16 checked facts

Logic

Everything on this site about logic — each one naming the study behind it.

You ignore evidence that contradicts your rule unless it's framed socially.
The Wason selection task demonstrates that people identify the correct logical cards with significantly higher accurac…
You ignore the most common outcome because it feels boring.
The conjunction fallacy occurs when you judge a specific scenario as more probable than a general one, despite mathema…
You trust information more if it is presented clearly.
A 1999 study by Reber and Schwarz showed that cognitive fluency influences truth judgments.…
You see patterns in random data that simply do not exist.
The 1985 Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky study focused on basketball shooting performance, but utilized the known psych…
You are surprised by the Law of Truly Large Numbers.
With a large enough sample, many outrageous events are likely to occur.…
You ignore the math when certainty is on the table.
The 'pseudocertainty' effect explains why people choose a certain, smaller gain over a larger, statistically superior …
Your brain creates meaning out of literal noise.
Klaus Conrad originally coined 'apophenia' in 1958 to describe a clinical symptom of the early stages of schizophrenia…
Your brain prefers simple patterns over complex reality.
The 'Representativeness Heuristic' leads you to judge the probability of an event by how much it resembles your mental…
You are smarter when you slow down deliberately.
The Cognitive Reflection Test predicts performance on logical tasks by measuring impulse inhibition.…
You scan the world for what you expect.
A 1979 study found that people perceive ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing beliefs while ignoring contrad…
You see patterns where none actually exist.
Illusory correlation causes you to perceive a relationship between two variables even when they are statistically unre…
The same information changes your choice depending on context.
The framing effect refers to the tendency for decisions to be influenced by whether information is presented as a gain…
You are biologically tuned to catch social cheaters.
People consistently fail abstract logic puzzles but solve identical problems easily when they involve detecting rule-b…
You decide based on how data is phrased.
In their 1981 paper, Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated that the framing of outcomes as gains or losses influences pref…
You believe that luck is a balancing force.
A 1971 study by Tversky and Kahneman, titled 'Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,' found that people expect short-term…
You ignore the statistics to focus on the story.
People disregard general statistical information in favor of specific, anecdotal evidence.…