1) Confirmation Bias - The confirmation bias is a tendency to seek information to prove, rather than disprove our theories…
2) Hindsight Bias - Known more commonly under “hindsight is 20/20“ this bias causes people to see past results as appearing more probable than they did initially…
3) Clustering Illusion - This is the tendency to see patterns where none actually exist…
4) Recency Effect - The recency effect is the tendency to give more weight to recent data…
5) Anchoring Bias - Anchoring is a well-known problem with negotiations. The first person to state a number will usually force the other person to give a new number based on the first…
6) Overconfidence Effect - Studies have shown that people tend to grossly overestimate their abilities and characteristics from where they should…
7) Fundamental Attribution Error - Mistaking personality and character traits for differences caused by situations…

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Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?” (He is also supposed to have said, “If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.” The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.)

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. “Introverts,” writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, in an online review of a recent book called Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money? (I’m not making that up, either), “are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don’t outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness.” Just so.

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In their experiments, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski make a good case that mortality reminders from September 11 enhanced Bush’s popularity through November 2004. But, on the basis of their research, it is possible to draw even broader conclusions about U.S. politics after September 11. Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.

For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives–as was evident in the Tucson experiment with the judges–and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004–a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy–than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances” rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.

In the months after September 11, most Americans were caught up in the same reaction to the tragedy–and that included adulation for Bush, even among many Democrats. But over the next few years, faced with two elections, Bush had to maintain his popularity; and he did so by constantly reviving memories of that dark day. As the 2002 election approached, voters turned their attention to the recession, as well as Enron and other scandals–all to the Democrats’ favor. At that point, Bush, who had stood aside in the November 2001 gubernatorial elections that Democrats won, sought to base the 2002 election on terrorism. Bush and Karl Rove used the full arsenal of scare tactics to evoke fears of another September 11. The result was that the electorate became sharply polarized between conservatives and liberals and between Republicans and Democrats, while those caught in the middle tended to side with the Republicans–exactly as the psychologists’ experiments might have predicted.

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General semantics, as any other symbolic environment, has its benefits and its difficulties.

The major focus of many self-avowed general semanticists today seems to me to be aimed at applying a relatively few static extractions related to prescriptions for how to behave. Unfortunately, this emphasis seems to be at the expense of an adequate understanding of the reasoning behind the prescriptions for these behaviors. As a result, the “practice” of general semantics falls largely into the category of self-improvement programs…

As a theory, general semantics “is” a forerunner of genetic epistemology. It predates genetic epistemology and could be called “neo-”logical positivism. (Charlotte Read pointed out that while general semantics is similar to logical positivism, it also differs in some respects.) Stuart Mayper identified Popper’s Philosophy of Science as best illustrating the methodological approach espoused by general semantics.

In up-to-date terms, general semantics is the study of and practical application of a particular epistemology - namely a theory of knowledge based upon a particular model of the multi-level structure and functioning of human information processing, including neurological levels through linguistic levels, in its context - people living in a society in a world (organism-in-its-environment-as-a-whole). In this model the primary process is abstracting from one level to another with an awareness of the process (consciousness of abstracting).

Korzybski’s answer to the question, “how do we know what we know” is rather straight forward and simple. We know what we know through the process of abstracting using our brains and nervous systems.

The product of that process, within nervous systems and as extended into linguistic and verbal levels, is knowledge. At a low level of description the only commonality to all levels is “structure”, albeit different “structure” at each level. This definition of knowledge is a completely new “dictionary definition” that is not to be confused with any others that went before, and is not to be confused with such terms as “truth” (which can be defined a la Tarski), beliefs, ideas, etc.. In general, the products of the abstraction processes are maps. Internal non-verbal maps, external verbal maps, abstract theories (also maps), etc..

Traditional uses of the term “knowledge” tends to imply “valid” maps of territories. Korzybski reserved this criteria to mathematics, which he described as similar in structure to its territory…

The traditional concept of “true” is not operative in the general semantics paradigm. Each of us abstracts to our own maps, and we use those maps as predictors of what we expect to find. When our predictions fail enough, we revise the associated map, but we can never expect that a map can reach a point where we expect that it will never need revision again. At verbal levels external to us, we agree on (and argue about) various maps. Some of us are accepted as authorities, to which the others defer, on particular maps. Such maps we evaluate as having structure “similar to” a hypothesized “structure of reality”.

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[Distributed Cognition] is a theory of psychology developed in the 1990s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf activity theory) it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is framework (not a method) that involves the co-ordination between individuals and artifacts. It is comprised of two key components: 1) the representations that information is held in and transformed across 2) the process by which representations are co-ordinated with each other.

Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.

Distributed cognition as a theory of learning, i.e. one in which the development of knowledge is attributed to the system of human agents interacting dynamically with artifacts, has been widely applied in the field of distance learning, especially in relation to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and other computer-supported learning tools. Distributed cognition illustrates the process of interaction between people and technologies in order to determine how to best represent, store and provide access to digital resources and other artifacts.

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