But far more common, say psychologists who study risk behavior, are the simple lapses of human nature and the elaborate rationalizations the mind is capable of producing.
This pattern is so common that psychologists have called it the fundamental attribution error.
While this term has a variety of meanings in common language, psychologists use "expertise" to represent not only the collection of knowledge that an individual possesses about his or her discipline, but also how that individual organizes and connects that disciplinary knowledge (Bedard and Chi, 1992).
One of the most common prescriptions psychologists give for curing insomnia is to set aside the bedroom for sex and sleeping only.
One of the most common "chief psychologist" asks of me as the CEO was to resolve an inter-personal conflict with another employee.
In an address to the American Psychological Association in 1957, the American researcher Lee Cronbach, a leader in the testing field, decried the lack of common ground between psychologists who studied individual differences and those who studied commonalities in human behaviour.
Perhaps this combination of experiences is as common as what psychologists call flow, a state of complete absorption in an activity.
There's a common bias that psychologists call the fluency heuristic: We prefer information that is processed more easily, or fluently, judging it to be truer or more beautiful.
This is a common trick of psychologists, to pretend they solved a riddle of the human mind by giving it a name, when all they've done is invented an agreed upon name for the mystery rather than solved it.
The first reaction you get from people when you tell them you are a psychologist is "oh, so what am I thinking now?" This reflects not only the ubiquity of human narcissism - yes, most people's favourite topic of conversation is themselves - but also the common misperception of psychologists as mind readers.
