A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.

you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

attenuated

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Although I have not conducted a systematic survey, I suspect that frequent switching of tasks and speeded-up mental work are not intrinsically pleasurable, and that people avoid them when possible. This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

One of Hess’s findings especially captured my attention. He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy.