Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

Hitchens’ razor, named after Christopher Hitchens, the late literary critic, journalist, contrarian, and staunch atheist: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Being haunted by worries day and night is a heavy burden to carry. Some degree of worry can be useful because it might make it more likely that we will pay attention and make better decisions. But nonstop worrying, worrying that eats up so much of our attention and brainpower, can’t possibly be useful.

the standard advice in our age of misinformation, ever-increasing polarization, hair-trigger outrage, and democratized media: Ignore it. Don’t feed the trolls!

Chronic misbelief is similar. Our healthy instincts toward skepticism and independent thinking become overactive and turn against us in ways that are self-destructive and debilitating.

Misbelief is a distorted lens through which people begin to view the world, reason about the world, and then describe the world to others. Misbelief is also a process—a kind of funnel that pulls people deeper and deeper. My goal in this book is to highlight how anyone, given the right circumstances, can find themselves pulled down the funnel of mis

As people progress down the funnel of misbelief, however, they reach a point where healthy skepticism evolves into a reflexive mistrust of anything “mainstream” and genuine open-mindedness slides into dysfunctional doubt.

Perhaps you can even help him reframe his life changes as opportunities for freedom and possibilities for self-discovery rather than as disruptive and unexpected events.

Based on the results, they proposed that the experience of being unable to control a stressful situation produces three “deficits”: motivational, cognitive, and emotional. In other words, when we experience repeated stress that we cannot control, it makes us feel less inclined to take action and less able to figure out solutions. It makes us feel w

we will think about misbelief as a perspective or psychological mindset that acts as a distorted lens through which people view the world, reason about the world, and describe the world to others. Moreover, misbelief will be explored not just as a state but as a process.