Human Psychology

---
name: human-psychology
description: "Applied toolkit for how business-owner prospects think, feel, perceive risk, and justify past decisions, distilled from ten psychology books. Use when preparing or debriefing a discovery call, handling 'we tried automation before and it failed', writing a proposal or pricing page for a loss-averse owner, drafting LinkedIn or cold outreach for sceptical operators, designing onboarding so clients keep feeling the gain, or calibrating your own deal forecasts. Distills: Kahneman, Aronson, Myers, DeWall, Gruber, Tavris, Chabris, Simons, Barrett, Gilbert, Nisbett, Pinker, Galef."
---

<!-- argument-hint: [topic, framework name, book number, or a situation you're in] -->

# Human Psychology: how people think, feel, perceive, and justify decisions
**Books**: 10 | **Generated**: 2026-10-06 | **Source**: distilled from the authors' published frameworks (no book text reproduced)

## How to Use This Skill
- **Without arguments** — load the core frameworks below
- **With a topic/situation** — e.g. `discovery call`, `prospect keeps stalling`, `pricing page`; read the relevant book file(s) and playbook before answering
- **With a book number** — `book 03`; load that book file
- **Browse** — "what books do you have?" → show the Book Index

When a question goes beyond the Core Frameworks, READ the relevant `books/NN-*.md` and `playbooks.md` before answering. Do not answer from the summary alone.

## Core Frameworks & Mental Models

### How prospects judge
**System 1 / System 2** (Kahneman) — fast automatic impressions vs slow effortful checking; System 2 mostly rubber-stamps System 1. → Use when a prospect answers instantly and confidently: ask "which step, how many times" to force System 2, because specifics dissolve impressions.
**WYSIATI** (Kahneman) — judgment is built from what is visible, with no sense of what is missing. → Before any pitch, list what the prospect cannot see (your base rates, their hidden hours) and quantify it, because coherence, not completeness, drives their confidence.
**Anchoring** (Kahneman) — the first number sets the range. → State the cost of the problem before any price, because adjustment away from an anchor stops early. Prefer frequencies ("8 of our last 10") over percentages (Kahneman, Pinker) because frequencies are processed correctly.
**Introspection illusion / "telling more than we can know"** (Nisbett) — people confabulate reasons for their behaviour. → Treat stated reasons for a stall ("budget," "timing") as hypotheses; code behaviours across deals instead.
**Correlation triage** (Nisbett; Chabris & Simons; Myers) — "X happened after Y" is sequence, not cause. → Ask how many cases, what else changed, who self-selected; propose an A/B test rather than accept the story.

### How prospects feel about risk
**Prospect theory and loss aversion** (Kahneman) — outcomes judged as gains/losses from a reference point; losses weigh ~2× gains; bleeding owners gamble on fixes, comfortable owners refuse good bets (fourfold pattern). → Find the reference point first; frame your offer as stopping a loss they already feel; offer the bold plan to the bleeding owner and the small certain win to the comfortable one.
**Impact bias and the three shortcomings of imagination** (Gilbert) — people overestimate how bad failure and how good relief will feel; imagination fills in, leaves out, and imports present mood. → Shrink the imagined failure with narrow, defined terms (threshold, window, remedy); do not inflate the relief; sell measured outcomes with a visible tally, because adaptation erases feelings but not numbers.
**Surrogation** (Gilbert) — someone currently in the situation predicts your future feelings better than your imagination. → Offer reference calls framed as "ask what week two felt like," not "what it saved."
**Reversibility then commitment** (Gilbert; Aronson) — reversible terms lower fear of yes but also lower post-purchase satisfaction; irreversible choices get rationalised into contentment. → 30-day pilot, then a committed term, and say why the term exists.
**Body budget and affective realism** (Barrett) — depleted people experience their fatigue as the riskiness of whatever is in front of them. → Never pitch to the depleted; reschedule the decision.

### How prospects justify the past
**Cognitive dissonance and the pyramid of choice** (Tavris & Aronson; Aronson) — each justified step makes the next cheaper and reversal dearer. → Locate the prospect: one quiet failed attempt is recoverable with a reframe; a public "we're done with automation" needs a new small private experience, never an argument, because argument adds dissonance and hardens the belief.
**Situational attribution** (Aronson; Nisbett; Tavris & Aronson) — people blame others' character and their own circumstances. → Explain the last vendor's failure by situation (built it and left, no internal owner); the prospect accepts it because it protects them too.
**Artefacts over memory** (Tavris & Aronson; Chabris & Simons; Myers) — memory is reconstructed to fit the current self-image. → Ask for the old scope doc or invoice; send your own call notes back within hours for correction.
**Sunk cost as paid learning** (Kahneman; Nisbett) — past spend is irrelevant to the next decision but paralysing. → Say plainly it is gone either way and reframe what it bought.
**Insufficient justification and effort justification** (Aronson) — small freely chosen steps produce belief; large incentives produce "I did it for the discount"; effort raises value. → Ask for a 20-minute process map before kickoff; never discount the first step heavily.
**Credibility = expertise × trustworthiness** (Aronson) — arguing against your own interest buys trust that case studies cannot. → Name one thing you would not automate and why; raise and refute the ops manager's objection in the proposal (inoculation).

### How prospects overestimate themselves
**The six everyday illusions** (Chabris & Simons) — attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, potential. → Ask the owner to walk the process step by step including who touches it (the gaps are the scope); ask the doer what never reaches the owner; discount confident claims from both sides and calibrate your own ("works in 8 of 10; here is the other 2").
**Status quo bias test** (Galef) — "if this weren't the default, would you choose it?" → Ask the owner, "If you were starting the company today, would you run it this way?" It converts "whether" into "what first."

### How to run yourself
**Scout vs soldier mindset** (Galef) — accuracy-motivated vs defence-motivated reasoning; the tell is relief or irritation at evidence. → Run the five tests (double standard, outsider, conformity, selective skeptic, status quo bias) on your own deal forecasts; write P(close) per proposal and score quarterly (equivalent bet test).
**Outside view and premortem** (Kahneman) — forecast from your historical distribution, not your plan; imagine the failure and write why. → Do the premortem with the client on the discovery call; it becomes the risk register.
**Emotions as constructed and as goal-setters** (Barrett; Pinker) — a frown is affect, not emotion; ask for the label. Fear sets "don't be the fool" (remedy: reversibility, references); anger at the old vendor sets "deter cheaters" (remedy: milestones, pay-on-running, symmetric terms).
**Peak-end and adaptation** (Kahneman; Gilbert; Myers) — the engagement is remembered by its peak and ending; the gain stops being felt within weeks. → Make the 90-day review the peak; keep a cumulative "hours returned" tile against a fixed baseline.

## Book Index
| # | Book | Author | Best for | File |
|---|------|--------|----------|------|
| 01 | Thinking, Fast and Slow | Kahneman | judgment, anchoring, loss aversion, planning fallacy | [books/01-thinking-fast-and-slow.md](books/01-thinking-fast-and-slow.md) |
| 02 | The Social Animal | Aronson (with J. Aronson) | persuasion routes, credibility, dissonance, social proof | [books/02-the-social-animal.md](books/02-the-social-animal.md) |
| 03 | Psychology (14th ed.) | Myers, DeWall, Gruber | memory, learning, reinforcement, attitudes, adaptation | [books/03-psychology-myers.md](books/03-psychology-myers.md) |
| 04 | Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) | Tavris, Aronson | self-justification, pyramid of choice, past failures | [books/04-mistakes-were-made.md](books/04-mistakes-were-made.md) |
| 05 | The Invisible Gorilla | Chabris, Simons | attention, memory, confidence, knowledge illusions | [books/05-the-invisible-gorilla.md](books/05-the-invisible-gorilla.md) |
| 06 | How Emotions Are Made | Barrett | constructed emotion, body budget, granularity | [books/06-how-emotions-are-made.md](books/06-how-emotions-are-made.md) |
| 07 | Stumbling on Happiness | Gilbert | affective forecasting, impact bias, surrogation | [books/07-stumbling-on-happiness.md](books/07-stumbling-on-happiness.md) |
| 08 | Mindware | Nisbett | statistical reasoning, attribution, opportunity cost, A/B | [books/08-mindware.md](books/08-mindware.md) |
| 09 | How the Mind Works | Pinker | emotions as adaptations, status, cheater detection | [books/09-how-the-mind-works.md](books/09-how-the-mind-works.md) |
| 10 | The Scout Mindset | Galef | calibration, motivated reasoning, updating | [books/10-the-scout-mindset.md](books/10-the-scout-mindset.md) |

## Situation Index
- **Discovery call; owner confident their process is fine** → books 05, 10, 01; playbook "Discovery call with an owner who is confident their process is fine"
- **"We tried automation before and it failed"** → books 04, 02, 08; playbook "Handling 'we tried automation before and it failed'"
- **Prospect fixated on a past spend with a failed vendor** → books 01, 04, 08; playbook 2
- **Writing a proposal or pricing page** → books 01, 02, 07, 09; playbook "Proposal and pricing page that survives risk perception"
- **Choosing guarantee / pilot / contract-term structure** → books 07, 09, 02; playbook 3; cheatsheet trade-offs
- **Prospect fears the project will fail** → books 07, 01, 09; playbook 3
- **Prospect says "budget" or "timing" and goes quiet** → books 08, 06, 10; cheatsheet decision tree "stated reason for the stall"
- **Prospect went quiet after the price** → books 06, 01; book 06 worked example
- **LinkedIn post or cold outreach to sceptical owners** → books 09, 02, 10; playbook "LinkedIn post or cold outreach for a sceptical owner audience"
- **Prospect's identity is "we're not a tech company"** → books 10, 09; playbook 4
- **Buying committee; loud ops lead says "impossible"** → books 05, 02; cheatsheet decision rules
- **Owner claims causation from their own data** → books 08, 05, 03; patterns A
- **Onboarding and staff adoption** → books 03, 08, 06; playbook "Onboarding and the first 90 days so the client keeps feeling the gain"
- **Client stopped feeling the gain / attributing wins to their team** → books 07, 03, 01; playbook 5
- **Reading a prospect's mood or body language** → book 06; patterns G
- **Your own win/loss review and forecast calibration** → books 10, 08, 01; playbook "Your own win/loss review and forecast calibration"
- **You feel certain about a deal** → books 10, 05, 01; playbook 6
- **Scoping a new vertical** → books 01, 07, 10; outside view, surrogation, equivalent bet

## Supporting Files
- [playbooks.md](playbooks.md) — step-by-step workflows for real tasks (start here for "how do I…")
- [cheatsheet.md](cheatsheet.md) — decision rules and thresholds on one page
- [patterns.md](patterns.md) — every technique, deduplicated across books
- [glossary.md](glossary.md) — terms with book references

## Scope & Limits
Distilled from the frameworks these books are known for, not from the book text. Where books disagree, the book files say so (Barrett vs Pinker on emotion; Kahneman vs Nisbett vs Galef on whether debiasing works). Social-priming and ego-depletion findings cited in book 01 have largely failed replication; do not use them in copy or on calls. Treat proprietary sales-research claims as practitioner evidence, not replicated science. Combine with the sibling skills: human-psychology, human-behavior, marketing-psychology, sales-psychology, copywriting, offer-creation, client-eagerness-playbook.

**To apply these methods to your real pipeline**, use the workflow skills: `setup` (workspace), `lead-magnets`, `outreach`, `deals`, `pitch`. They cite this skill's book files as their method library.