1. Reward and punishment superresponse tendency

People are highly motivated by incentives and will often act in line with rewards or punishments, sometimes irrationally.

“Incentives are superpowers.” ⁽¹⁾

Charlie emphasises the use of proper and carefully thought out incentive structures in business to achieve desired outcomes and how drastically wrong things can go if incentives aren't aligned properly.

“Dread, and avoid as much you can, rewarding people for what can be easily faked.” ⁽²⁾

2. Liking/Loving tendency

This is a really common one where people ovestimate positive attributes of things or people they like, leading to biased judgement. This tendency usually sees people ignoring flaws or negative aspects of situations, things, or people.

3. Disliking/Hating tendency

This one is the reverse of liking/loving tendency. It's where people will have accentuated hatred for those or things they dislike. This causes people to completely ignore positive qualities.

4. Doubt-avoidance tendency

When presented with a difficult or complex choice, people usually seek certainty even when it leads to irrational or hasty decision making. People would rather come to quick conclusions than dwell in uncertainty.

5. Inconsistency-avoidance tendency

People dislike changing their beliefs or behaviours. Once committed to a decision or viewpoint people tend to stick with it, even in the face of true contradictory evidence.

“Proper education is one long exercise in the augmentation of high cognition so that our wisdom becomes strong enough to destroy wrong thinking maintained by resistance to change.” ⁽³⁾

6. Curiosity tendency

Human curiosity drives us to learn and explore, which can lead to both positive innovation through the acquiring or combining of ideas or it can lead to negative outcomes like overconsumption of useless information.

7. Kantian fairness tendency

Most individuals value fairness and will often act in ways that are perceived as just, even at personal cost. For example lining up so the first to come are the first to be served or allowing someone to merge in front of you on the motorway. This can sometimes lead to inefficient or suboptimal decisions.

8. Envy/jealousy tendency

People are prone to envy, which can lead to irrational actions driven by the desire to possess what others have or to undermine other's success.

“It is not greed that drives the world but envy.” ⁽⁴⁾

9. Reciprocation tendency

Humans feel compelled to return favours or good deeds. This natural tendency can be exploited to great effectiveness by other individuals as people are likely to be manipulated through acts of reciprocity. For example, a car salesman might park you in a really comfortable seat and hand you a cup of coffee. In return you'll subconsciously want to return the favour, and in many cases that means you parting with more money for the car.

10. Influence-from-mere-association tendency

People tend to judge objects, individuals, or ideas based on their associations. Positive or negative traits from one aspect can transfer onto unrelated matters. Let's say you played various games in a casino and won more than you lost, some might associate these wins with a natural skill for gambling to their great misfortune.

“Even association that appears to be trivial, if carefully planned, can have extreme and peculiar effects on purchasers of products.” ⁽⁵⁾

11. Simple, pain-avoiding psychological denial

When reality becomes too painful to accept, people may deny it rather than accept it, distorting their view of the world to avoid discomfort.

12. Excessive self regard tendency

Individuals often overestimate their own abilities, skills, or qualities, leading to overconfidence and poor decision-making as well as biased hiring.

“Some of the worst consequences in modern life come when dysfunctional groups of cliquish persons, dominated by excessive self-regard tendency, select as new members of their organizations persons who are very much like themselves.” ⁽⁶⁾

13. Overoptimism tendency

People tend to be overly optimistic about the future, often believing things will turn out better than they realistically will, especially when they are personally involved. Charlie points out that in a study on Swedish drivers 90% of them appraised their driving skill as "above average" when this cannot possibly be true in reality.

14. Deprival-superreaction tendency

People overreact to the prospect of losing something they value, leading them to irrationally avoid loss even when the risk is minor.

“The quantity of man’s pleasure from a $10 gain does not exactly match the quantity of his displeasure from a $10 loss.” ⁽⁷⁾

15. Social-proof tendency

People tend to follow the crowd, assuming that the majority must be right. This leads to groupthink and can cause huge errors when the crowd is wrong.

“Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.” ⁽⁸⁾

16. Contrast-misreaction tendency

Judgements are often influenced by comparing situations rather than evaluating them on their own merits. People may accept unfavourable outcomes if they are presented alongside something worse.

"When a man’s steps are consecutively taken toward disaster, with each step being very small, the brain’s contrast-misreaction tendency will often let the man go too far toward disaster to be able to avoid it" ⁽⁹⁾

17. Stress-influence tendency

Under stress, people are more likely to make poor decisions as their cognitive abilities decline and they become more reactive.

18. Availability-misweighing tendency

People give undue importance to information that is easily available to them, often neglecting facts or data that are harder to recall or access.

“An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.” ⁽¹⁰⁾

19. Use-it-or-lose-it tendency

Skills or knowledge that aren't regularly put to use are forgotten, leading to loss of expertise or ability over time.

20. Drug-misinfluence tendency

Nothing good comes from taking drugs. People are led to making decisions they wouldn't make sober, usually making worse decisions than if they were.

21. Senescence-misinfluence tendency

Ageing effects cognitive function, leading older individuals to make decisions differently as their mental faculties change.

22. Authority-misinfluence tendency

People are more likely to follow or be influenced by those in positions of authority, even when the authority figure is wrong. Stanley Milgram's experiments demonstrated this effectively where 65% of participants, led by a perceived authority figure, gave lethal shocks to what they thought were other study participants simply because they were told to.

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” ⁽¹¹⁾

23. Twaddle tendency

People are naturally inclined to engage in irrelevant or trivial conversations, wasting time on unimportant things.

24. Reason-respecting tendency

Humans have a tendency to follow reasons, even when those reasons aren't valid. If someone gives rationale, people are more likely to comply, even if the rationale is flawed.

25. Lollapalooza tendency—the tendency to get extreme consequences from confluences of psychological tendencies acting in favor of a particular outcome

This is a combination of several biases or tendencies acting together, which can result in extreme outcomes. When multiple tendencies align, their combined effects can lead to major misjudgments.