Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

What makes scarcity most interesting—and relevant to our quest to understand misbelief—is that it is another form of stress that reduces our capacity to reason, think, plan, and generally make good decisions.

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.

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.”

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

Deep canvassing starts by asking sensitive questions, listening to the answers with real interest, and then asking follow-up questions as a way to start a conversation. Why is this approach more likely to be effective? Because in the standard argumentative approach we tend to start counterarguing (at least in our heads, but sometimes out loud, too)

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

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.

Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by human fallibility,”

Beliefs are powerful because once we have them, it takes a lot for us to question them. We’re more likely to avoid the hard work of questioning ourselves and instead double down,