Category
Messaging, Storytelling & Framing
30 free guides in this category.
4 guides
Audience & Propositions
Audience Insight
The process of understanding your audience's needs, motivations, and context to communicate more effectively.
Read guideHigh-Conversion Calls to Action
Strategic prompts that combine motivation, ability, and clear triggers to guide people toward specific actions.
Read guideSingle-Minded Proposition
A clear, focused statement that communicates one core message to your target audience by cutting through complexity and choice overload.
Read guideValue Proposition
A clear statement that explains the benefit you provide, for whom, and how you do it uniquely well.
Read guide15 guides
Beliefs, Expectations & Information Design
Bayesian Updating
Learn to rationally adjust your beliefs and improve your judgment by incorporating new evidence.
Read guideBelief Miscalibration & Overconfidence
Why our confidence often exceeds our accuracy, what research finds, and practical steps to calibrate judgments.
Read guideBeliefs as Probabilities
Treat your beliefs not as certainties (true/false) but as probabilities that you can update with new evidence.
Read guideBlackwell Informativeness & Value of Information
A rigorous framework for measuring how much information improves decisions and determining when seeking information is worth the cost.
Read guideGoodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Read guideInformation Design & Bayesian Persuasion
Understand how strategically revealing truthful information can persuade rational individuals more effectively than raw data dumps.
Read guideLikelihood Ratios & Bayes Factors
Quantitative tools for updating beliefs by measuring how much new evidence should shift your confidence in competing explanations.
Read guideMotivated Reasoning
The tendency to process information in a way that supports desired conclusions rather than remaining objectively neutral.
Read guideOrder Effects in Evidence
The sequence in which we encounter information shapes our judgments and decisions, with early evidence often carrying disproportionate weight.
Read guidePrior Elicitation Techniques
Structured ways to turn expert beliefs into explicit starting assumptions for analysis, with steps to reduce bias and document uncertainty.
Read guideRational Inattention
People naturally ignore information because processing it is costly, leading to systematic mistakes even when trying to make rational choices.
Read guideScoring Rules & Calibration
Learn to measure and improve the accuracy of your probabilistic forecasts by honestly assessing your own uncertainty.
Read guideSequential Testing & SPRT
A method for making reliable decisions by analyzing data as it arrives and stopping as soon as enough evidence is gathered.
Read guideSocial Learning & DeGroot
How beliefs spread through networks and why influence depends on your position in the social graph.
Read guideCheap Talk
Messages without binding consequences that can still influence beliefs and decisions through credibility signals.
Read guide5 guides
Framing & Effects
Ethos, Pathos, Logos
Aristotle's three modes of persuasion—credibility (ethos), emotion (pathos), and logic (logos)—form the foundation of effective communication and influence.
Read guideInoculation and Counter-Framing
Strategies to protect beliefs from manipulation and to reshape how issues are understood through competing narratives.
Read guideMoral Foundations Framing
How framing issues using different moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity) can influence political and social attitudes by appealing to people's core moral intuitions.
Read guidePositioning with Contrast Frames
Making an option more appealing by presenting it alongside a less attractive alternative to highlight its benefits.
Read guideSocial Norms and Proof Framing
How information about what others do shapes our decisions through descriptive and injunctive social norms.
Read guide5 guides
Storytelling & Narrative
Setup–Tension–Resolution
The universal framework for compelling stories, guiding an audience from an initial state, through rising conflict, to a satisfying conclusion.
Read guideCrisis Narrative Playbook
A strategic framework for shaping public perception during a crisis by controlling the story's key elements: victim, villain, and hero.
Read guideMessage Stickiness
How to shape a message so people remember and repeat it.
Read guideEffective Metaphors and Analogies
A framework for choosing metaphors and analogies that actually connect—by mapping relational structure, not surface similarity.
Read guideNarrative Transportation
The psychological state of becoming absorbed in a story, which reduces critical thinking and makes us more likely to be persuaded by the narrative's message.
Read guide1 guide