Case file
Murphy's Law (as cognitive bias)
- Filed under
- Not Enough Meaning
The charge
As a cognitive bias, Murphy's Law is the tendency to overexpect that things will go wrong, often in chains, because negative possibilities feel especially vivid.
How it operates
Anxiety and availability make worst-case failure paths easier to imagine than ordinary outcomes.
Logged incidents
- Incident 01
A launch manager assumes every dependency will break at once.
- Incident 02
A traveler packs for unlikely disasters and forgets the basics.
- Incident 03
A leader adds layers of approval because someone might mess up.
What to watch for
Ask: Am I reacting to vivid failure stories more than to their actual frequency?
Recommended action
Keep a probability-weighted risk register and use FMEA rather than generic worst-case thinking.
Known associates
- Mental AccountingMental accounting is treating money or resources differently based on arbitrary labels instead of on total…
- Appeal to ProbabilityAppeal to probability fallacy is assuming that because something could happen or is plausible, it probably…
- Normalcy BiasNormalcy bias is underestimating the possibility and impact of disaster because the present still feels…
- Zero-Sum ThinkingZero-sum bias is assuming one person's or group's gain must come at another's expense, even when mutual gain…
- Survivorship BiasSurvivorship bias is drawing lessons from the cases that remain visible while missing the failures that…
- Subadditivity EffectSubadditivity effect is assigning higher total probability when a broad category is unpacked into specific…
Source of record