Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed. Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Recency illusion. The recency illusion is the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when it is in fact long-established.
The term was invented by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who was primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions. However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent". Linguistic items prone to the Recency Illusion include: "Singular they" - the use of they to reference a singular antecedent, as in someone said they liked the play.
According to Zwicky, the illusion is caused by selective attention. References Jump up ^ Intensive and Quotative ALL: something old, something new, John R. External links Is History Really As the History Books Teach Us? The First Civilizations Author: Philip Coppens Is history really as the history books tell us or is civilization — when humankind began to cultivate plants, work metals, build monuments and live in organized settlements — far more complex and older than we assume?
28 Ways to Stop Complicating Your Life. Fallacy of composition. Dear Customer who stuck up for his little brother, Éloge de la transmission. Your Evolved Intuitions. Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy We have already examined one source of our intuitions: attribute substitution heuristics.
Today we examine a second source of our intuitions: biological evolution. Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology1 has been covered on Less Wrong many times before, but let's review anyway. Lions walk on four legs and hunt for food. Certain evolved psychological mechanisms in humans are part of what makes us like each other and not like lions, skunks, and spiders.
These mechanisms evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. You know there’s a new nonfiction genre by the titles alone — Blink, Nudge, Predictably Irrational… and now Sway.
Clear Thinking in a Blurry World - Amazon.com. James Randi Educational Foundation. Cognitive Biases. List of cognitive biases. Cognitive biases, categorized. Illustration by John Manoogian III (jm3). Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics. There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person.
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought. Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing.
Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. You may be consciously thinking about one specific thing, but you brain is processing thousands of subconscious ideas. Unfortunately, our cognition is not perfect, and there are certain judgment errors that we are prone to making, known in the field of psychology as cognitive biases. 5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think. The Internet has introduced a golden age of ill-informed arguments.
You can't post a video of an adorable kitten without a raging debate about pet issues spawning in the comment section. These days, everyone is a pundit. But with all those different perspectives on important issues flying around, you'd think we'd be getting smarter and more informed. Unfortunately, the very wiring of our brains ensures that all these lively debates only make us dumber and more narrow-minded. For instance ... #5. Forer effect. A related and more general phenomenon is that of subjective validation. Subjective validation occurs when two unrelated or even random events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectation, or hypothesis demands a relationship.
Thus people seek a correspondence between their perception of their personality and the contents of a horoscope. Forer's demonstration On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.26 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in was it revealed that each student had received an identical sketch assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book. The sketch contains statements that are vague and general enough to most people. In another study examining the Forer effect, students took the MMPI personality assessment and researchers evaluated their responses.
The Forer effect is also known as the "Barnum effect". The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science. Illustration: Jonathon Rosen "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change.
Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. " So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed.
Many of these studies focus on the effect of implicit memory known as priming. Several studies have been performed that confirm the existence of a separate entity which is implicit memory. In one such experiment, participants were asked to listen to several songs and decide if they were familiar with the song or not. Half of the participants were presented with familiar American folk songs and the other half were presented with songs made using the tunes of the same songs from group 1 but mixed with new lyrics. 15 Styles of Distorted Thinking. 25 Acts of Body Language to Avoid. Our body language exhibits far more information about how we feel than it is possible to articulate verbally. All of the physical gestures we make are subconsciously interpreted by others.
This can work for or against us depending on the kind of body language we use. Some gestures project a very positive message, while others do nothing but set a negative tone. Video. The Brain. Athene's Theory of Everything.