Sublime

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.

Having access to unrelated information was enough to inflate their intellectual confidence.

As Welch had done, he attacked the elitism.

Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner, and that’s important, because each person needs to contribute a strongly biased perspective to the pool. And it is lazy, because we expect to off-load the cognitive effort to a group process. Everyone can be cognitive misers and save their calories for punching bears, because when it comes time to

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of “national identity,” which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (“National traits” might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both

Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves. Here are some highlights of their findings: High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have "above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent "below average"; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1

Tajfel wondered what would happen if, in a laboratory setting, you stripped away every single salient difference between two groups of people, even their personalities, and simply told them they were in one group and not another? He then wondered, if you started adding small differences one at a time, like one group wears glasses and the other

Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”

This might all seem obvious—of course people have different personalities! But there’s long been a debate in psychology over how much personality matters when it comes to explaining what people do.3 To take an extreme example, if you wake up surrounded by smoke and fire, you’re likely to be anxious, but it would be a mistake to say that this is due