“I know the secret of making the average American believing anything I want them to. Just let me control television. You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV sets images.” – Hal Becker That is […]
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Have you ever had something happen where you needed support for being right? Maybe something happens in the family, maybe with friends, or at work. You are in the right. You know it. Others know it. But, they won’t stand with you against an opposer or adversary that is standing against what is right, and you. Instead of standing together, […]
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Base rate neglect is the tendency to ignore base general information, in favor of specific (new, novel, attention grabbing) information. The base rate neglect is also known as the base rate fallacy. This bias ties into the previous biases I have covered. Please see the bottom of the post for previous biases. If something is generally understood, novel new information […]
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Many of us recognize the world is not right. Many people go through life with this unconscious or subconscious sense of something being off with society and the way things are. Unfortunately, many of us are often too busy with our lives to try to figure out what the root causal source of this feeling is. We are often all […]
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We live in an ever increasing technological world. In the past 50 years things have changed more rapidly for technological development than in the previous 100 years before that. How much has all of this technological development affected our brains and how we live in the modern age? Attention Attention spans are down. That seems to be the case the […]
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Something might happen, possibly happen, or even be likely or probable to happen, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. When we assume something will inevitably happen because it could happen, we are engaging in the appeal to possibility or probability fallacy. Something being probable doesn’t prove it as a fact. However, this doesn’t prevent us from making decisions based […]
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The anecdotal fallacy is to use a particular personal or isolated example to attempt to prove a generalized universal conclusion. The anecdotal fallacy is also known as misleading vividness. What is most vivid in our environment and most available (availability heuristic) to us, is what is first used to draw conclusions. This vivid availability of information in our memory affects […]
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The bandwagon effect represents the phenomena of the increasing adoption of beliefs, ideas, fads, trends, fashions, styles, and behaviors as more people accept it. The more something becomes popularized by others, the more likely even more people will adopt it into their own lives. The term “bandwagon” is used because of the political success of one campaigner in 1848 American […]
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The phoenix is a mythical bird that is associated with magic and alchemy, and higher knowledge and life through the philosopher’s stone. The symbolic mythology generally goes along the storyline of resurrection, rebirth or renewal through the purification of death, usually through fire. This is the central goal of alchemical symbolism, whether using the 3, 4 or 7 phase symbolism. […]
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The backfire effect is the tendency to reject evidence, facts or information that goes against the beliefs we are attached to. Normally we tend to give ourselves and others more credit, that our perceptions of reality can change given more accurate or new information. But often that isn’t the case. Information we first absorb and use has an anchoring effect […]
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