we've looked at how ordinary people decide. Now we turn to two groups who hold a lot of power over other people's money and lives: leaders (managers,…
  15. 15

    Understanding Politicians, Voters & Crowds

    Walk into a political argument and you'll notice something strange. People who are smart, kind, and reasonable in every other part of their lives suddenly stop…
  16. 16

    Understanding Yourself: Seeing Your Own Blind Spots

    So far in this part of the guide, you have been learning to read other people — what customers really want, why teams thrive or burn out, why markets panic,…
  17. 17

    Building Products People Actually Want

    Everything you have learned so far in this book — how attention works, how habits form, how people choose under uncertainty — gets put to work the moment…
  18. 18

    Writing Marketing Copy That Persuades (Without Lying)

    Marketing copy is just the words a business uses to help someone decide to buy, sign up, or click. Good copy is not magic, and it is not trickery.
  19. 19

    Negotiating Effectively: Psychology at the Table

    Most people think negotiation is about being tough, talking fast, or out-arguing the other side. It isn't.
  20. 20

    Hiring & Leading Teams With Less Bias

    Few decisions matter more than who you bring onto a team, and how you treat them once they arrive.
  21. 21

    Making Better Personal Decisions: A Debiasing Toolkit

    By now you've met the glitches in human thinking: we're overconfident, we chase evidence that flatters us, we let hot emotions hijack big choices, and we dream…
  22. 22

    Persuasion vs Manipulation: The Ethics of Influence

    By now you have learned a lot about how the human mind makes decisions: how anchors pull our numbers, how losses feel twice as heavy as gains, how defaults…