In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs even after the information that they’re based on is shown to be false. I’m a big fan of this line from a paper by Savion (2009): …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Do you ever find that once you start to notice something, all of a sudden, it’s happening a lot? There’s a name for that; it’s a type of …
What Is… the Frequency Illusion (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon) Read More »
The COVID/5G conspiracy theory has been around since the early days of the pandemic. How did such an out-there idea become so widely known? The dumpster fire that is social media has a fair bit to do with it, with a combination of misinformation (wrong information spread without manipulative/deceptive intent) and disinformation (intentionally spreading wrong …
The Bizarre Spread of the COVID/5G Conspiracy Theory Read More »
This post is a follow-up to a conversation that Winter Dragonflies and I were having about different mental errors that can feed into social anxiety. We all have a natural set of cognitive biases that can result in mental errors, so I wanted to take a look at what some of those might be. Cognitive …
Cognitive Biases that Can Feed into Social Anxiety Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect was first described by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. It’s a type of cognitive bias that causes people to feel confident that they have greater knowledge or competence in an …
There’s a lot of knowledge out there in the world. We’ve all accumulated some of it, whether that’s by formal schooling, work, or life in general. Quadrants of knowledge There are several different ways in which we relate to the potential knowledge that’s out there in the world. This can be seen in the modified …
The Importance of What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re looking at the psychology behind conspiracy theories. This topic came up in a recent post by Andy of Eden in Babylon. In particular, the Q-Anon conspiracy theory has become quite popular, despite its utter absurdity. Then there’s the …
What Is… The Psychology Behind Conspiracy Theories Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the psychology of advertising. A University of Southern California blog says that we see an average of 5000 ads a day and 2 million 30-second commercials a year. And all of that is carefully composed to take …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a type of cognitive bias that makes us more likely to believe false information to be correct the more often we’re exposed to it. It was first described …
