Psychology Cryptogram Puzzles — 21 to Decode

This category is mostly laws — Murphy's, Parkinson's, Hanlon's Razor, Occam's Razor, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Peter Principle. Not advice about how people ought to behave, but blunt observations of how they reliably do: work expands to fill the time available, anything that can go wrong will, and the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

They also happen to be shaped almost perfectly for a cipher. Each one is phrased like a definition — a subject, a verb, a consequence — so the grammar is predictable before a single letter is confirmed. Better still, these laws love to repeat a word inside their own sentence ("anything that can go wrong will go wrong"), and a repeated word is the single most useful thing a substitution puzzle can hand you: solve it once and it pays out twice.

There is a fitting one in here, too. The Zeigarnik effect says unfinished tasks stay lodged in memory in a way completed ones do not — which is roughly what a half-solved cryptogram does to an evening.