Cognitive Bias Quotes

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

Everyone has blind spots, and even the brightest people are no exceptions.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

Perception is reality.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues, ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.

You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.