The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

A library, organised by topic

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.... insidious. It affects every choice you make. Every. Single. Day. ... without you noticing. Confirmation bias affects you in 3 ways... Why? You seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong ... means you’re not …

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

the backfire effect can be hard to replicate in rigorous research... a large-scale, peer-reviewed study ... couldn't reproduce the high-profile 2010 study . ... The trouble is that even when we learn that something is false, we may be able to acknowledge those facts without changing our political position accordingly

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

a lot of psychology and other social science studies... participants are overwhelming Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries... not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit.... from countries that represent only about 12 percent …

my team and I studied how people use different information when it comes to voting... presented voters with ... “Public information” was seen by everyone and referred to as “expert”. “Private information” was given to individuals and referred to “personal opinion”... with a probability of it being correct,... They followed their personal informa…

The scientists asked the volunteers to perform a creative thinking task as they lay inside a brain scanner... strong connectivity between three networks of the brain... default mode network, is linked to spontaneous thinking and mind wandering... executive control network, is engaged when people focus in on their thoughts... salience network, help…

we evolved to solve complex problems not independently but dependently in a group setting.... the knowledge illusion... much of our “knowledge” is not knowledge in the sense of understanding how things work but ... faith... in other people  -... smart people with PhDs... whatever  -  who I trust to know these things that I do not know.... for tho…

to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

Confirmation bias... such a prevalent feature of human cognition, that until recently a second phenomenon has been hidden in plain sight. Recent research suggests that something called desirability bias may be just as prevalent in our thinking... When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire usually wins out.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

What separates honest people from not honest people is not necessarily character. It's opportunity... rationally, more people ought to get away with cheating than actually do.... the flip side ... is that people are also unthinkingly dishonest... small slips without really thinking about it ... the brain reacts very strongly to a first act of l…

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...

outrage explodsd... because it allowed us to make the story about ourselves... we could effortlessly and instantaneously join a global conversation... attracted more agreement from our following than resentment, and invigorated our social capital. We were putting our best face forward, aligning ourselves with an ethical and moral high ground, virt…

Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood... Recognizing cognitive biases ... can also help ... omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect ... than ...…

the knowledge illusion is a common form of human fallibility, but Trump takes it to an exceptional degree... When asked to explain something, he changes the subject, his confidence in his knowledge unwavering... reflectivity... whether people are likely to be highly deluded about their own knowledge... Low scores on the reflectivity test correlat…

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

Riches do not satisfy. They only bring desire for more riches.... Winning a lottery typically allows someone to live the life of his dreams. It turns out, though, that after an initial period of exhilaration, lottery winners end up about as happy as they previously were...victims of accidents, despite permanent injury, were soon as happy as they w…

openness to new experiences is linked with creativity... we’re constantly filtering out what sensory information to focus on.... “The ‘gate’ that lets through the information that reaches consciousness may have a different level of flexibility... Open people appear to have a more flexible gate and let through more information than the average pers…

researchers found that the more people use Facebook, the less healthy they are and the less satisfied with their lives... monitored the mental health and social lives of 5,208 adults over two years... Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health... each statistical jump ... in “liking” other people’s p…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm... Just as confirmation bias shields you when y…

A little bit of something bad helps you resist a full-blown case... Inoculating text requires two elements. First, it includes an explicit warning about the danger of being misled by misinformation. Second, you need to provide counterarguments explaining the flaws in that misinformation... explaining the misinformation technique completely neutra…

a bias likely to cloud the minds of the audience – the halo effect.... when we see something we like or dislike, and associate this emotional reaction with something else... “illusory truth effect.” This bias causes our brains to perceive something as true just because we hear it repeated... the illusion of control bias occurs when we perceive o…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.