Why People May Believe What isn't True about You
What we can take from Daniel Kahneman's research and writing
The mind is powerful. It just doesn’t always work well. It makes mistakes and egregious errors. That means people think and react strangely and illogically.
Yael Schonbrun recently wrote a piece about the late Daniel Kahneman, who died last year, and his understanding of human thinking. She listed numerous points of his and applied them to personal relationships. I’m using Kahneman’s points to show how people incorrectly analyze us and negatively impact our lives.
You might be saying, “boring!” If you read through this piece, however, you might discover an a-ha moment that will light up your mind and help you see something you’d like to know. If fact, you might have multiple such moments.
I will roll the dice and say that many readers will learn something that they will be happy to understand.
Here's why people are naturally inclined to believe what isn't true about you:
Schonbrun shared smart, helpful insights from Kahneman’s well-known work and book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I will edit some of what Schonbrun wrote and also elaborate on it.
Hang with the scientific talk. I’ll cut through it to make the points easy to understand.
“The associative machine (the mind) is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story.
“A mind that follows WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.
“As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.”
What it Means, Why it Matters: it’s well researched and documented that people’s minds strongly prefer certainty over doubt. So what the above-passage is saying is that when the brain begins to feel doubt, it often pushes it down and instead seeks to find information and stories to keep believing what it finds more comfortable.
It leans into confirmation bias. This helps someone feel confident.
It doesn’t matter to them if what they are relying on as information is insufficient or weak on facts and context.
People are not always curious to learn what is true and in context. That takes more cognitive work. It’s harder. Emotionally, they may have an idea of what the truth may be but it conflicts with their biases so they prefer to remain ignorant.
The Illusion of Understanding
“… declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in their mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
Why it Matters: Just because someone tells a clear story to themselves doesn’t mean it is factual. Of course, it certainly can be and most often, probably is factual yet assuming that’s always the case is willful deception.
It’s also willful deception when we choose to believe (and maybe support) someone we think is believable yet whom is lying. That is a substantial error that gets made or that someone is making now or will soon make.
“Cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions,” Kahneman wrote. “The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition, and questioning your intuitions is unpleasant when you face the stress of a big decision.”
Why it Matters: What our brains initially conclude may not be accurate. It’s an “illusion” that we are seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing. We choose to lean into trusting these conclusions even if we hear that “little voice” saying “something doesn’t make sense and seem right.”
People can reveal large blind spots and a taste for, and comfort level, with them.
It’s not unnatural for humans, some more than others, yet everyone maybe at times, to believe what is not true and then not care to want to learn what is and believe it.
Michael Toebe is the specialist at Reputation Intelligence, helping individuals and organizations with matters of credibility, trust, decision analysis, communications, relationships and reputation.
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