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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a61eded | The promise of revenge is one way human beings ensure fairness, and you are precisely tuned to expect it. Your perceived status is part of the unconscious equation you work out when accepting, refusing, and making offers with other people. | David McRaney | ||
| 8e6c842 | THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts. THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent's position. | David McRaney | ||
| 5791d00 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation. THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks. | David McRaney | ||
| b7086e2 | As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, "In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." | David McRaney | ||
| f13ae10 | Scientists tell us we all come from monkeys, and that's why I homeschool," this person is using a straw man, because science doesn't say we all come from monkeys." | David McRaney | ||
| a9307ce | THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples. THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you've never seen or heard of before. | David McRaney | ||
| 6b4d939 | Your beliefs are rational, logical and fact-based, right? Well, consider a topic such as spanking. Is it right or wrong? Is it harmless or harmful? Is it lazy parenting or tough love? Science has an answer, but let's get to that later. For now, savor your emotional reaction to the issue and realize you are willing to be swayed, willing to be edified on a great many things, but you keep a special set of topics separate. The last time you got.. | David McRaney | ||
| 40c5493 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera. THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered. | David McRaney | ||
| fb0204f | Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception. | David McRaney | ||
| 08438fa | One of the best things about owning a brain is how you often seem to phase out of normalcy and briefly see your culture with a weirdly objective frame of mind. At some point every child realizes money is made up of slips of paper with no intrinsic value, and wonders why aloud. So, too, will children ask adults what's up with shaking hands, or putting your fork on one side of the plate, or saying "Bless you" after a sneeze. Parents apply the.. | David McRaney | ||
| 923a157 | In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception about certain ideas in American politics. As soon as a person read a fake article, experimenters then handed over a true article that corrected the first. For instance, one article suggested that the United States had found weapons of mass des.. | David McRaney | ||
| ea251af | Apophenia isn't always a bad thing. You need a sense of meaning to get out of bed, to push forward against the grain. Just remember that meaning comes only from within. Your mind is preorganized to notice order, even when the order is defined by your culture and not your synapses. | David McRaney | ||
| bf39551 | Subjective Validation THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally. | David McRaney | ||
| daf3498 | finished to raise their hands, | David McRaney | ||
| d97d92c | Piyango bileti satin almaya giderken kaza gecirip bir otomobilin icinde olme ihtimaliniz, ikramiye kazanma ihtimalinizden yuksektir. | David McRaney | ||
| 3ef70f5 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are being influenced and how it is affecting your behavior. THE TRUTH: You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind. | David McRaney | ||
| 03eb799 | THE MISCONCEPTION: Men who have sex with RealDolls are insane, and women who marry eighty-year-old billionaires are gold diggers. THE TRUTH: The RealDoll and rich old sugar daddies are both supernormal releasers. | David McRaney | ||
| 8b188d8 | Son otuz yildir yapilan calismalara gore, hepimizin kendimizi is arkadaslarimizdan daha becerikli, arkadaslarimizdan daha ahlakli, sokaktaki insanlardan daha dost canlisi, tanidiklarimizdan daha zeki, ortalama bir insandan daha cekici, ayni dine mensup oldugumuz insanlardan daha az on yargili, ayni yasta oldugumuz insanlardan daha genc gorunumlu, tanidigimiz insanlarin cogundan daha iyi sofor, kardeslerimizden daha iyi evlat oldugumuzu ve o.. | David McRaney | ||
| 4303065 | While driving and talking on a cell phone, how much of your world do you miss? The research findings suggest you could have your eyes wide open, but fail to see the car, the bike, or the deer about to cross your path. | David McRaney | ||
| 1064b1a | To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind, you've developed the ability to knit everything together into something simpler and less accurate, something less informative but more entertaining, and most times more useful. | David McRaney | ||
| 14d4dc1 | matter how good you've got it, you are no stranger to tears. | David McRaney | ||
| 4f7e2ae | Ignorance of the halo effect can easily set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which attitude changes behavior, which then loops back around over and over for the persons both giving and receiving a label. | David McRaney | ||
| fcd6e35 | If a politician can come across as likable--as nice, genuine, and friendly--she's won most of her votes already. That initial appraisal will spread and elevate all other appraisals. Gaffes will be forgiven. | David McRaney | ||
| 28e27db | Remember, there's always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. | David McRaney | ||
| 0e3e8a6 | THE MISCONCEPTION: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning. THE TRUTH: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind. | David McRaney | ||
| 055d281 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn't conform unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct. | David McRaney | ||
| 79fb60b | THE MISCONCEPTION: Knowing a person's history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are. THE TRUTH: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type. | David McRaney | ||
| 4f5e518 | Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, both philosophers, wrote a book about this in 2004 called The Rebel Sell. It's available in the United States as Nation of Rebels. The central theme of the book is you can't rage against the machine through rebellious consumption. Here's | David McRaney | ||
| d50e630 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect. THE TRUTH: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause. | David McRaney | ||
| 1276363 | THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and become more accomplished. THE TRUTH: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others'. | David McRaney | ||
| aed76ac | THE MISCONCEPTION: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling. THE TRUTH: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions. | David McRaney | ||
| 568f7ca | When those beliefs fall apart, you tend not to notice. You have a deep desire to be right all of the time and a deeper desire to see yourself in a positive light both morally and behaviorally. | David McRaney | ||
| 5b21857 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You are too smart to join a cult. THE TRUTH: Cults are populated by people just like you. | David McRaney | ||
| 72e0d8c | In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to people in the Deep South. Now people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and observe what the counterculture is into and have it on the shelves in the mall stores right as it becomes popular. The counterculture, the.. | David McRaney | ||
| bc839e0 | In 2010, UCLA researchers conducted a survey of more than 25,000 people ages 18-75 and found that the majority rated their own attractiveness as about a seven out of ten. This suggests that the average person thinks he is a little better looking than the average person. About a third of the people under 30 rated themselves as somewhere around a nine. That sort of confidence is fun to think about considering that it is impossible for everyon.. | David McRaney | ||
| fc5bafb | THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control. THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior. | David McRaney | ||
| d933047 | THE TRUTH: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others. | David McRaney | ||
| 4f868d8 | 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. | David McRaney | ||
| 1915be5 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally. | David McRaney | ||
| f408535 | Branding builds on this by giving you the option to create the person you think you are through choosing to align yourself with the mystique of certain products. | David McRaney | ||
| d9d10cf | If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards. The meaning is a human construct. Look | David McRaney | ||
| 726f02e | narrative bias--a bias in that when given the option, you prefer to give and receive information in narrative format. | David McRaney | ||
| 9132e7c | Wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine, as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong. | David McRaney | ||
| f628764 | Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better. | David McRaney |