Poor Thinking Habits

 

Look it up at Amazon: Poor Thinking Habits by David G Croucher

Provides a brief summary of Poor Thinking Habits, and underlying causes and contributory factors including Cognitive Biases, Fallacies, a poor understanding of Probabilities and Uncertainties, Influences, and unhelpful Attitudes and Mindsets.

This is a ready reference of the most common instances of poor thinking: poor thinking by ourselves and poor thinking by others, an awareness of which is the first and most important step to improving your life and protecting yourself from others.

As a ready reference guide, keep this book close to hand.  Familiarize yourself with these instances of poor thinking and you’ll see them popping up all around you. Have a look through when you know something isn’t right but can’t quite put your finger on it. You will be far more able to protect yourself from other people’s and your own poor thinking when you can recognize and put a name to it.

Contents:

What’s it about?

Poor Thinking Habits

  • Over simplifying
  • Failing to question the authenticity or reliability of information
  • Being distracted by irrelevancies
  • Seeking only to confirm/justify what we already believe
  • Attributing effects to a single cause when there are multiple contributory factors
  • Judging different people or groups by different standards
  • Having overly negative or overly optimistic expectations 
  • Being continually negative
  • Focusing solely on what is there, and failing to think about what is not there but maybe could have been
  • Jumping to conclusions, and failing to think about things that ought to be thought about
  • Believing without question in our intuition and instincts, believing they are magically correct
  • Continually putting off what needs to be dealt with
  • Wishful thinking and failing to think through potential consequences
  • Focusing on the what, not the why
  • Lack of specificity, talking in vague terms
  • Believing the Ends Justify the Means
  • Over prioritizing
  • Rewarding success based on output alone
  • Readiness to presume cause and effect
  • Alternative views and criticism are to be avoided
  • Looking to always avoid conflict
  • Looking for and finding excuses rather than reasons
  • Letting our emotions override our rationale judgement
  • A failure to stop and think and recognize we have a choice
  • Blaming others for when things go wrong
  • Laziness and avoiding having to make an effort
  • Putting off till tomorrow that which should be dealt with today
  • Lack of gratitude

Cognitive Biases

  • Actor-Observer Bias / Fundamental Attribution Bias
  • Ambiguity Bias
  • Anchoring or Focusing Bias
  • Attention Bias
  • Authority Bias
  • Availability Bias
  • Bandwagon Effect Bias
  • Barnum Effect Bias
  • Belief Bias
  • Benefit Bias
  • Blind Spot Bias
  • Choice Supportive Bias
  • Conservativism Bias
  • Confirmation Bias
  • Congruence Bias
  • Consistency Bias
  • Contrast Bias
  • Control Bias
  • Distinction Bias
  • Early Evidence Bias / Recency Bias
  • Early Reward Bias
  • Egocentric bias
  • Endowment Bias
  • Extreme Aversion Bias
  • Observer Expectancy Bias / Pygmalion Effect / Golem Effect
  • Expectation Bias
  • False consensus bias
  • Familiarity Bias
  • Framing Bias
  • Frequency illusion
  • Halo Effect Bias
  • Hindsight Bias
  • An Illusion of Control Bias
  • Ingroup Bias
  • Just World Bias
  • Negativity Bias
  • Normalcy Bias
  • Omission Bias
  • Optimism Bias
  • Outcome Bias
  • Overconfidence Bias
  • Partsum Bias
  • Pattern Bias
  • Personal Validation Bias
  • Pessimism Bias
  • Recall Bias
  • Restraint Bias
  • Risk Framing Bias
  • Secrecy Bias
  • Selective Outcome Bias
  • Unconscious Bias
  • The Zeigarnik Effect

Fallacies

  • The Fallacy of Accident
  • The Fallacy of Amphiboly
  • The Fallacy of Argument By Selective Observation
  • The Fallacy “Ad Hominem”, Argument To The Man
  • An Appeal to Authority
  • A Fallacy of False Balance
  • An Appeal to Consequence
  • The Fallacy of Appeal to Emotions
  • The Fallacy of Appeal to Human Nature
  • The Fallacy of Ad ignorantiam, an Appeal to Ignorance
  • An Appeal to Money
  • A Fallacy of Appeal to the People
  • An Appeal to Ridicule or Mockery
  • The Fallacy of an Appeal to Silence
  • The Fallacy of Appeal to Vanity
  • The Fallacy of Assuming the Antecedent
  • A Fallacy of Changing the Goalpost
  • Circular reasoning
  • Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
  • Fallacies of Composition and Division
  • The Fallacy of Confusing an Explanation with an Excuse
  • Fallacy of the Continuum
  • The Fallacy of Distortion
  • The Domino Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of the Dope Pushers Defense
  • The Fallacy of Double Standards
  • The Fallacy of Equivocation
  • The Fallacy of the Excluded Middle
  • The Fallacy of False Analogy
  • The Fallacy of False Continuum
  • A Fallacy of False Precision
  • The Fallacy Argumentum ad Logicam / the Fallacist’s Fallacy
  • A Fallacy of Group Identity
  • The Fallacy of Guilt by Association
  • A Hasty Generalization
  • The Hindsight Fallacy, or Historian’s Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of Hypostatization
  • Implicit Assumption Fallacy / The Loaded Question Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of Moderation, / Fallacy of the Middle Ground
  • The Fallacy of Poisoning the Well
  • The Fallacy of Positive Ad Hominem
  • Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc
  • The Prosecutor’s Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of Rationalization
  • The Sharpshooter Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of Single Cause
  • The Slippery Slope Fallacy
  • The Spotlight Fallacy
  • The Fallacy of Style Over Substance
  • The Fallacy of Traditional Wisdom / Fallacy of Appeal to Novelty
  • The Fallacy of Tu Quoque
  • The Fallacy of the Unexplained
  • The Victim Fallacy

A Poor Understanding of Probabilities

  • Even-Chance Bias
  • The Gambler’s Fallacy
  • Probabilities and Possibilities
  • It is highly likely that unlikely things will happen
  • Failure to appreciate Regression to the Mean
  • Selective Observation Bias
  • Lucky charms and superstitions
  • The Many Abuses of Statistics
  • Failure to appreciate the implication of ‘base rate’
  • Extreme estimation bias

Influences

  • Authority
  • Social Proof and affinity
  • Scarcity
  • Reciprocity
  • Consistency
  • Likability
  • Repetition
  • Distinctiveness
  • Framing
  • Appeal to Ego
  • Selective Observations
  • Where there’s smoke there’s fire

Unhelpful Attitudes and Mindsets

  • I am who I am
  • My religion, my nation, my group, is who I am
  • I just know I’m right about most things
  • Why Should I?
  • It’s not what you know in this world, it’s who you know
  • It shouldn’t be like this
  • Everyone is selfish

Where to Next?