This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.
This sets you up to be more afraid of terrorists than home furniture, even though falling couches and televisions take more lives each year.
To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind,...
Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another’s backs.
You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
Whatever groups you don’t belong to become the groups who you think will be bowled over by messages you don’t agree with.
When a kid asks, But, why? she is rightfully bringing to the attention of the adult world that all this stuff is just made up and mostly arbitrary nonsense often clung to for some long-forgotten reaso...
When a movie begins with the words Based on a True Story, what crosses your mind? Do you assume every line of dialogue, every bit of clothing and song in the background is the same as it was in the tr...
When it comes to buying lottery tickets, fearing the West Nile virus, looking for child molesters, and so on, you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second.
When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if thos...
First impressions are difficult to change.
When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.
When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can't stop worrying that you could become an example...
Where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of obectivity....about 20 percent of all people live in that spot and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive real...
Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.
While driving and talking on a cell phone, how much of your world do you miss? The research findings suggest you could have your eyes wide open, but fail to see the car, the bike, or the deer about to...
Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that th...
Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unluc...
You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.
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