➚ Shane Parrish on How Our Brains Lie Because we love a good story
Our brains are stubborn…
“ Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman offers an example of how our brains look for, and assume, causality:
“After spending a day exploring beautiful sights in the crowded streets of New York, Jane discovered that her wallet was missing.”
That’s all you get. No background on Jane, or any particulars about where she went. Kahneman presented this miniature story to his test subjects hidden among several other statements. When Kahneman later offered a surprise recall test, “the word pickpocket was more strongly associated with the story than the word sights, even though the latter was actually in the sentence while the former was not.” 1“
Read more on Farman Street: The Lies We Tell ➚