GLOSSARY

Attributional Bias: Typically, people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). This bias is about the ways we decide who or what is responsible for an action. 

Cognitive: Pertaining to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning.

Cognitive PsychologyA branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory and language.

Emergent propertyThe way complex systems arise out of interactions by individual particles, parts or agents. For example, our immune system is an emergent property of billions of cells working together to fight viruses and bacteria. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Heuristics: Rules-of-thumb thinking. Mental tools that evolved over millennia to help us make fast decisions in complex situations or where information is limited. 

Metacognition:  Thinking about your own thinking. Awareness of one's cognitive processes and the efficient use of self-awareness to self-regulate these processes.

Sense of self:  "The self is an emergent phenomenon and not some separately existing entity, yet allows each of us to feel that we are individuals and not merely machinery," writes Robert Burton in On Being Certain.