A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.
To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.
Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.
The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.
Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions – and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.
Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.