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As a modern person you should know that a motion picture is just
individual photographs whizzing by faster than your brain can process.
When you look at a flower, you should know that you don’t see the same
thing a butterfly sees and that if you switched your eyes for insect eyes the
floral world would become a psychedelic explosion of madness. Your
unnavigable nighttime living room is a completely visible playground to a
cat, and if you’ve ever shined a laser pointer near a feline pal, then surely
you’ve realized something is going on in its tiny cat head that isn’t
happening in yours. You know the world is not what it seems, and all it
takes is one great optical illusion to prove it. Naive realism is, well, naive.
The stars are always in the sky, but the light of the sun filtered through the
atmosphere makes them difficult to see in the day. If you throw a rock into a
pond, and that sploosh turns the heads of a frog and a fox, what they see is
not what you see.
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Another giant stumbling block in your mental life is a collection of
predictable patterns of thought called cognitive biases. A bias is a tendency
to think in one way when other options are just as good, if not better. For
instance, if you tend to take a right turn every time you walk into a grocery
store when turning to the left would be no better, you have a right-turn bias
in your own behavior. Most people are biased in this way, and most large
chain stores develop displays and lay out their interiors with this in mind.
Most cognitive biases are completely natural and unlearned
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Some of what we will discuss has to do with the wiring of the brain,
some with cultural influences, and some with ancient behavioral routines.
The brain in your head was built by evolution, and the world in which your
ancestors lived was full of situations you no longer face. Still, you err on
the side of caution just in case. If someone throws a rope on you while you
are napping, there is really no harm in freaking out, screaming, and flailing
around while you try to hold in your pee. If a poisonous snake had fallen on
you, such a response would have been an excellent course of action. It
would be much more costly if every time you woke up to a snakelike
impact you just yawned and calmly brushed it aside. Over the course of
millions of years, the creatures who didn’t freak out at snake-shaped objects
didn’t make as many babies as the people who did, and now that same fear
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THE MISCONCEPTION: You make sense of life through rational
contemplation.
THE TRUTH: You make sense of life through narrative.
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DENIAL
Ramachandran told me, “I like to compare it with a military general
who is receiving different sources of information while preparing for battle.
So he is preparing to launch battle at six in the morning, and at five fiftyfive,
he’s got all the generals lined up and all the scouts have brought him
information, and he’s going to launch battle at dawn, at six A.M. exactly.
Suddenly, one chap comes along and says, ‘This is wrong. We’ve seen the
enemy is actually six hundred [soldiers strong], not five hundred. We were
misinformed.’ What you do is you say, ‘Shut up.’ You don’t revise all your
battle plans; it would be too costly. What’s the likelihood that this one guy
is right and everybody else is wrong? Let me just ignore what he is saying.
This is what we call denial, the tendency to not accept information that’s
contrary to your sense of narrative. But if that chap comes and says,
‘They’ve got nuclear weapons. I’ve just looked through the telescope, and
they’ve got nuclear weapons.’ Then you would be foolish to launch war.
You have to say, no, let me change my paradigm, let me shift gears.”
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Narratives are meaning transmitters. They are history-preservation
devices. They create and maintain cultures, and they forge identities that
emerge out of the malleable, imperfect memories of life events. It makes
sense, then, that every aspect of humanity concerned with meaning,
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UNREAL SELF- NARRATIVE BIAS
You might find it alarming, then, to learn that neuroscience and
psychology have teamed up over the last twenty years and used their
combined powers to reach a strange and unsettling conclusion: The self is
not real. It’s just a story like all the others, one created by your narrative
bias. After all, you are just a pile of atoms. When you eat vanilla pudding,
which is also a pile of atoms, you are really just putting those atoms next to
your atoms and waiting for some of them to trade places. If things had
turned out differently back when your mom had that second glass of wine,
the same atoms that glommed together to make your bones and your skin,
your tongue and your brain, could have been arranged to make other things.
Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen—the whole collection of elements that make up
your body right down to the vanadium, molybdenum, and arsenic could be
popped off you, collected, and reused to make something else—if such a
seemingly impossible technology existed
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THE MISCONCEPTION: The larger the consensus, the more likely
it is correct.
THE TRUTH: A belief is not more likely to be accurate just
because many people share it.
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The Benjamin Franklin Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: You do nice things for the people you like
and bad things to the people you hate.
THE TRUTH: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things
and hate people you harm.
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For many things, your attitudes came from actions that led to
observations that led to explanations that led to beliefs. Your actions tend to
chisel away at the raw marble of your persona, carving into being the self
you experience from day to day. It doesn’t feel that way, though. To
conscious experience, it feels as if you were the one holding the chisel,
motivated by existing thoughts and beliefs. It feels as though the person
wearing your pants performed actions consistent with your established
character, yet there is plenty of research suggesting otherwise. The things
you do often create the things you believe
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The Post Hoc Fallacy
THE MISCONCEPTION: You notice when effect doesn’t follow
cause.
THE TRUTH: You find it especially difficult to believe a sequence
of events means nothing.
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beauty seems to be the one
thing that most reliably produces the halo effect. Beauty is shorthand, a
placeholder term for an invisible mental process
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When evaluating a person’s skills, make an effort to keep her attributes
separate from her appearance or demeanor or fame. Make sure the person is
anonymous during your final evaluation, and then evaluate each attribute
separately. If comparing, don’t compare people as a whole, but judge them
against each other one attribute at a time. Erase the names and faces;
quantify and compare. The more you can force an accomplishment, a skill,
or a measure of performance to stand on its own, the less likely any one
ingredient will taint the whole batch. You can’t prevent the halo effect, but
you can use your knowledge of its power to be less dumb.
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Ego Depletion
THE MISCONCEPTION: Willpower is just a metaphor.
THE TRUTH: Willpower is a finite resource
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JUDGE LUNCH PAROLE STUDY
A study published in 2010 conducted by Jonathan Leval, Shai Danziger,
and Liora Avniam-Pesso looked at 1,112 judicial rulings concerning
prisoner paroles over the course of ten months. They found that right after
breakfast and lunch, your chances of getting paroled were at their highest.
On average, the judges granted parole to around 60 percent of prisoners
right after the judge had eaten a meal. The rate of approval crept down after
that. Right before a meal, the judges granted parole to about 20 percent of
those appearing before them. The less glucose in judges’ bodies—that is,
the longer they’d gone since eating—the less willing they were to make the
active choice of setting a person free and accepting the consequences and
the more likely they were to go with the passive choice to put the fate of the
prisoner off until a future date.
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The Backfire Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: You alter your opinions and incorporate
the new information into your thinking after your beliefs are
challenged with facts.
THE TRUTH: When your deepest convictions are challenged by
contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
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The backfire effect constantly shapes your beliefs and memory, keeping
you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process that
psychologists call biased assimilation. Decades of research into a variety of
cognitive biases show you tend to see the world through thick Coke-bottle
lenses forged from belief and smudged with attitudes and ideologies
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It requires real changes in the physiology of your brain to accept new
information demanding that you see the world in a new way. Neuroscientist
Kevin Dunbar showcased this when he put students in a brain scanner and
showed them research debunking their own theories. He established what
the students believed about the effectiveness of antidepressants, and then
placed the subjects in the machine, where he showed them data that either
backed up or disproved what they said they believed. When shown data that
agreed with their opinions, Dunbar saw the areas in the students’ brains
associated with learning light up and take in more blood. When the students
were shown information debunking their preconceived notions, the learning
areas of their brains didn’t come online; instead, the areas associated with
effortful thinking and thought suppression showed increased activation.
According to Dunbar, you shouldn’t expect people to change their minds
just because you present them with facts that contradict their
misconceptions.
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PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE BLDNM
Pluralistic ignorance is the erroneous
belief that the majority is acting in a way that matches its internal
philosophies, and that you are one of a small number of people who feel
differently, when in reality the majority agrees with you on the inside but is
afraid to admit it outright or imply such through its behavior
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Enclothed Cognition
THE MISCONCEPTION: Clothes as everyday objects are just
fabrics for protection and decoration of the body.
THE TRUTH: The clothes you wear change your behavior and can
either add or subtract from your mental abilities.
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Research has long suggested that clothes aren’t completely inanimate or
inert, at least not inside the brains of humans. Looking at garments sets in
motion a cascade of associations that can and do affect your perceptions and
behaviors. Prom dresses, high-heel shoes, fedoras—
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Deindividuation
THE MISCONCEPTION: People who riot and loot are scum who
were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent.
THE TRUTH: Under the right conditions, you are prone to losing
your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hive mind.
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The Sunk Cost Fallacy
THE MISCONCEPTION: You make rational decisions based on the
future value of objects, investments, and experiences.
THE TRUTH: Your decisions are tainted by the emotional
investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in
something, the harder it becomes to abandon it.
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The Overjustification Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: There is nothing better in the world than
getting paid to do what you love.
THE TRUTH: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will
sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you
attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your
internal feelings.
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The positive illusions and their helpers form a supercluster of delusion
that thumps in the psyche of every human. Together, illusory superiority
bias, the illusion of control, optimism bias, confirmation bias, hindsight
bias, and self-serving bias combine like Voltron into a mental chimera
called self-enhancement bias. It works just as the name suggests—it
enhances your view of your self. If you drive, you probably see yourself as
a competent, considerate, skillful driver, especially compared with the
morons and assholes you face on the road on a daily basis
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