Munger crowned incentives 'the most powerful' of all 25 forces on his list.
No experiment has ever ranked the biases against each other. That sentence is not a measurement. It is a closing argument delivered in a measurement's voice, by the best closer of his generation.
verdict confidence: medium3 receipts
No ranking study exists; the claim is rhetoric, not data
The obedience tapes sat in Yale's archives for forty years. Then someone pressed play.
The experimenter broke his four-prompt script, badgering wavering subjects eight and nine times. Some suspected the shocks were fake. The famous 'authority' parable did not survive its own filing cabinet.
verdict confidence: medium2 receipts
Gina Perry's archival work on Milgram's original recordings
The conformity experiment in every textbook has a problem: most people didn't conform.
Modern re-analysis of the Asch studies found most subjects, most of the time, trusted their own eyes. The herd effect is a tug, not a puppet string, and Munger's Social-Proof Tendency stands on softer ground than he knew.
Your brain bills vivid memories as if they were evidence.
Munger's Availability Tendency is real and armored: verified in 1995, still standing after psychology's replication wars gutted half the textbook around it.
verdict confidence: high2 receipts
Availability heuristic: replicated across four decades
Kill the messenger, and soon nobody brings you bad news. Then the surprise kills you.
Munger's 'Persian Messenger Syndrome' is aphorism, not science; no study backs it. But we have found a version of it in every corporate collapse we have audited. Wisdom and evidence are different things. The book never says which is which.
verdict confidence: high2 receipts
Unfalsifiable as stated; directionally observed everywhere
The most famous bias list on Earth is missing the most famous bias on Earth.
Confirmation bias is not among Munger's 25 tendencies. Neither is anchoring. The list survived thirty years of worship unchecked, protected by the exact bias it forgot to include.
A lawyer described a Nobel Prize finding seven years before the Nobel was awarded.
Munger's homemade 'Deprival-Superreaction Tendency' is loss aversion: the discovery at the center of Kahneman's Nobel, mapped accurately from courtroom observation before most economists accepted it.
verdict confidence: high3 receipts
Kahneman & Tversky's loss aversion, Nobel 2002; Munger's talk, 1995
The most worshipped list in investing was written by a lawyer with no psychology degree.
Charlie Munger built his 25 biases from fifty years of courtroom observation, then checked the science afterwards. Sixty percent held up. The academy took decades to catch up to a practitioner's notebook.
verdict confidence: high2 receipts
Munger, Harvard 1995; verified against three decades of replication research