An ad hominem argument is a personal attack against the source of an argument, rather than against the argument itself. Essentially, this means that ad hominem arguments are used to attack opposing views indirectly, by attacking the individuals or groups that support these views. Ad hominem arguments can take many forms, from basic name-calling to …
The Benjamin Franklin effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to like someone more after they do that person a favor, especially if they previously disliked that person or felt neutral toward them. For example, the Ben Franklin effect could cause someone who disliked you to start liking you after they do you …
When going over study material, there is an important distinction between two approaches, known as knowledge-telling and knowledge-building, that we can use in our own learning or promote in those that we teach: Knowledge-telling is an approach to learning and teaching that involves relatively shallow engagement with the study material, which consists primarily of …
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods, logical fallacies, or irrationality to people’s argument, …
Niccolò Machiavelli was an eminent philosopher and diplomat in the Florentine Republic, between the late 1400s and the early 1500s. His renowned writing on strategy and politics led to the creation of the term Machiavellianism, which refers to the use of cunning and duplicity in statecraft and in general conduct, and he is sometimes …
The overkill backfire effect is a cognitive bias that causes people who encounter a complex explanation to reject it in favor of a simpler alternative, and to sometimes also reinforce their belief in the simpler alternative. For example, if someone is presented with a complicated scientific explanation for a certain phenomenon, the overkill backfire effect …
A logical fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that contains a flaw, either in its logical structure or in its premises. An example of a logical fallacy is the false dilemma, which is a logical fallacy that occurs when a limited number of options are incorrectly presented as being mutually exclusive to one another …
When you write or talk, you generally do so with the purpose of conveying information, and the better you are at conveying information, the more likely people are to understand and accept what you have to say. However, despite the importance of being able to communicate effectively, and despite the frequency in which we …
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a psychological study conducted in the late 1960s to early 1970s, in which children were placed in a room with some tasty snack, such as a marshmallow, and told that if they could wait for a short while before eating it then they will get an extra snack as a …
Whether you’re studying for a college course, practicing a new language, or trying to improve at your favorite sport, there are three factors that determine how successful your learning process will be. These factors are your natural abilities, the amount of effort that you put into learning, and how optimized your learning process is. …