The behavioral vocabulary of IM7 Intelligence.
Every principle links to the essays that study it in the wild.
Anchoring
The mind clings to the first number it sees, then judges everything else relative to it.
Tversky & Kahneman, 1974
Availability Heuristic
The easier an outcome is to recall, the more likely it feels — recency and vividness distort probability.
Tversky & Kahneman, 1973
Belief Perseverance
Once a market view forms, it survives long after the evidence that created it is discredited.
Ross, Lepper & Hubbard, 1975
Confirmation Bias
Investors seek out and remember evidence that supports the position they already hold.
Wason, 1960
Herd Behavior
Individuals abandon private information to mimic the crowd, amplifying trends and reversals.
Banerjee, 1992
Loss Aversion
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good, distorting risk-taking under threat.
Kahneman & Tversky, 1979
Mental Accounting
Money is treated differently depending on the mental "bucket" it lives in, breaking fungibility.
Thaler, 1985
Opportunity Cost
The value of a decision is defined not only by what it earns, but by what it prevents you from doing.
Buchanan, 1969
Overconfidence
Traders overestimate the precision of their forecasts, leading to over-trading and under-diversification.
Odean, 1998
Status Quo Bias
People prefer to leave things as they are, even when change would clearly improve outcomes.
Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988