Naïve diversification is a choice heuristic (also known as “diversification heuristic”). Its first demonstration was made by Itamar Simonson in marketing in the context of consumption decisions by individuals. It was subsequently shown in the context of economic and financial decisions. Simonson showed that when people have to make simultaneous choice (e.g. choose now which of […]
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Familiarity heuristic
The familiarity heuristic was developed based on the discovery of the availability heuristic by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it happens when the familiar is favored over novel places, people, things. The familiarity heuristic can be applied to various situations that individuals experience in day to day life. When these situations appear similar to […]
Cognitive map
A cognitive map ( mental map or mental model) is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. Cognitive maps have been […]
Heuristic: Definition
In psychology, a heuristic refers to an easy-to-compute procedure or “rule of thumb” that people use when forming beliefs, judgments or decisions. Where an exhaustive search for a solution is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a […]
Nirvana fallacy
The nirvana fallacy is the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. It can also refer to the tendency to assume that there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the perfect solution fallacy. By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously […]
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert […]
Quoting out of context
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy“, is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Contextomies are stereotypically intentional, but may also occur accidentally if someone misinterprets the meaning […]
Intension
In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word’s definition often implies an intension. The term may also refer to all such intensions collectively, although the term comprehension is technically more correct for this. […]
Masked man fallacy
In philosophical logic, the masked man fallacy (also known as the intensional fallacy and the epistemic fallacy) is committed when one makes an illicit use of Leibniz’s law in an argument. Leibniz’s law states that, if one object has a certain property, while another object does not have the same property, the two objects cannot […]
Proof by example
Proof by example (also known as inappropriate generalization) is a logical fallacy whereby one or more examples are claimed as “proof” for a more general statement. This fallacy has the following structure, and argument form: Structure: I know that X is such. Therefore, anything related to X is also such. Argument form: I know that […]