Quick thread of quotes, or why I recommend reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman to help make sense of our current cultural paradigm.

“The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas...”

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“Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”

“Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”

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“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague...showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”

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

“As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.”

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“Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”

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“I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws."

“We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”

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“For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected...this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.”

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“We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition...when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”

“A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”

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“Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

“If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”

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“The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help...Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take on the unpleasantness of dealing.”

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“Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”

“The goal of venture capitalists is to call the extreme cases correctly, even at the cost of overestimating the prospects of many other ventures.”

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Read this one in full.

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This is normally where I'd drop a link to the Amazon page to buy this book, but honestly, screw Amazon.

Find a local bookstore and support them.

Lastly, a link to my own exploration of what I call "cognitive funnels."

13/ https://medium.com/@thehuntsmanonline/masterselfs-beyond-influence-autoimmune-influence-diseases-f47fab9a9b66