Psychology
Introduction to Psychology
Seven days on the small set of moves that make ordinary emotional life easier, for the adult who was never taught how their inner life works.
7 lessons · Catalogue preview
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How Your Mind Actually Works
Ten days on what is actually known about human judgment, which of the famous findings survived being checked, and how to tell the two apart yourself.
Inside this path
A little more understanding.
Most of what people repeat about cognitive bias comes from four or five popular books, and a meaningful share of it did not survive being checked. This path teaches the research on human judgment as it stands now — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky established, what Kahneman himself later withdrew, how well Robert Cialdini's principles of influence are really evidenced, and Gerd Gigerenzer's long-standing objection that many of the famous errors are artefacts of how the question was put. Ten days, and by the end you'll be able to grade a claim about the mind by the evidence behind it rather than by how good the story is.
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Where the path begins · Lesson 01
The Answer That Arrives First
A question almost everyone gets wrong, what the field built out of that observation, and why the honest version of the story is more useful than the popular one.
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The Answer That Arrives First
A question almost everyone gets wrong, what the field built out of that observation, and why the honest version of the story is more useful than the popular one.
The Two Systems, and What They Are Not
The most borrowed framework in modern psychology, the man who built it, and the one mechanism underneath it that does most of the real work.
The Number Already in the Room
Anchoring — what it is, why it survived every attempt to knock it down, and what a genuinely strong finding looks like from the outside.
The Objection: Errors in the Question
The most serious standing argument against everything so far — that a large share of these famous failures are properties of the question rather than defects in the reasoner.
What You Are Comparing It To
Reference points, losses, framing and ownership — the structural idea that made this field famous, and the live argument over the number everybody quotes from it.
The Studies That Went
Social priming and ego depletion — the two most famous bodies of work in this territory to fail systematic testing, why they failed, and what the man who popularised them did about it.
The Dataset That Wasn't Real
How three researchers proved from a spreadsheet alone that a famous honesty experiment had been fabricated, and what that episode does to a book this path decided not to teach from.
Three Levers Other People Pull
Reciprocity, commitment and social proof — the first three of Cialdini's principles, each with its evidence graded rather than assumed.
Authority, Liking, Scarcity, Belonging
The remaining four principles, and the two most famous experiments about human badness — neither of which shows what it is usually said to show.
How to Grade a Claim About the Mind
The path turns its own method on its own recommended source, and then hands the method over.
Keep exploring
Another question to follow.
Psychology
Meaning Under Pressure
Seven days with three writers who went looking for what suffering is for — and an honest account of how much of what they found actually holds up.
7 lessons · Catalogue preview
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Psychology
The Body and the Mind
Seven days on what the body actually contributes to psychological life — and on three of the most-read writers in the field, who disagree about where the leverage sits.
7 lessons · Catalogue preview
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