cognitive dissonance

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Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

From reading exactly the same material, the two groups moved even further apart in their views. They had each reframed the evidence to fit in with their preexisting beliefs. Festinger’s great achievement was to show that cognitive dissonance is a deeply ingrained human trait. The more we have riding on our judgments, the more we are likely to manipulate any new evidence that calls them into question. Now let us take these insights back to the subject with which we started this chapter. For it turns out that cognitive dissonance has had huge and often astonishing effects on the workings of the criminal justice system. IV On March 20, 1987, a young girl was attacked in her home in Billings, Montana.

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Imagine what it must be like to be confronted with evidence that they have assisted in putting the wrong person in jail; that they have ruined the life of an innocent person; that the wounds of the victim’s family are going to be reopened. It must be stomach churning. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it is difficult to think of anything more threatening. As Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist, has put it: “[Convicting the wrong person is] one of the worst professional mistakes you can make—like a physician amputating the wrong arm.”21 Just think of how desperate they would be to reframe the fatality. The theory of cognitive dissonance is the only way to get a handle on the otherwise bewildering reaction of prosecutors and police (and, indeed, the wider system) to exonerating DNA evidence.

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In other words, the victim had had consensual sex with another man, but had subsequently been raped by the prisoner, who had used a condom.22 This is the domino effect of cognitive dissonance: the reframing process takes on a life of its own. The presence of an entirely new man, not mentioned at the initial trial, for whom there were no eyewitnesses, and whom the victim often couldn’t remember having sex with, may seem like a desperate ploy to evade the evidence. But it has been used so often that it has been given a name by defense lawyers: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.” It is a term that usefully captures the power of cognitive dissonance. Schulz quotes from a fascinating interview with Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project: We’ll be leaving the courtroom after an exoneration and the prosecutor will say “We still think your client is guilty and we are going to retry him.”

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Provide reasons for people to use If you expect that users will be conflicted about the product or service you offer, provide them with many reasons they can use to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep their pride intact. Online, cognitive dissonance can be brought about by effects such as buyer’s remorse, in which the purchaser struggles to justify the high purchase price and their desire for an item in comparison to their subsequent feelings of the item’s worth. Sites help users resolve this cognitive dissonance by giving them reasons and evidence that bolster their satisfaction with the product (positive reviews; images of famous people using the product; and promises of hard-to-quantify benefits, such as social approval brought about by using the product) rather than letting them resolve the dissonance by returning the product.

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Pride Saint Augustine quote: “Humilitas homines sanctis angelis similes facit, et superbia ex angelis demones facit.” as quoted in Manipulus Florum (c. 1306), edited by Thomas Hibernicus. Cognitive dissonance Leon Festinger proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance after he studied the aftermath of Dorothy Martin’s December 21, 1954, end of the world prediction. Yes, these predictions seem to happen with alarming frequency: Leon Festinger. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1957. Harold Camping quote: familyradio.com. Retrieved January 2012. Ig Nobel prize winners, by year: “Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize.”

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They revolve around setting goals to reduce debt, to have “toy fund” money for frivolous expenditures, and simply being entertained: “Why not get paid for sitting at the computer, which I would be doing anyway?” Lots of these reasons appear to be justifications that attempt to remove the cognitive dissonance of doing something that isn’t actually particularly “worthwhile” in financial terms. And that fits in nicely with some findings from way back in 1959 when Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith found that in situations where there is cognitive dissonance between effort and return, people will be forced to create justifications for working so hard for a small reward, thus increasing their perceived value of the reward.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Many of the group's members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech's prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger's. *** The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it.

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The conservative columnist William Safire once described the "psychopolitical challenge" that voters face: "how to deal with cognitive dissonance."29 He began with a story of his own such challenge. During the Clinton administration, Safire recounted, he had criticized Hillary Clinton for trying to conceal the identity of the members of her health-care task force. He wrote a column castigating her efforts at secrecy, which he said were toxic to democracy. No dissonance there; those bad Democrats are always doing bad things. Six years later, however, he found that he was "afflicted" by cognitive dissonance when Vice President Dick Cheney, a fellow conservative Republican whom Safire admires, insisted on keeping the identity of his energy-policy task force a secret.

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New York: Harper and Brothers, p. 11 (first quote), p. 120 (second quote). 10 Edward Humes (1999), Mean Justice. New York: Pocket Books. CHAPTER 1 Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification 1 Press releases from Neal Chase, representing the religious group Baha'is Under the Provisions of the Covenant, in "The End Is Nearish," Harper's, February 1995, pp. 22, 24. 2 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter (1956), When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3 Leon Festinger (1957), A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. See also Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson (1960), "Arousal and Reduction of Dissonance in Social Contexts," in D.

Psychopath Free (Expanded Edition): Recovering From Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People by Jackson MacKenzie

cognitive dissonance

Only you can’t see this clearly because you’ve had lies about who you are and your part in this relationship pounded into your brain, over and over again. This creates cognitive dissonance, causing you to have doubts about ending it. Compounding this is the fact that in the initial phase of the relationship, they did an excellent job of idealizing and love-bombing you. The vicious circle then comes in to play, in that you cannot see clearly who they are and the cognitive dissonance won’t leave you until you’ve done some No Contact time. But it’s hard to feel at peace with your decision to go No Contact while the cognitive dissonance is wreaking havoc in your mind. What worked for me to end the cognitive dissonance: Well, I went through utter hell inside this mental tug-of-war for the first six weeks of No Contact.

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How could someone who thought you were perfect be the very same person who intentionally hurt you? How could they go from obsession to contempt in the blink of an eye? It isn’t possible. There’s no way you dated a psychopath. They loved you. Right? Cognitive Dissonance What I’ve just described is a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. It’s a state of mind where your intuition is telling you two competing things. It’s totally natural after a psychopathic relationship, because you’re used to repeatedly being told things—instead of seeing them with your own two eyes, or feeling them in your heart.

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Plus, how could you forget those beautiful memories where you held hands as they said “I love you . . .” And that’s the danger of cognitive dissonance. It brings you back to the addictive love memories. It causes you to long for a broken dream, a manufactured lie. As you begin to work through these feelings, the diametrically opposed thoughts will become less and less extreme. But in the meantime, you are still very susceptible to their ongoing abuse. As long as you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance, make no mistake: they will be able to trick you again. All it takes is one sweet word to send you right back to the idealization phase.

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

They may be fooled by their own memetic programming! More on this in Chapter 9. 129 virus of the mind If you’re in a situation where you’re being rewarded for some behavior, think about what memes that operant conditioning is programming you with. Do they serve your purpose in life? Cognitive Dissonance Another programming technique is creating mental pressure and resolving it—cognitive dissonance. Why do high-pressure sales tactics exist even though people universally despise them? As with any “why” question in the world of memetics, the answer is: because the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the high-pressure sales meme and go about acting on it, regardless of whether it’s the most effective means at their disposal.

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There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a meme like I really want to buy this. Once you create that meme, it’s yours, and a smart salesperson will reinforce it by telling you what 130 How We Get Programmed a smart decision you’ve made and even calling a few days later and congratulating you on your purchase. Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance.

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That creates an association-meme between the demonstration of loyalty and the good feeling caused by the release of pressure. With cognitive dissonance, people end up believing they have received something valuable, something deserving of their loyalty, when in reality all that has happened is that the people who were torturing them have stopped. Prisoners of war have been programmed to submit and be loyal to their captors through this method. One interesting result of research in operant conditioning on people is that it works better—creates stronger memes—to give the reward only occasionally than it does to give it all the time. That could be because withholding the reward adds cognitive dissonance to the operant conditioning.

The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

It wouldn't be at all unusual if you need a lot more convincing that you too are susceptible to such enormous errors of judgment, would it? It turns out there is a name for the psychological tendency that is at work in such situations: “cognitive dissonance”. It refers to those times when there is a clash between different attitudes, beliefs or ideas which results in a state of internal tension. As this dissonance is unpleasant, the mind seeks to reduce the conflict between the two opposing thoughts, which is most easily achieved by altering one or the other of them. Cognitive dissonance has two dimensions: When there is a clash between an external idea or event and our internal model of the world. When an inner conflict exists between our own ideas.

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Clearly, this isn't good news for anyone who likes the idea that we are essentially rational creatures. Indeed, if this applies you, you might well be experiencing some of your own cognitive dissonance right now, created by the conflict between two ideas: your comfortable misconception that your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis and the modern understanding that, actually, you are rather emotionally driven, whether you realise it or not! I'm Right Because I Believe I Am When faced with contradictory evidence, the desire to side with what is most comfortable – cognitive dissonance – and to avoid ideas that are contrary to what we believe – motivated reasoning – produces a very strong tendency for us to do little more than to seek to confirm our existing beliefs.

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Index adaptability adaptive change aircraft recognition Alvarado, Alejandro Sánchez ambiguity amygdala Antioco, John arousal artificial intelligence (AI) assumptions attention controlling the focus of frontal lobe inattention blindness meditation mindfulness neuroplasticity see also intentional attention attentional blink awareness bounded fear intentional attention levels of mindfulness prefrontal cortex see also self-awareness beliefs cognitive dissonance confirmation bias doomsday see also assumptions best practice Beyth, Ruth biases awareness of hindsight triggered by emotions see also confirmation bias big data blindsided, being “blink” versus “think” model Blockbuster Bohm, David Boston Consulting Group (BCG) bounded awareness brain attention balance brainwaves cognitive dissonance confirmation bias fear frontal lobe meditation mind and motivated reasoning neural seesaw neuroplasticity startle reflex stress threat response Triune Brain see also unconscious mind breathing Brehm, Jack cause and effect Challenger space shuttle disaster change adaptive complex systems increase in the pace of chaos chess cognitive dissonance communication complexity complex systems stress complicated systems conditioning confirmation bias conflicts of interest conventional wisdom Cook, David Covey, Stephen R.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

You also don’t notice or don’t remember evidence contrary to your belief (no replies, no wires outside the office walls). Honesty bias with a chaser of confirmation bias creates the conditions in which we can be deceived, over and over, through our own willing participation, in large part because of our need to protect against something called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of untenable mental stress. It occurs when you try to hold two conflicting truths (or at least beliefs) in your mind simultaneously. You can’t do it. Really. You can’t. I mean, some people can, but they’re seriously atypical and you probably don’t want to know them. So, what happens when you have to process two conflicting beliefs?

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There’s an entire emerging field of science looking at how difficult it is to change someone’s perception and emotional opinion of fact once they’ve accepted that something is fact, even after they’re provided with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. What it mostly boils down to is more cognitive dissonance: they become incapable of processing new information, and more often than not they just can’t accept that the first fact was a lie—at least, not if they really bought it. The trajectory of confirmation bias (wherein you believe something and thus begin to see evidence for it everywhere you look) followed by cognitive dissonance (where you dig in your heels and believe something more the more it’s disproved) is a powerful emotional response and a form of recursive cognitive error that subverts objective reasoning.

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One gets dumped in the idea shredder. And it actually doesn’t make a bit of difference which one is more factually accurate: you defend and protect whichever idea you need to be true in order not to have been wrong at some point. The psychological and neurological stress experienced during moments of cognitive dissonance are so great, you’ll believe anything to protect your preexisting mental paradigm. It’s why people refuse to hear proof of things like climate change or see clips of transgressions that they insist didn’t happen—in the event that they’ve already decided they don’t believe it. What Lustig did with the Eiffel Tower, Parker did with the Brooklyn Bridge, and Smith did with his telegraph to nowhere were obviously far less harmful than enticing hundreds of people onto a boat and sending them out to die in a jungle, but they were all still the same basic con that Gregor MacGregor pulled with the nation of Poyais: it’s known among con artists as selling thin air.22 The thin-air part is integral to the Big Lie, because by definition a Big Lie is not an exaggeration, misrepresentation, or misdirection about the truth; rather, it rests entirely on the absence of any sort of tangible reality and relies on your combined theory of mind and faith in objective reality to float it enough credit to be believed.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

For those who haven’t adapted to new norms, these changes can be jarring. A natural response to a viral wave of shaming is anger and indignation. It is here that people enter the second stage of shame, denial. One hallmark of this stage is cognitive dissonance. I’m not a bad person, Permit Karen might think. And yet people are outside my door raging at me. I’m not a racist, and yet my community insists that I am one. I must deny it. Cognitive dissonance—holding two ideas that appear to contradict each other—can cause great emotional stress and lead to tortured logic. The term was minted in the 1950s by a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, and two colleagues.

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However, doing so usually involves an emotional journey, not unlike the passage through the stages of grief. The first stage is hurt. When shamed, whether for addiction, poverty, or illiteracy, people suffer and can feel worthless. And being denounced by millions on social media as a racist or a rapist can create cognitive dissonance, especially for people who consider themselves “good.” A natural response is to cast about for a way to turn off the pain. This leads them to hide the shame, or pretend it’s not there. Some even blame others, or seek out people nursing similar grievances. That second stage of shame, denial, leads to no end of hazards.

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It enabled me not only to address the sources of my own shame but, more important, to delve into false assumptions I used to justify my own shaming actions. In the realm of shame, most of us are both victims and perpetrators. To avoid pain, or perhaps in response to pain, we habitually and automatically deflect it toward others. Both the diagnosis and the remedy, I found, are usually rooted in phony science, cognitive dissonance, and self-preserving flattery. In short, lots of unnecessary bullshit. We should wield this weapon more carefully. My purpose in writing this book is to shine a light on both the shame we’ve been subjected to in life and the shame that we heap on others, often without meaning to or even noticing.

Power by Shahida Arabi

cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, false memory syndrome, microaggression, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), traumatic brain injury, twin studies

This can make it difficult to pinpoint who the narcissistic abuser truly is—the sweet, charming and seemingly remorseful person that appears shortly after the abuse, or the abusive partner who ridicules, invalidates and belittles you on a daily basis? You suffer a great deal of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile the illusion the narcissist first presented to you with the tormenting behaviors he or she subjects you to. In order to cope with this cognitive dissonance, you might blame yourself for his or her abusive behavior and attempt to “improve” yourself when you have done nothing wrong, just to uphold your belief in the narcissist’s false self during the devaluation phase.

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It’s a huge trauma made out of a million tiny shocks that shatter the memory, erode the self and break your life into fragments. It’s psychological terrorism at its worst and confusing as hell at its best. It’s an unforgettable event (or rather, series of unfortunate events) that creates some memorable cognitive dissonance because it hits the core of everything you once believed about the world. It also doesn’t make any sense—why would the same person who claimed to love and care for you hurt you—over and over without a hint of empathy or remorse? In the narcissist’s world, it’s simply because they can. To understand why narcissistic abuse is so traumatic and problematic, consider that the very nature of it distorts everything we hold true about humanity.

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Narcissistic abuse is rife with emotional neglect and unbelievable acts of murder and violence—only, most of it can never be traced back to the perpetrator because there may be no visible bloodshed. This type of abuse is brimming with psychological mind games, touched with a dash of intermittent sweetness to keep the victim constantly teetering over the edge of uncertainty and self-doubt. It is a relationship where the shadows of old scars dance with fresh wounds. When the cognitive dissonance about the abuser’s ever-shifting true identity mingles with self-doubt, a feeling of pervasive unworthiness lingers, an alienation that cannot be voiced aloud. When you’ve been psychologically and emotionally abused, there are no words that can describe the pain, no explanation that you can offer your friends and family without fearing they’ll look at you as if you’ve grown three heads.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If he should ever lift his nose out of the minutiae of his fascinating business and view its history whole, he would be forced to admit the sad truth that pitifully few nancial experts have ever known for two years (much less fteen) what was going to happen to any class of securities—and that the majority are usually spectacularly wrong in a much shorter time than that.4 Although Schwed’s book was anecdotal and presented no statistical evidence, it was an early and effective statement of the efficient markets theory. Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger, is a negative emotional response, a feeling of psychological pain, when something con icts with one’s stated beliefs—an emotional response that may lead to something other than a rational updating of the beliefs.5 In particular, when a person’s own actions are revealed to be inconsistent with certain beliefs, he or she often just conveniently changes those beliefs. Hypocrisy is one particular manifestation of cognitive dissonance, in which a person espouses opinions out of convenience and to justify certain actions, while often at some level actually believing them.

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The evidence that Festinger and his successors presented is solid: cognitive dissonance is a genuine phenomenon and leads with some regularity to human error—or at times to what we would label sleaziness. And yet there remains skepticism about cognitive dissonance in many quarters, particularly among people who feel committed to the fully rational model of human behavior. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in support of Festinger’s theory. It has been found that brain structure is fundamentally tied to cognitive dissonance. Neuroscientist Vincent van Veen and his colleagues put human subjects in an experimental situation in which they were paid or otherwise incentivized to lie about their true beliefs as they were observed by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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Importantly, those subjects with more activity in these regions showed a stronger tendency to change their actual beliefs to be consonant with the beliefs they were made to espouse.6 We thus have evidence of a physical structure in the brain whose actions are correlated with the outcome of cognitive dissonance, and that thus appears to be part of a brain mechanism that produces the phenomenon Festinger described based solely on his observations of human behavior. If hypocrisy is built into the brain, then there is a potential for human error that can be of great economic signi cance. A whole economic system can take as given certain assumptions, such as, for example, the belief in the years before the current nancial crisis that “home prices can never fall.” That theory was adopted by millions of people who would have experienced cognitive dissonance had they not done so, either because they were involved one way or another in a system that was overselling real estate or because they themselves had invested in real estate.

The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse by Debbie Mirza

cognitive dissonance, Skype, Snapchat

I also know since you have all that as your core, you are going to come out of this just fine, even better then you could imagine. Keep going. We need people like you in this world. Don’t let this take you out. You are the cream of the crop. You are the type of person that makes this planet a better place. Thank you for being brave, for being you. Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance is when you hold two conflicting beliefs in your mind. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “Psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.” This is what makes covert narcissistic abuse so confusing and difficult. For so long you believed this person was kind and genuine.

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When I say “worst form,” I do not want to minimize anyone else’s trauma when dealing with an overt narcissist or any other type of psychologically abusive personality. Abuse is abuse—it is horrific and always undeserved. My heart goes out to anyone who has and is experiencing anything that harms and devalues them. One reason covert narcissists are so damaging is because of cognitive dissonance. This is when you have two competing thoughts in your mind. You love your mom, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend and thought they loved you the same. Yet when you look back, their behaviors are making you question your beliefs about them. As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?”

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As you research you begin to wonder, “Could this person really have been controlling and manipulating me for years, and I didn’t see it… or were things really my fault and I’m just overdramatizing my experience?” You have a solid belief that has been built up over years that this is a good person who cares about you, and at the same time, they are being incredibly cruel and controlling. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying and crazy making. The overt types of narcissists are obvious, in-your-face kind of people. They will let others know how great they are. When their mask comes off others around them roll their eyes and say, “Oh, yeah, he’s terrible.” On the other hand, covert narcissists are well liked.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Some of those present camped out for weeks or even months, expecting something to happen imminently despite their many and repeated disappointments. It was only by the spring of 2022 that this most outlandish of Q-related subgroups finally began to dissipate, a full five months or so since the initial pronouncements. The group seemed to be displaying cognitive dissonance on a grand scale.15 ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is a psychological term for the discomfort that comes when two beliefs we strongly hold clash, or when a belief clashes with reality. If we have invested months of our lives – possibly losing jobs or relationships – in believing a conspiracy, and the moment of truth doesn’t come, we have two options.

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The study, eventually published as the book When Prophecy Fails in 1956 by Minnesota University Press, and its methodology remain deeply controversial to this day, but it was from it that the concept of cognitive dissonance is taken. It’s a core psychological tenet we’ve already applied to QAnon’s supporters, but to explain how Q survived January 2021, it merits deeper examination. Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when our ideas or beliefs clash either with each other or with objective reality. This can be as simple as ‘I am a good person, but I have just stolen,’ or as specific as ‘I believe the world will end today, but it hasn’t.’

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At the same time, Q and its variants provided far more flexibility and alternative theories than conspiracies of old. We have seen how Q bifurcated and reformed in the years after inauguration – but let’s just look at the first few days and weeks afterwards, and see how it follows much the same cognitive dissonance process as was first observed in Dorothy Martin and her followers in 1954. Election day dissonance If we are going to consider the full-scale cognitive dissonance in QAnon, we need to look at how the movement’s US followers in particular – who were all fanatical supporters of Donald Trump – could continue to believe in at least some part of the plan after 20 January.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Their beliefs were my entrée, but my goal was to get them to talk about why they had them. Maybe I could ask them a question they’d never heard before. One that a scientist wouldn’t have any trouble answering. And then—rather than trying to change their mind directly—I could just sit back and watch while cognitive dissonance overtook them, as they grew increasingly uncomfortable when they couldn’t give me an answer.34 In his 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper offers his theory of “falsification,” which says that a scientist always sets out to try to falsify their theory, not confirm it.35 In my book The Scientific Attitude, I developed a key insight from this, which is that—in order to be a scientist—you have to be willing to change your mind on the basis of new evidence.

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For an excellent psychological study of some of the motivations and causal influences in conversion to Flat Eartherism, see Alex Olshansky, Robert M. Peaslee, and Ashley Landrum, “Flat-Smacked! Converting to Flat-Eartherism,” Journal of Media and Religion, July 2, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348423.2020.1774257?scroll=top&needAccess=true. 34. One of the best introductions to the concept of cognitive dissonance can be found in Leon Festinger’s classic When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), which is about a 1950s UFO cult that believed the Earth was going to end on a specific date, so they waited on a mountaintop for a spaceship to pick them up. After the appointed time came and went, instead of giving up their belief they instead turned to the idea that the faith of their tiny group was so great that it had saved humanity. 35.

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Research has shown that for the most part, this is not even done at a conscious level.48 Perhaps this is why there is such a close kinship in our minds between someone who is “in denial” and someone who is a “denier.”49 We lie to ourselves as a means of more efficiently lying to others. Seventy years of social psychology has shown that satisfying the human ego is an important part of our behavior. And an integral part of this is maintaining a positive view of ourselves. This can account for those times when we resolve cognitive dissonance by telling ourselves a story we would prefer to believe over one that is true, as long as we can be the hero in it. It also involves making sure that we present a favorable image of ourselves to those in our social circle, whose opinions we care about. Thus, our beliefs and behavior are formed in a hothouse of self-opinion, as reflected back to us in the opinion of others.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

It would be odd if this had not been a major topic of exploration, since it speaks so directly to our images of ourselves and others. While there have been many modes and idioms in which the question has been broached, for the sake of brevity we shall describe but one: the attempt to comprehend these responses as a case study in the social psychological problem of cognitive dissonance. The father of “cognitive dissonance theory” was the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In his premier work on the subject, he addressed the canonical problem situation which captures the predicament of the contemporary economics profession: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart . . . suppose that he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

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Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting people.24 This profound insight, that confrontation with contrary evidence may actually augment and sharpen the conviction and enthusiasm of a true believer, was explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance evoked by a disconfirmation of strongly held beliefs. The thesis that humans are more rationalizing than rational has spawned a huge literature, but one that gets little respect in economics.25 Cognitive dissonance and the responses it provokes venture well beyond the literature in the philosophy of science that travels under the rubric of Duhem’s Thesis, in that the former plumbs response mechanisms to emotional chagrin, whereas the latter sketches the myriad ways in which auxiliary hypotheses may be evoked in order to blunt the threat of disconfirmation.

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Predominantly, the long history of schooling, socialization, and past experience induces a stubborn inertia into cognitive processes. More commonly, people react to potential disconfirmation of strongly held views by adjusting their own understandings of the doctrine in question to accommodate the contrary evidence; this has been discussed in the social psychology literature under the rubric of “cognitive dissonance,” and in the philosophy literature as Duhem’s Thesis. Cognition sports an inescapable social dimension as well: people cannot vet and validate even a small proportion of the knowledge to which they subscribe, and so must of necessity depend heavily upon others such as teachers and experts and peers to underwrite much of their beliefs.23 And then there is a second major consideration relevant to our current conundrum, namely, the issue of whether most people who may subscribe to something like neoliberalism actually understand it to be constituted as a coherent doctrine with a spelled-out roster of propositions, or instead treat their notions as disparate implications of other beliefs.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

How did I miss this? One answer is the psychological construct of cognitive dissonance, which posits discomfort when someone is faced with inconsistent evidence and driven to resolve the discrepancy. Like when my cousin told her eight-year-old son that she got pregnant with him because of sperm that swam fast to the finish line, and in the next breath told him the stork dropped him off in her lap. How could both be true? They could not. Still, somehow he managed to accept both ideas. That’s cognitive dissonance. The theory of cognitive dissonance was developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist who believed that humans needed internal consistency.20 He argued that we become psychologically uncomfortable with any kind of irregularity, and so we do everything in our power to diminish this dissonance.

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Peg Streep, “The Trouble with Trust,” Psychology Today, March 25, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-support/201403/the-trouble-trust. 19. Telephone interview with author. 20. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 21. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Thea Buckley, “What Happens to the Brain During Cognitive Dissonance?,” Scientific American, n.d., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-cognitive-dissonance1. 24.

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But Martin didn’t back down. Tomorrow, she promised. They’ll come tomorrow. Her followers stuck by her. In their 1956 book about the cult, When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his coauthors concluded that “a man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” This applies to women, too, by the way.22 Cognitive dissonance is actually quite valuable, because it causes us to believe we have made intelligent, reasonable decisions.23 Our response is also called “motivated reasoning,” or motivated bias.24 It’s what we do when we seek out information that jibes with our previously held convictions. We discount anything that challenges our views.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

We see others enjoying them, try a little more, and over time condition ourselves. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something that others seem to take so much pleasure in, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy. • • • Together, the three tendencies just described influence our future actions: The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance. These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically.

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The homeowners’ greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller one demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors. Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors. We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance In a classic Aesop’s fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. Yet as hard as he tries, he cannot reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that therefore he would not want them anyway. The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them.

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The fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet he cannot have them. To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance. The irrational manipulation of the way one sees the world is not limited to fictional animals in children’s stories. We humans do this as well. Consider your reaction the first time you sipped a beer or tried spicy food. Was it tasty? Unlikely. Our bodies are designed to reject alcohol and capsaicin, the compound that creates the sensation of heat in spicy food.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance According to the widely accepted theory of cognitive dissonance, we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another – and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image.15 We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.

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Aronson, Elliot. 1999. ‘Dissonance, Hypocrisy, and the Self-Concept’. Pp. 103–26 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aronson, Elliot, and Judson Mills. 1959. ‘The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81. Aronson, Joshua, Geoffrey Cohen, and Paul R. Nail. 1999. ‘Self-Affirmation Theory: An Update and Appraisal’. Pp. 127–47 in Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology, ed. Eddie Harmon-Jones and Judson Mills.

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Some believe that it is dangerous to undermine belief in authority. 6.1.2 The appeal to popular opinion Some believe that the rejection of authority is too far from common-sense political beliefs to be taken seriously. 6.2 The Milgram experiments 6.2.1 Setup Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects would be ordered to administer electric shocks to helpless others. 6.2.2 Predictions Most people expect that subjects will defy the orders of the experimenter. 6.2.3 Results Two-thirds of subjects obey fully, even to the point of administering apparently lethal shocks. 6.2.4 The dangers of obedience The experiment shows that belief in authority is very dangerous. 6.2.5 The unreliability of opinions about authority The experiment also shows that people have a strong pro-authority bias. 6.3 Cognitive dissonance People may seek to rationalize their own obedience to the state by devising theories of authority. 6.4 Social proof and status quo bias People are biased toward commonly held beliefs and the practices of their own society. 6.5 The power of political aesthetics 6.5.1 Symbols The state employs symbols to create an emotional and aesthetic sense of its own power and authority. 6.5.2 Rituals Rituals serve a similar function. 6.5.3 Authoritative language Legal language and the language of some political philosophers serve to encourage feelings of respect for authority. 6.6 Stockholm Syndrome and the charisma of power 6.6.1 The phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome Kidnapping victims sometimes emotionally bond with their captors, as in the case of the Stockholm bank robbery. 6.6.2 Why does Stockholm Syndrome occur?

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

The pernicious effects of confirmation bias and related models can be explained by cognitive dissonance, the stress felt by holding two contradictory, dissonant, beliefs at once. Scientists have actually linked cognitive dissonance to a physical area in the brain that plays a role in helping you avoid aversive outcomes. Instead of dealing with the underlying cause of this stress—the fact that we might actually be wrong—we take the easy way out and rationalize the conflicting information away. It’s a survival instinct! Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts.

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Once you start looking for confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we guarantee you will spot them all over, including in your own thoughts. A real trick to being wrong less is to fight your instincts to dismiss new information and instead to embrace new ways of thinking and new paradigms. The meme on the next page perfectly illustrates how cognitive dissonance can make things we take for granted seem absurd. There are a couple of tactical mental models that can help you on an everyday basis to overcome your ingrained confirmation bias and tribalism. First, consider thinking gray, a concept we learned from Steven Sample’s book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. You may think about issues in terms of black and white, but the truth is somewhere in between, a shade of gray.

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Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. This model is powerful because it forces you to be patient. By delaying decision making, you avoid confirmation bias since you haven’t yet made a decision to confirm! It can be difficult to think gray because all the nuance and different points of view can cause cognitive dissonance. However, it is worth fighting through that dissonance to get closer to the objective truth. A second mental model that can help you with confirmation bias is the Devil’s advocate position. This was once an official position in the Catholic Church used during the process of canonizing people as saints.

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

a uniquely human capacity, and computers can only dream with impatience of that far-off day when they, too, will at last be able to perceive that two situations so different on their surface level are nonetheless “exactly the same thing”. In the meantime, though, they all pooh-pooh the interest of such a goal… How to Reduce Cognitive Dissonance in a Fox Æsop’s fox-and-grapes fable, more than two millennia old, insightfully anticipated some rather recent ideas. From the 1950’s onwards, thanks to the pioneering work of social psychologist Leon Festinger, the notions of cognitive dissonance and its reduction have been part of psychology, and they are direct descendants of the fable, which, in expositions of the theory, is often given as a quintessential example.

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Thus, the fox is in a state of cognitive dissonance, since his desire to eat the grapes conflicts with his inability to reach them. He thus modifies one of the two causes of the conflict by denying that he wants to eat them. Since they are sour (so he says), they are no longer desirable, so his failure to reach them is no longer upsetting. Much as the concept once bitten, twice shy contains the essence of the modern psychological notion that a traumatic experience leaves lasting after-effects in its wake, so the sour-grapes fable contains the essence of the notion of reduction of cognitive dissonance, and more generally, the notion of rationalization, where a painful situation is rendered less painful by the unconscious generation, after the fact, of some kind of arbitrary and often unlikely justification.

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For this reason, his fable not only has survived many centuries but it also anticipated developments in modern psychology. To see how the sour-grapes fable relates to the notion of cognitive dissonance in its full generality, one can cast the notion of disparagement of an unrealized yearning, which is the fable’s crux, as a special case of the more general notion of regaining a peaceful frame of mind by distorting one’s perception of a troubling situation, which is what the reduction of cognitive dissonance is all about. Equipped with this new category, we will far more easily and more rapidly recognize situations in which people spontaneously invent novel justifications, sometimes rather bizarre ones, in order to reconcile themselves with disappointing outcomes.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Another track of cognition studies – dealing with contradictions – arrived at this same end. We owe this work to Leon Festinger, the psychologist who developed the modern understanding of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term refers to a situation in which there are contradictory rules of behaviour, or rules which are confusing. How will the subject respond? Festinger was a man of the experimental laboratory, making use of animals – he preferred pigeons – but he was thinking always about the application of his findings to human beings. He recognized, though, that cognitive dissonance, a condition which he created for the pigeons, is a painful state that people create for themselves. Aesop’s fable ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ is a classic instance of this.

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One way out of this bind, Festinger writes, is for ‘the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance’. This mentality can mean that ‘when dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance’. That’s the negative side of cognitive dissonance: the subject avoids its complexities whenever possible. The fox craves grapes but in time comes to lie about his craving: ‘I really don’t like grapes.’ Any ex-smoker will recognize this line.19, 20 There is also a positive way to respond to frustrating or contradictory experience. Knowing of my interest in complex environments, Festinger led me one day through a laboratory filled with caged pigeons trying to peer around obstacles hiding their watering tubes, or to make sense of feed troughs the experimenters had angled oddly.

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Florian Znaniecki recognized that neophytes are made uncomfortable by the silence of a subject, and are tempted to jump in with statements like, ‘In other words, Mrs Schwarz, what you mean to say is…’. Znaniecki counselled, don’t put words in their mouths; to do so is the cardinal sin of sociology. Since the time of the Chicago School, techniques have evolved for spotlighting meanings which are left inarticulate or contradictory; listening for cognitive dissonances figures in the education of the modern ethnographer. The fact that a subject contradicts him- or herself cannot be taken as a sign he or she is stupid or ignorant; rather, following Bakhtin, it is the context of the speech act that is crooked and contradictory. Little would be gained by the interviewer saying, ‘Mrs Schwarz, you contradict yourself’; that makes the difficulty her problem rather than one of the situation she finds herself in.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, delayed gratification, meta-analysis, nocebo, placebo effect, Skype, Snapchat, spaced repetition, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies

Cultural Context: A Sex-Positive Life in a Sex-Negative World Three Messages You Are Beautiful Criticizing Yourself = Stress = Reduced Sexual Pleasure Health at Every Size “Dirty” When Somebody “Yucks” Your “Yum” Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 1: Self-Compassion Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 2: Cognitive Dissonance Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 3: Media Nutrition You Do You part 3 sex in action 6. Arousal: Lubrication Is Not Causation Measuring and Defining Nonconcordance All the Same Parts, Organized in Different Ways: “This Is a Restaurant” Nonconcordance in Other Emotions Lubrication Error #1: Genital Response = “Turned On” Lubrication Error #2: Genital Response Is Enjoying Lubrication Error #3: Nonconcordance Is a Problem Medicating Away the Brakes “Honey . . .

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Or twice a week. Or more. Each time, the things you like will become a little more salient and the noise will get a little quieter. Maybe even consider telling someone else about what you see and what you like. Better still, tell someone who also did the exercise! It’s an activity that gets labeled cognitive dissonance because it forces us to be aware of good things, when mostly we tend to be aware of the “negative” things. Try it. 2. Ask your partner, if you have one, to have a close look. Turn on the light, take off your clothes, get on your back, and let them look. Ask them what they see, how they feel about it, what memories they have of your vulva.

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But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to. And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

All this came together to dismantle my confirmation bias; drinking was no longer this precious wonderful thing, but a trap, and we were all in it. It was like learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real; once we know, we can’t go back. Carr’s book also smashed my cognitive dissonance into cognitive alignment. I was no longer of two minds: I desired to not drink, I believed not drinking could be fun and effortless, and I was excited for my nondrinking life to begin. When Carr instructed me to “never question the decision,” he was giving me the golden ticket for success—a way out of cognitive dissonance and a way out of battling myself. I decided not to drink, and I wouldn’t question it or need to use my willpower. If a friend called me on my way home from work when I’d had a bad day and asked me out for a drink, I wouldn’t need to think about whether I should or shouldn’t; I’d made up my mind to not drink, and I would uphold the decision.

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If I had a dollar for every person in recovery who told me I needed to take responsibility for my actions and stop vilifying poor alcohol—or worse, ruining it for the people who “can” drink—I’d be a rich woman. We love to protect alcohol and our right to consume it, and to vilify people who can’t handle it. We venerate the substance; we demonize those who get sick from using it. BELIEVING THE LIE The engineered controversy born of Big Tobacco’s need to keep the public trapped in cognitive dissonance—first over whether the cigarette was to blame, or a few unfortunate people with bad genes, and eventually over whether the mounting scientific evidence could be believed, or if we needed more proof—is the same mechanism that’s being applied to alcohol today. Because of this co-opting of Big Tobacco’s strategy, we hold on to ideas that alcohol is bad for a fraction of the population instead of all of us, or that it’s a matter of drinking responsibly versus drinking irresponsibly.

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Let’s say I believe that quitting alcohol is all but impossible, that people die trying to do it, or that people feel deprived without alcohol, or that their lives suck forever and ever amen—and I see this confirmed in the movies, or when Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen ends up back in rehab, or when my friend’s mom is still going to meetings more than twenty years after she quit—then my belief about quitting alcohol being terrible and impossible is right, and I should probably not try to do it. We see what we want to see, or what we’ve been trained to see, and our beliefs are constantly reinforced. The second concept is cognitive dissonance, which is when we have two conflicting thoughts at the same time. It’s the devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. We may not like hangovers, or saying stupid things, or forgetting portions of our evenings, or having beer guts or purple teeth, or fucking people we don’t like. But we also love how booze helps us overcome our shyness and inhibitions, be the life of the party, connect intimately, be able to have sex, and relax.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

But there’s no magic at work here – rather, the hand of cognitive dissonance. Two incontrovertible and antithetical cognitions – ‘I have spent X amount on this particular purchase’ on the one hand, and ‘I don’t like it and can’t change it’ on the other – are forced to cohabit the same bit of brainspace until one of two things happens. They either get their act together and sort out their differences. Or one of them packs its bags. Nine times out of ten, they learn to get along. The Neurology Of Influence The effects of cognitive dissonance demonstrate quite clearly how the propositional aspects of belief are closely tied in with emotion. 9But a recent experiment conducted by Sam Harris and his colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles goes one better – and shows how belief, emotion and influence are possibly tied up in the brain.

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That there never had been a custom-built flying saucer. That the master plan to spirit them all off into the cosmos had never existed in the first place. And that the jobs, spouses and houses had all been abandoned in vain. 8Festinger’s exposé of Keech’s divinations precipitated an avalanche of research into the dynamics of cognitive dissonance. The flagship study, conducted by Festinger himself in 1959, did much to get things moving. The study consisted of three key ingredients: the obligatory cohort of students, a series of meaningless and mind-numbingly tedious tasks, and a downright whopper of a lie: the students had to perform the tasks and then rope in subsequent ‘participants’ (in reality, associates of the researchers) by claiming that they were actually interesting.

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The students, in the absence of any other justification for their behaviour, were forced to internalise the attitude they were induced to express – and came, in so doing, genuinely to believe that the tasks they had performed were enjoyable. On the other hand, those in the $20 group had reason to believe there was external justification for their behaviour – they were in it for the money. No confusion there over job satisfaction. Why We Love The Things We Hate (Especially If We Can’t Get A Refund) The perils of cognitive dissonance should feature uppermost in the mind of any prospective persuader. Especially in situations where there’s a lot at stake and the person whom one is persuading has much to lose. Festinger’s study – these days considered a classic – provided, for the very first time, concrete evidence of something that we now take for granted: powerful gravitational forces deep within our brains keep the orbits of both belief and behaviour in close psychological alignment.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Among New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.” (We’ll discuss more of this rhetoric in part 6.) These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. For example, I have an acquaintance who recently got laid off from her job, and she was lamenting to me about how beside the point it felt when people responded to her bad news with “Everything happens for a reason.”

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But her roommates and old coworkers didn’t want to think about those things, because doing so would make them anxious, suddenly hyperaware of the fact that life fundamentally bends toward entropy, which would conflict with their goal of appearing sympathetic. So they fed her a line—“Everything happens for a reason”—to simplify the situation and put everyone’s cognitive dissonance to bed. “It’s work to think, especially about things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought-terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative.

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One anonymous ex-Way member recalled a traumatic glossolalia experience from her childhood for the blog Yes and Yes: “When I was 12, I was . . . required to speak in tongues in front of everyone, and I was so shy I couldn’t do it,” she said. “The man hosting the class . . . put his face very close to mine and essentially bullied me into speaking in tongues.” The girl’s parents watched the interaction unfold from across the room, benumbed by cognitive dissonance. “I was crying,” she continued. “The man was inches from my face . . . using the language of love in the most terrifying, bullying way.” Say you’re a child like this Way International survivor was or one of the Jesus Camp kids, who grew up in an oppressive religious environment and only ever knew its language.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

A dark, opposing magic happens to our view of those who are on the ‘out’. But as damaging as it can be, we need prejudice. It is the shape of our models, the starting point for our guesses about the world. When our brains are told things that contradict their models, we often enter a state known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this as ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are inconsistent, such as “smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”.

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For their own candidate, however, ratings averaged closer to two, indicating minimal contradiction.’ But that was just the beginning. Westen also had his scans to consult. He wanted to know exactly what happened on the neurological level when new data arrived that conflicted with internal models; when their minds were blasted into a state of cognitive dissonance. As he expected, the unpleasant emotion was soothed away quickly. ‘But the political brain also did something we didn’t predict,’ he writes. ‘Once participants had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on.

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Psychics, homeopathy, chiropractors, ghosts, God – they don’t believe a word of it and that is one of their favourite things to do. The fallibility of human belief is the base upon which the Skeptics build their activism. As bracingly incredible as it was to me, it is highly likely that the ordinary Skeptic would have discovered nothing new in the chapter that precedes this one. Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, unconscious ego-bolstering and the many illusions of vision are their foundational texts, their Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Skeptics rely on the findings of science, rather than the dubious anecdotes of individuals, to inform them about the world. They are knights of hard intellect whose ultimate goal is a world free of superstitious thinking.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis there’s much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm. On May 1, 2008, the New York Times ran a cover story in its Styles section headlined “Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress?: How Steve & Barry’s Became a $1 Billion Company Selling Celebrity Style for $8.98.”

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Since these mall fees were essential to its survival, the company was required to expand continuously. In a sense, the company relied for its existence on a fully legal variation of a Ponzi scheme. Business plans like this are not built on a foundation of frugality. They are built on a platform of cognitive dissonance. Three months after boasting of their great success to the New York Times, Steve and Barry filed for bankruptcy. THRIFT MAY BE a bedrock American virtue, but it is no more branded into our DNA than it is branded into the DNA of any other culture. Benjamin Franklin, whose most famous homily translates roughly into “A penny saved is a penny earned,” confessed that thrift would elude even him were it not for Deborah, his frugal and hardworking wife.

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The chronic disregard for workers’ rights in China’s foreign-invested private sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, including the hard-won gains of American workers. Labor scholar Robert Bruno, a political economist at the University of Illinois, has observed that most Americans tend not to think of themselves as “workers.” This demands some level of cognitive dissonance because most of us do work for a living. But in a society where salesclerks in discount stores are called “associates” and garbage collectors “sanitary engineers,” the term “worker” has lost meaning. Bruno is certain that this is no accident, and explained why in one of several conversations we had over many months.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Darwin’s anti-Darwinism: Fridlund, 1992. 415 Voluntary and involuntary facial expressions, method acting, and the brain: Damasio, 1994. 415 Honest signaling in animals: Dawkins, 1976/1989; Trivers, 1981; Cronin, 1992; Hauser, 1996; Hamilton, 1996. 416 Emotions and the body: Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Lazarus, 1991; Etcoff, 1986. 417 Theory of mad love: Frank, 1988. 417 Marriage market: Buss, 1994; Fisher, 1992; Hatfield & Rapson, 1993. 419 Tactics for controlling self and others: Schelling, 1984. 420 Grief as a deterrent: Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a. 421 Self-deception: Trivers, 1985; Alexander, 1987a; Wright, 1994a; Lockard & Paulhaus, 1988. Self-deception and Freudian defense mechanisms: Nesse & Lloyd, 1992. 422 Split brains: Gazzaniga, 1992. 422 Lake Wobegon effect: Gilovich, 1991. 422 Beneffectance: Greenwald, 1988; Brown, 1985. Cognitive dissonance: Festinger, 1957. Cognitive dissonance as self-presentation: Aronson, 1980; Baumeister & Tice, 1984. Beneffectance and cognitive dissonance as self-deception: Wright, 1994a. 424 Argument between husband and wife: Trivers, 1985, p. 420. 424 Explaining Hitler: Rosenbaum, 1995. 7. Family Values 426 Greening of America controversy: Nobile, 1971. 426 Nineteenth-century Utopias: Klaw, 1993. 427 Human universals: Brown, 1991. 427 The thirty-six dramatic situations: Polti, 1921/1977. 427 Darwinian competitors: Williams, 1966; Dawkins, 1976/1989, 1995. 428 Homicide rates: Daly & Wilson, 1988.

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When they are fooled in a fake experiment into thinking they have delivered shocks to another subject, they derogate the victim, implying that he deserved the punishment. Everyone has heard of “reducing cognitive dissonance,” in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay. (If the person had been enticed to recommend the task for generous pay, he accurately recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistency in one’s beliefs. But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.”

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But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.” Another social psychologist, Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition “I am nice and in control.” Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that you are not as beneficent and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight. Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, hit a nerve?

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

AOL-Time Warner, business process, cognitive dissonance, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, knowledge worker, loss aversion, shareholder value, zero-sum game

No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace. Yet cognitive dissonance actually works in favor of successful people when they apply it to themselves. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of evidence that shows we may have chosen the wrong path.

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It means turning that muscular commitment on its head. Easy to say, hard to do. The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behavior. There’s a reason for this, and it’s one of the best-researched principles in psychology. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underlying theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.

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In other words, now that you’ve said you’re sorry, what are you going to do about it? I tell my clients, “It’s a lot harder to change people’s perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers.” The logic behind this is, as I’ve explained in Chapter 3, cognitive dissonance: To recap, we view people in a manner that is consistent with our previous existing stereotypes, whether it is positive or negative. If I think you’re an arrogant jerk, everything you do will be filtered through that perception. If you do something wonderful and saintly, I will regard it as the exception to the rule; you’re still an arrogant jerk.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

True, certainty cannot protect us from error, any more than shouting a belief can make it true. But it can and does shield us, at least temporarily, from facing our fallibility. The psychologist Leon Festinger documented this protective effect of certainty in the 1950s, in the study that gave us the now-famous term “cognitive dissonance.” Along with several colleagues and hired observers, Festinger infiltrated a group of people who believed in the doomsday prophecies of a suburban housewife named (actually, pseudonymed) Marian Keech. Keech claimed that she was in touch with a Jesuslike figure from outer space who sent her messages about alien visits, spaceship landings, and the impending destruction of the world by flood.

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However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone. Why can we do this sometimes but not others? For one thing, as we saw earlier, it’s a lot harder to let go of a belief if we don’t have a new one to replace it. For another, as Leon Festinger observed in his study of cognitive dissonance, it’s a lot harder if we are heavily invested in that belief—if, to borrow a term from economics, we have accrued significant sunk costs. Traditionally, sunk costs refer to money that is already spent and can’t be recovered. Let’s say you shelled out five grand for a used car, and three weeks later it got a flat tire.

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“The flight attendant comes down the aisle.” David Sedaris, “Undecided,” the New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2008. “we must be fully committed.” Rollo May, The Courage To Create (W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 20. The second quotation in this paragraph is from p. 21. In both cases, the italics are his. cognitive dissonance (FN). Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails (Torchbooks, 1994). CHAPTER 9 BEING WRONG The quotations from Anita Wilson and from the psychoanalyst Irna Gadd are from my interviews with each of them. Greg Markus. Marcus, G. B, “Stability and Change in Political Attitudes: Observe, Recall, and ‘Explain.’”

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

Many who hold such views will always try to interpret and favour evidence in a way that confirms their pre-existing hypotheses. This is known as confirmation bias. Often, in the case of ideological beliefs, we also hear the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, whereby someone will feel genuine mental discomfort when confronted with evidence supporting a view contrary to their own. This potent combination of confirmation bias and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance works to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. So, trying to persuade someone in this frame of mind with scientific evidence can often prove to be a waste of time. Many people, facing an avalanche of widely different views through both the mainstream and social media, understandably find it difficult to know what to believe.

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INDEX absolute zero, 102 Adams, Douglas, 5 AdS/CFT (anti–de Sitter/conformal theory correspondence; gauge/ gravity duality), 232–33 alpha particles, 101–2 Anderson, Carl, 103–4 Anderson, Philip, 47 Andromeda galaxy, 98 antigravity, 212–13 antimatter, 7, 13, 103–5 antiquarks, 96n1, 176n2 Anu (Sumerian god), 1 Archimedes, 16, 25 Aristotle, 16, 45, 57–58, 74, 77 artificial intelligence (AI), 161, 235, 240, 250, 255, 256–57 atomic clocks, 39 atomism, 16–17, 45 atoms, 15; composition of, 224; types of, 16–17 axions, 200 Banks, Joseph, 108 Bell, John, 126–27 beta radioactivity, 94, 96 Big Bang, 7, 32, 34, 98–101, 103, 150; cosmology model of, 179; in eternal inflation theory, 216; verification of, 269–70 binary data, 251 binary pulsars, 226 biology, 21, 111, 161, 236, 242–44 biomass, 151 biophysics, 242 bits, 251 black holes, 195, 221, 223, 233; entropy of, 279; evaporation of, 215, 220; formation of, 106; gravitational pull from, 72; Hawking radiation emitted from, 24, 220 block universe model, 68–69, 70–71, 79–81 Bohm, David, 136 Bohr, Niels, 122–23, 124, 125, 132 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 46 Born’s rule, 124 Bose-Einstein condensates, 226 bosons, 6–7, 13, 25, 93, 96–97, 181 Broglie, Louis de, 136 bubble universes, 217–18 Bullet Cluster, 197 butterfly effect, 157–58, 160 carbon, 106 celestial mechanics, 55 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 174, 228 chaos, 21, 160–61 chemistry, 21, 91, 236, 241–42, 256; quantum theory and, 9, 117, 173, 246 Classical Physics, 111–12 climate, 151, 240, 271, 272–73 cloud technology, 255 COBE satellite, 199 cognitive dissonance, 272 cold dark matter, 179, 200 colour charge, 95–96, 175–76 comets, 18 complexity, 21 complex systems, 161 computer science, 241, 246, 250–58 concordance model, 179 condensed matter, 232, 233, 236 confirmation bias, 272, 277 conformal cyclic cosmology, 215–16 conservation, laws of, 41 consistent histories interpretation, 127 conspiracy theories, 271–72 constrained minimal supersymmetry, 231 Copenhagen interpretation, xiii, 123, 125, 127, 128 Copernican (heliocentric) model, 4, 26–27, 126 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 27 Cosmic Background Explorer (Explorer 66), 199n2 cosmic inflation, 208–19, 276 cosmic microwave background (CMB), 34, 101, 197, 198–99 cosmological constant, 203 cosmology, 12 creation myths, 1 Crick, Francis, 243 CT (computed tomography), 246 curved spacetime, 64n2, 78, 82, 187, 234; dark matter and, 196; gravitational field linked to 72–73, 163, 170; inflation and, 209 dark energy, 7, 9, 193, 202–5, 210, 226, 276 dark matter, 7, 9, 42, 105–6, 179, 193–201, 231, 276 de Broglie–Bohm theory, 137 decoherence, 133, 135 Delbrück, Max, 243 Democritus, 16, 44–45 Descartes, René, 55, 57–58, 59–60, 74, 77 determinism, 155–58 diffraction, 114 Dirac, Paul, 13, 14, 103, 171–72 Dirac notation, 124 disorder, 21 DNA, 243, 249 Doppler effect, 63 double helix, 243 doubt, in scientific inquiry, 266–67, 274 dwarf galaxies, 197 dynamical collapse interpretation, 127 economics, 161 Einstein, Albert, xiv, 124, 222–23, 280; field equations of, 82, 129; light quanta hypothesized by, 112–13; Newtonian theory replaced by, 8, 36, 61; nonlocality and entanglement mistrusted by, 131–32; as philosophical realist, 130; photoelectric effect explained by, 29–30; thought experiments by, 56.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Crashes occur (the accident rate on French roads is so high that a French transport minister notoriously appealed to his compatriots to drive ‘comme les anglais’). But an element of cognitive dissonance creeps into accounts of the crash. The accident victim blames someone else for his misfortune: usually with some justification. The accidents that result from tailgating are triggered by some other immediate cause – an obstruction on the road, a mistake by another driver. The same cognitive dissonance enabled many bankers to persuade themselves – and some others – that the global financial crisis was not caused by their imprudent behaviour.

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By 2007–8 it became apparent that even the most senior tranche of a package of mortgages sold to people who were in default and whose houses were difficult to sell was likely to be worth very little. The story of that collapse has been told in detail in many places.6 Mozilo would settle charges levelled against him by the SEC with a payment of $67.5 million. With the cognitive dissonance of the tailgater, he would explain that the considerably larger amount he had received for his services as chief executive of Countrywide was justified by the profits that his company had reported from the sale of mortgages before the borrowers failed to pay them back. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.

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Carbolic Smoke Ball Company 61, 316n13 Carnegie, Andrew 52 Carney, Mark 288 Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass 111 ‘carry trades’ 129 Carville, James 248, 249, 252 Casablanca (film) 292 Cassano, Joe 120, 293 Cayman Islands 122 Cayne, Jimmy 90 Central Banks 43, 75, 98, 183, 184, 242–6 Chacoan civilisation 277 Challenger space shuttle 276, 327n3 Channel Tunnel 158 chartism 110 Chelsfield 158 Chequers country residence, Buckinghamshire 231 Chesterton 158 Chicago Board of Trade 17 Chicago Butter and Egg Board 17, 19 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) 19–20, 23, 31 China, economic growth in 53, 69 Chinese Revolution (1949) 3 Citibank 51, 166, 186 Citicorp 33–4, 37, 38, 48 Citigroup 1, 34, 35, 48, 49, 51, 57, 59, 91, 124, 134–5, 138, 191, 242, 293, 300 Citizens United case (2010) 304 City of Glasgow Bank 292 City of London 1, 20, 262, 263, 266, 268, 303, 305 careers in 12, 15 a pre-eminent financial centre 13 staffing of 217 Civil Aeronautics Board 238 civilisations, collapse of 277 Cleveland, Grover 233, 237 Clinton, Bill 5, 57, 205 closet indexation 206 Coca-Cola 108 ‘code staff’ 266 cognitive dissonance 102, 152 coin-tossing game 96, 105 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 59–60, 63 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 40, 63–4, 73, 101, 131, 244, 303 Collins, Senator S.M. 114, 117 commercial banks acquisitions 24 capital strength 28 investment banks within 22 payments system 25 public companies 30 short-term lending 25 structure of 30 commercial paper 163 Commerzbank 169 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) 119 Commodity Futures Trading Commission 57, 288 Communist states 3, 39 company directors 84 competition 111–14 Confucius 270 Conrad, Joseph: Typhoon 233, 235 consumer debt 175 consumer protection 259–62 contactless payment cards 181, 186 corporate treasurer 164 corporation tax 266 correlation 96, 97–8 Corrigan, E.

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

After all, absorbing, processing, and retaining abstract information is vitally important, but often hard work for our brains, so anything that challenges the information they’ve laboriously accumulated is technically a threat, as it could potentially undo all that hard work and throw our understanding of the world into disarray. That’s why being presented with information that contradicts what we already think and believe often leads to a rapid negative emotional reaction, involving the experience of stress and psychological discomfort, known as cognitive dissonance.122 To stop this dissonance, we can either alter our emotional response to it and accept we’re wrong, or think about it more critically or cynically than we would more neutral things, allowing us to figure out reasons to reject it, and preserve our existing views and beliefs. It speaks to the powerfully fundamental nature of emotions that it’s often a lot easier to change what you think than it is to change what you feel.

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., ‘Picture perfect: the direct effect of manipulated Instagram photos on body image in adolescent girls’, Media Psychology, 2018, 21(1): pp. 93–110. 44 O’Reilly, et al., ‘Is social media bad?’. 45 Quinn, K., ‘Social media and social wellbeing in later life’, Ageing & Society, 2021, 41(6): pp. 1349–1370. 46 Gentner, D. and A.L. Stevens, Mental Models (Psychology Press, 2014). 47 Brehm, J.W. and A.R. Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance (John Wiley & Sons, 1962). 48 Marris, P., Loss and Change (Psychology Revivals): Revised Edition (Routledge, 2014). 49 Hertenstein, M.J., et al., ‘The communication of emotion via touch’, Emotion, 2009, 9(4): p. 566. 50 Radulescu, A., ‘Why do we walk around when talking on the phone?’, Medium, 13 October 2020. 51 Oppezzo, M. and D.L.

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., ‘Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises’, Review of General Psychology, 1998, 2(2): pp. 175–220. 120 Bolsen, T., J.N. Druckman, and F.L. Cook, ‘The influence of partisan motivated reasoning on public opinion’, Political Behavior, 2014, 36(2): pp. 235–262. 121 Nestler, S., ‘Belief perseverance’, Social Psychology, 2010, 41(1): pp. 35–41. 122 Brehm and Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance. 123 Martel, C., G. Pennycook, and D.G. Rand, ‘Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2020, 5(1): pp. 1–20. 124 Brady, W.J., et al., ‘How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks’, Science Advances, 2021, 7(33). 125 Holman, E.A., D.R.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Models based on past results forecast in the belief that the future will be characteristically similar to history. In each case, our minds—or the models our minds construct—anticipate without giving suitable consideration to other possibilities. When in Doubt, Rationalize Your Decision Cognitive dissonance is one facet of our next mistake, the rigidity that comes with the innate human desire to be internally and externally consistent.14 Cognitive dissonance, a theory developed in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, arises when “a person holds two cognitions—ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions—that are psychologically inconsistent.”15 The dissonance causes mental discomfort that our minds seek to reduce.

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So the exhausted members, led by Mrs. Keech, started calling newspapers, radio stations, and wire services. From then on, the cult opened up. “The house was crowded with the nowwelcome horde of newspaper, radio, and television representatives,” the scientists wrote, “and visitors streamed in and out the door.”18 While cognitive dissonance is about internal consistency, the confirmation bias is about external consistency. The confirmation bias occurs when an individual seeks information that confirms a prior belief or view and disregards, or disconfirms, evidence that counters it.19 Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, notes that consistency offers two benefits.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

In general, according to Smith, the desired identity is of someone who is ‘lovely… or the natural and proper object of love’, and the judgement by the impartial spectator of what is lovely will always be as in the eyes of others. But what happens when such a person does something at odds with their identity—something that they know is not lovely in the eyes of others? The result, according to the great American social psychologist Leon Festinger, is cognitive dissonance: that is, a feeling of discomfort which encourages the individual to rationalize their action as having somehow been right all along. For Smith, this is seen in the excuses offered for infanticide in ancient Greece, that it ‘is commonly done, and they seem to think this a sufficient apology for what, in itself, is the most unjust and unreasonable conduct’.

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To take a recent example, when it was shown that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq in 2003, and therefore that the stated rationale for the US-led invasion of Iraq had been groundless, supporters of the invasion generally did not accept this; instead they insisted that the war had been a success anyway, was justified for other reasons, had brought peace, had increased international security and the like. Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance, and his earlier work on social comparison, sit at the heart of much modern social psychology; and they revisit ideas to be found in Adam Smith. But Smith’s work also hints at a deeper explanation for these phenomena. Recall that for Smith someone’s reputation or public character is part of their personal property, under what he calls the jus sincerae aestimationis, or right to an unspoiled reputation.

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This private internal reputation can be a hugely useful asset in supporting someone’s belief in their value in the world, their will to make things happen and their resilience in the face of adversity. But it also leads directly to the patterns of defensive self-justification described by Festinger. Treating people’s core beliefs and moral identity as property assets, perhaps hard-won, in Smithian fashion makes it easier to understand their reluctance to give them up in the face of cognitively dissonant behaviour. But this approach can also help to explain many other kinds of behaviour as well. People who see themselves as rich in the assets of moral identity tend to behave in a more entitled way. They are more likely to ‘coast’, that is, to give themselves licence to misbehave in later situations, while those who see themselves as depleted may take up worthy causes: privately in an effort to renew their identity capital, or publicly to renew their reputation with others.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

The number 3.08 in my example was a deliberate choice, because it’s a notable one from the history of the GRIM test – and psychology research in general. In 2016, the psychologist Matti Heino applied the GRIM test to one of the most famous psychology papers of all time: Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith’s 1959 paper on ‘cognitive dissonance’13. This is the now widely known idea that forcing someone to say or do something inconsistent with their true beliefs will make them psychologically uncomfortable and they’ll do their best to alter those beliefs to make them fit with what they’ve been made to say or do. In the 1959 study, participants were made to complete some tedious, pointless tasks, such as endlessly twisting pegs around on a pegboard.

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They’d reduced their dissonance, in other words, by making themselves believe they’d had fun.14 Alas, Heino’s use of the GRIM test showed that it wasn’t just the participants’ beliefs that were inconsistent – it was Festinger and Carlsmith’s numbers.15 They reported an average score of 3.08 for a sample of twenty people filling in a scale of 0-to-10, which as we just saw isn’t possible, alongside several other averages that failed the GRIM test. Cognitive dissonance is a remarkably useful concept that makes intuitive sense, and the experiment was clever and memorable. But would the thousands of researchers who’ve cited Festinger and Carlsmith’s study over the years have done so if they’d known it was riddled with impossible numbers?16 The story reminds us once more that even ‘classic’ findings from the scientific literature – the ones that you would hope had been examined most rigorously – can be wholly unreliable, with what should be the most important part, the numbers and the data, acting as mere window-dressing in service of an attention-grabbing story.

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Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58, no. 2 (1959): pp. 203–10; https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593 14.  There was actually a third group, who were paid $20. They reported finding the task as tedious as did those who weren’t paid anything – supposedly because they had reduced their cognitive dissonance by thinking of all that nice money, rather than by altering their beliefs. 15.  Matti Heino, ‘The Legacy of Social Psychology’, Data Punk, 13 Nov. 2016; https://mattiheino.com/2016/11/13/legacy-of-psychology/ 16.  As of January 2020, the paper has over 4,200 citations, according to Google Scholar. 17.  

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Over time, this shared experience led essential workers to see themselves as a group, and they developed what social scientists often call “class consciousness”: an awareness of one’s class position relative to others in the social hierarchy, and a set of beliefs that help shape class-based organization. Class consciousness is not a simple recognition of fact but the outcome of a process, usually set in motion by a political struggle. During the pandemic, the cognitive dissonance between essential workers’ popular designation as heroes and their actual treatment as sacrificial servants inspired collective action and a distinct awareness of their class interests. At the same time, differences among essential workers strained unity on the front lines. The classic sociological dividing lines of race, gender, and immigration status were in some sense less significant barriers than were other pandemic-specific obstacles: mass unemployment, the ability to telecommute, occupation, political differences and voting behavior, and popular recognition of one’s essential status.

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Why is it essential that someone says “Welcome to Walmart” every time a patron enters the store during a global health crisis? The answer is because Walmart, and in this case the government of Massachusetts, prioritized the business culture of the world’s largest boss over the health of workers and citizens. It was exactly this cognitive dissonance—of being both essential and sacrificial, simultaneously heroic and disposable—that was at the heart of the problem of defining what an essential worker really is. Scholar Benedict Anderson argued that nations form as “imagined communities.” The members of a particular region might not know each other or ever meet, yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”24 Imagined communities don’t simply form automatically but emerge through shared norms, language, values, cultural codes, and common enemies.

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Rather than resenting a system that denied paid leave to workers, her coworkers directed their frustration toward her. “In a way, I get it—I was avoiding some risks during my time off,” she said. “That’s what mattered most to all of us.” The pandemic ignited a frontline class consciousness, motivated in large part by the cognitive dissonance of being simultaneously celebrated as heroes and exposed to so much workplace risk. The language of being “essential” was almost always part of the rhetoric of protest. As I’ll explore in later chapters, these newly class-conscious workers mobilized and launched organized movements in diverse ways, profoundly reshaping labor politics and the fight for worker justice in America.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

“Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us are immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he coined it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1 Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber.

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When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come. Long Was the Night In 2008, it seemed as if that time had finally come when we were confronted with the biggest case of cognitive dissonance since the 1930s. On September 15, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly, the whole global banking sector seemed poised to tumble like a row of dominoes. In the months that followed, one free market dogma after another crashed and burned. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, once dubbed the “Oracle” and the “Maestro,” was gobsmacked.

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Joris Luyendijk, a journalist at The Guardian who spent two years looking under the hood of London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”13 You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives? This last possibility is the most worrying of all. The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

I am not a contrarian; instead I greatly respect the climate scientists of the IPCC and would prefer to accept as true their conclusions about future climates. I do not enjoy argument for its own sake but I cannot ignore the large differences that exist between their predictions and what is observed. In human affairs we know that ‘he who hesitates is lost’; social scientists talk of ‘cognitive dissonance’, which the composer of the phrase, Leon Festinger, defined as the feeling of discomfort we feel when trying to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and the urge to reduce the dissonance by modifying or rejecting one of the ideas. It operates when we choose between two almost equal objects and, having chosen, invest our choice with superlative advantage over the alternative so that we can happily reject it.

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We have to choose and then have faith in our choice; this applies to the jobs we take, how we vote, the purchases we make, and the marriages to which we commit ourselves. It applies also to a judge or jury, but it is worse than useless in science. However, scientists are human and we never entirely escape the pull of cognitive dissonance. The range of forecasts by the different models of the IPCC is so large that it is difficult to believe that they are reliable enough to be used by governments to plan policy for ameliorating climate change. It is a brave try at an exceedingly difficult scientific task and probably we are expecting too much from them: it would be wrong to expect the view of the panel to be truly authoritative.

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This third component of my knowledge base has taught me that above all humans hate any conspicuous change in their daily way of life and view of the future. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘The average man would rather face death or torture than think.’ The overwhelming wish to continue with business as usual applies far beyond the marketplace and may be a consequence of the cognitive dissonance I wrote about earlier. Business as usual is unfortunately how most of science is done even though we know that it has no place in science’s probabilistic world. For practical and administrative reasons we cannot suddenly change the direction of research of a large and expensive laboratory built around a costly assembly of instruments, computers and specialized staff; this may be part of the reason why our forecasts do not agree well with expectations drawn from the history of the Earth.

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

And then they would think, ‘Oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh, right! And they think this is somehow illicit.’ Just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they’re doing. HITCHENS: I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit. DENNETT: You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance? HITCHENS: No, practising it. Take the case of someone who’s a member of MoveOn.org.*4 They think the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime. It crushes the poor and invades other people’s countries.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

The larger number of choices were good for getting people’s attention, but were ultimately far worse for sales.2 In a study on how people select pension funds, when 95 funds were offered, about 60 percent of people participated, but when only 2 funds were offered, the rate of participation jumped to 75 percent.3 When Procter & Gamble reduced the number of Head & Shoulders products from 26 to 15, they saw a 10 percent increase in sales.4 Often it is better to offer fewer choices. Although we want more information, when we have two or more conflicting ideas in our head, we become overwhelmed. This is known as cognitive dissonance and we often experience it when shopping. When this happens, we often pick the option that matches our current beliefs, and disregard all other options without evaluating them properly. When we buy things, in particular expensive things, we often feel discomfort after the purchase because we’re not sure if the purchase was a good decision.

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Yet, presenting them with evidence that what they currently do is a bad choice is one of the worst ways to change people’s behavior or attitude. At best, this has little influence, as we automatically ignore information counter to our beliefs. At worst, the conflicting evidence brings about cognitive dissonance, and because we don’t like to hold opposing views in our head, we become more ingrained in what we believed before. It’s incredibly hard to change people’s attitudes. It’s much easier to invoke behavioral change first, and then attitudinal change later. Changes in behavior almost always lead to changes in attitude.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Pity the poor atheist if Pascal got the payoffs right in the event that God exists. Only a fool would fail to believe. But unfortunately you can’t just grunt and produce belief. Pascal had a solution to this problem, though. And in solving the problem he invented a new psychological theory—what we would now call cognitive dissonance theory. If our beliefs are incongruent with our behavior, something has to change: either our beliefs or our behavior. We don’t have direct control over our beliefs but we do have control over our behavior. And because dissonance is a noxious state, our beliefs move into line with our behavior.

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Sanchez-Burks, “Performance in Intercultural Interactions at Work: Cross-Cultural Differences in Responses to Behavioral Mirroring.” 12. Goethals and Reckman, “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” 13. Goethals, Cooper, and Naficy, “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” 14. Nisbett et al., “Behavior as Seen by the Actor and as Seen by the Observer.” 15. Ibid. 16. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought; Nisbett et al., “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Vs. Analytic Cognition.” 17. Masuda et al., “Placing the Face in Context: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion.” 18.

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Gilovich, Thomas, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive Personality 17 (1985): 295–314. Goethals, George R., Joel Cooper, and Anahita Naficy. “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1179–85. Goethals, George R., and Richard F. Reckman. “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9 (1973): 491–501. Goldstein, Noah J., Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius. “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.”

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

It would have been easy for someone of her stature to reject outright the critics’ views, refuse to change the show, lose her investors’ money, set back the careers of her young dancers, and go to the grave convinced that the world had misunderstood her masterpiece. Why is denial such a natural tendency? Psychologists have a name for the root cause which has become famous enough that many non-psychologists will recognise the term: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the mind’s difficulty in holding two apparently contradictory thoughts simultaneously: in Tharp’s case, ‘I am a capable, experienced and respected choreographer’ and ‘My latest creation is stupefyingly clichéd.’ This odd phenomenon was first pinned down in an ingenious laboratory experiment half a century ago.

…

Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive consequences of forced compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), 203–10. 252 ‘It means that the sperm found’: Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (London: Pinter & Martin, 2008), p. 150. 252 Bromgard had spent fifteen years in prison: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010), pp.233–8. 253 ‘One of the worst professional errors’: Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, p.130. 253 ‘I didn’t promote myself as a star’: Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 82. 253 ‘That experience remains intensely painful’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 84. 253 ‘Bob and I had lost a baby’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 98. 255 Naturally the subject usually chose: M. D. Lieberman, K. N. Ochsner, D. T. Gilbert, & D. L. Schacter, ‘Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change’, Psychological Science, 12 (2001), 135–40. 255 ‘Happiness being synthesised’: Dan Gilbert at TED, February 2004, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html 256 Taught Petraeus that everyone is fallible: David Cloud & Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 43. 257 ‘She didn’t try to console me’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 221. 257 The reviews are harsh but fair: Reviews by Hedy Weiss, Michael Phillips & Sid Smith, references above. 257 ‘All you need are people’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 229. 258 People with regular jobs tend to receive feedback: Andrew Oswald, ‘What is a happiness equation?’

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., 55, 59, 71 catastrophe experts, 184–6, 191, 194–5, 208 Cave-Brown-Cave, Air Commodore Henry, 81, 83, 85, 88, 114 centralised decision making, 70, 74–5, 226, 227, 228; warfare and, 46–7, 67–8, 69, 71, 76, 78–9 centrally planned economies, 11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70 Challenger shuttle disaster, 184 Charles, Prince, 154 Chernobyl disaster, 185 Chile, 3, 69–72, 76, 148 China, 11, 94, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152 Christensen, Clayton, 239–40, 242, 245 Chuquicamata mine (Chile), 3 Churchill, Winston, 41–2, 82, 85 Citigroup, 205131 Clay Mathematics Institute, 110 climate change, 4, 20; carbon dioxide emissions and, 132, 156, 159–65, 166–9, 173, 176, 178–80; ‘carbon footprinting’, 159–66; carbon tax/price idea, 167–9, 178–80, 222; environmental regulations and, 169–74, 176, 177; ‘food miles’ and, 159, 160–1, 168; governments/politics and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; greenhouse effect and, 154–6; individual behaviour and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; innovation prizes and, 109, 179; methane and, 155, 156, 157, 159–60, 173, 179, 180; new technologies and, 94–5; simplicity/complexity paradox, 156, 157–8; Thaler-Sunstein nudge, 177–8; uncertainty and, 156 Coca-Cola, 28, 243 Cochrane, Archie, 123–7, 129, 130, 140, 238, 256 cognitive dissonance, 251–2 Cold War, 6, 41, 62–3 Colombia, 117, 147 complexity theory, 3–4, 13, 16, 49, 72103, 237 computer games, 92–3 computer industry, 11–12, 69, 70–1, 239–42 corporations and companies: disruptive technologies and, 239–44, 245–6; environmental issues and, 157–8, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; flattening of hierarchies, 75, 224–5, 226–31; fraud and, 208, 210, 212–13, 214; innovation and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; limited liability, 244; patents and, 95–7, 110, 111, 114; randomised experiments and, 235–9; skunk works model and, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; strategy and, 16, 18, 27–8, 36, 223, 224–34; see also business world; economics and finance cot-death, 120–1 credit-rating agencies, 188, 189, 190 Criner, Roy, 252 Crosby, Sir James, 211, 214, 250, 256 Cuban Missile Crisis, 41, 63 Cudahy Packing, 9 dairy products, 158, 159–60, 164–5, 166 Darwin, Charles, 86 Dayton Hudson, 243 de Montyon, Baron, 107–8 Deal or No Deal (TV game show), 33–5, 253 decentralisation, 73, 74–8, 222, 224–5, 226–31; Iraq war and, 76–8, 79; trial and error and, 31, 174–5, 232, 234 decision making: big picture thinking, 41, 42, 46, 55; consistent standards and, 28–9; diversity of opinions, 31, 44–5, 46, 48–50, 59–63; doctrine of unanimous advice, 30–1, 47–50, 62–3, 64, 78; grandiosity and, 27–8; idealized hierarchy, 40–1, 42, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 78; learning from mistakes, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; local/on the ground, 73, 74, 75, 76–8, 79, 224–5, 226–31; reporting lines/chain of command, 41, 42, 46, 49–50, 55–6, 58, 59–60, 64, 77–8; supportive team with shared vision, 41, 42, 46, 56, 62–3; unsuccessful, 19, 32, 34–5, 41–2; see also centralised decision making Deepwater Horizon disaster (April 2010), 36, 216–19, 220 Democratic Republic of Congo, 139–40 Deng Xiaoping, 1 Denmark, 148 Department for International Development (DFID), 133, 137–8 development aid: charter cities movement, 150–3; community-driven reconstruction (CDR), 137–40; corruption and, 133–5, 142–3; economic ‘big push’ and, 143–5, 148–9; feedback loops, 141–3; fundamentally unidentified questions (FUQs), 132, 133; governments and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; identification strategies, 132–5; microfinance, 116, 117–18, 120; Millennium Development Villages, 129–30, 131; product space concept, 145–8; randomised trials and, 127–9, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 137–40, 141; randomistas, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; selection principle and, 117, 140–3, 149; SouthWest project in China, 131; success and failure, 116, 118–20, 130–1; Muhammad Yunus and, 116, 117–18 digital photography, 240–1, 242 Dirks, Ray, 211–12, 213 disk-drive industry, 239–40, 242 Djankov, Simeon, 135 domino-toppling displays, 185, 200–1 Don Basin (Russia), 21–2, 24, 27 dot-com bubble, 10, 92 Dubai, 147, 150 Duflo, Esther, 127, 131, 135, 136 Dyck, Alexander, 210, 213 eBay, 95, 230 econometrics, 132–5 economics and finance: banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bankruptcy contingency plans, 204; Basel III regulations, 195; bond insurance business, 189–90; bridge bank/rump bank approach, 205–6; capital requirements, 203, 204; centrally planned economiepos=0000032004 >11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70; CoCos (contingent convertible bonds), 203–4; complexity and, 3–4; decoupling of financial system, 202, 203–8, 215–16, 220; Dodd-Frank reform act (2010), 195; employees as error/fraud spotters, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215; energy crisis (1970s), 179; evolutionary theory and, 14–17, 18–19, 174–5; improvements since 1960s, 215; inter-bank payments systems, 207; latent errors and, 209–10, 215; ‘LMX spiral’, 183–4, 189; narrow banking approach, 206–7, 215; need for systemic heat maps, 195–6; reinsurance markets, 183; zombie banks, 201–2; see also business world; corporations and companies; financial crisis (from 2007) Edison, Thomas, 236, 238 Eliot, T.S., 260 Elizabeth House (Waterloo), 170–1, 172 Endler, John, 221–2, 223, 234, 239 Engineers Without Borders, 119 Enron, 197–8, 200, 208, 210 environmental issues: biofuels, 84, 173, 176; clean energy, 91, 94, 96, 245–6; corporations/companies and, 159, 161, 165, 170–1, 172–3; renewable energy technology, 84, 91, 96, 130, 168, 169–73, 179, 245; see also climate change Equity Funding Corporation, 212 Ernst and Young, 199 errors and mistakes, types of, 208–10; latent errors, 209–10, 215, 218, 220 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 188 European Union, 169, 173 Evans, Martin, 100 evolutionary theory, 6, 12–13, 15–17, 174, 258; business world and, 14–17, 174–5, 233–4; Darwin and, 86; digital world and, 13–14, 259–60; economics and, 14–17, 174–5; Endler’s guppy experiments, 221–2, 223, 239; fitness landscapes, 14–15, 259; Leslie Orgel’s law, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180; problem solving and, 14–15, 16; selective breeding and, 175–6 expertise, limits of, 6–8, 16, 17, 19, 66 extinction events, biological, 18–19 Exxon (formerly Jersey Standard), 9, 12, 188, 245 F-22 stealth fighter, 93 Facebook, 90, 91 failure: in business, 8–10, 11–12, 18–19, 36, 148–9, 224, 239–46; chasing of losses, 32–5, 253–4, 256; in complex and tightly coupled systems, 185–90, 191–2, 200, 201, 207–8, 219, 220; corporate extinctions, 18–19; denial and, 32, 34–5, 250–3, 255–6; disruptive technologies, 239–44, 245–6; of established industries, 8–10; government funding and, 148–9; hedonic editing and, 254; honest advice from others and, 256–7, 258, 259; learning from, 31–5, 78, 119, 250–1, 256–9, 261–2; modern computer industry and, 11–12, 239–42; as natural in market system, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; niche markets and, 240–2; normal accident theory, 219; recognition of, 36, 224; reinterpreted as success, 254–5, 256; shifts in competitive landscape, 239–46; ‘Swiss cheese model’ of safety systems, 186–7, 190, 209, 218; types of error and mistake, 208–10; willingness to fail, 249–50, 261–2; of young industries, 10 Fearon, James, 137, Federal Aviation Administration, 210 Federal Reserve Bank, 193–4 feedback, 25, 26, 42, 178, 240; in bureaucratic hierarchies, 30–1; development and, 141–3; dictatorships’ immunity to, 27; Iraq war and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; market system and, 141; praise sandwich, 254; public services and, 141; self-employment and, 258; yes-men and, 30 Feith, Douglas, 44, 45 Ferguson, Chris ‘Jesus’, 32 Fermi nuclear reactor (near Detroit), 187 Festinger, Leon, 251 financial crisis (from 2007), 5, 11, 25; AIG and, 189, 193–5, 215–16, 228; bankers’ bonuses, 198; banking system as complex and tightly coupled, 185, 186, 187–90, 200, 201, 207–8, 220; bond insurance business and, 189–90; collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 190, 209; credit default swaps (CDSs), 187–9, 190, 194; derivatives deals and, 198, 220; faulty information systems and, 193–5; fees paid to administrators, 197; government bail-outs/guarantees, 202, 214, 223; Lehman Brothers and, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16; ‘LMX spiral’ comparisons, 183–4, 189; Repo 105 accounting trick, 199 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 214 Firefox, 221, 230 Fleming, Alexander, 83 Food Preservation prize, 107, 108 Ford Motor Company, 46–7 fossil record, 18 Fourier, Joseph, 155 fraud, corporate, 208, 210, 212–13, 214 Friedel, Robert, 80 Frost, Robert, 260 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical), 248 Gage, Phineas, 21, 27 Galapagos Islands, 86, 87 Gale (US developer), 152 Galenson, David, 260 Galileo, 187 Galland, Adolf, 81 Gallipoli campaign (1915), 41–2 Galvin, Major General Jack, 62, 256 game theory, 138, 205 Gates, Bill, 110, 115 Gates, Robert, 59, 64, 78 Gates Foundation, 110 Geithner, Tim, 193–5, 196 GenArts, 13 General Electric, 9, 12, 95 Gilbert, Daniel, 255, 256 GlaxoSmithKline, 95 Glewwe, Paul, 127–8 Global Positioning System (GPS), 113 globalisation, 75 Google, 12, 15, 90, 91, 239, 245, 261; corporate strategy, 36, 231–4; Gmail, 233, 234, 241, 242; peer monitoring at, 229–30 Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 158 Göring, Hermann, 81 government and politics: climate change and, 157–8, 163, 169–74, 176, 180; development aid and, 118, 120, 143, 144, 148–9; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 193–5, 198–9, 202, 214, 215–16, 223; grandiosity and, 27–8; ideal hierarchies and, 46pos=00002pos=0000022558 >7, 49–50, 62–3, 78; innovation funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; lack of adaptability rewarded, 20; pilot schemes and, 29, 30; rigorous evaluation methods and, 29* Graham, Loren, 26 Grameen Bank, 116, 117 Greece, 147 Green, Donald, 29* greenhouse effect, 154–6 Gulf War, first, 44, 53, 65, 66, 67, 71; Battle of 73 Easting, 72–3, 74, 79 Gutenberg, Johannes, 10 Haldane, Andrew, 195, 258 Halifax (HBOS subsidiary), 211 Halley, Edmund, 105 Halliburton, 217 Hamel, Gary, 221, 226, 233, 234 Hanna, Rema, 135 Hannah, Leslie, 8–10, 18 Hanseatic League, 150 Harrison, John, 106–7, 108, 110, 111 Harvard University, 98–9, 185 Hastings, Reed, 108 Hausmann, Ricardo, 145 Hayek, Friedrich von, 1, 72, 74–5, 227 HBOS, 211, 213, 214 healthcare sector, US, 213–14 Heckler, Margaret, 90–1 Henry the Lion, 149, 150, 151–2, 153 Hewitt, Adrian, 169 Hidalgo, César, 144–7, 148 Higginson, Peter, 230 Hinkley Point B power station, 192–3, 230–1 Hitachi, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 82, 83, 150 HIV-AIDS, 90–1, 96, 111, 113 Holland, John, 16, 103 Hong Kong, 150 Houston, Dame Fanny, 88–9, 114 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), 101–3, 112 Hughes (computer company), 11 Humphreys, Macartan, 136, 137, 138–40 Hurricane aircraft, 82* IBM, 11, 90, 95–6 In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), 8, 10 India, 135, 136, 143, 147, 169 individuals: adaptation and, 223–4, 248–62; climate change and, 158–63, 164, 165–6; experimentation and, 260–2; trial and error and, 31–5 Indonesia, 133–4, 142, 143 Innocentive, 109 innovation: corporations and, 17, 81–2, 87–9, 90, 93–4, 95–7, 108–11, 112, 114, 224–30, 232–4; costs/funding of, 90–4, 99–105; failure as price worth paying, 101–3, 104, 184, 215, 236; government funding, 82, 88, 93, 97, 99–101, 102–3, 104, 113; grants and, 108; in health field, 90–1, 96; large teams and specialisation, 91–4; market system and, 17, 95–7, 104; new technologies and, 89–90, 91, 94–5; parallel possibilities and, 86–9, 104; prize methodology, 106–11, 112, 113–14, 179, 222–3; randomistas and, 127–9, 132, 133, 135–40, 258; return on investment and, 83–4; skunk works model, 89, 91, 93, 152, 224, 242–3, 245; slowing down of, 90–5, 97; small steps and, 16, 24, 29, 36, 99, 103, 143, 149, 153, 224, 259–60; space tourism, 112–13, 114; specialisation and, 91–2; speculative leaps and, 16, 36, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 259–60; unpredictability and, 84–5 Intel, 11, 90, 95 International Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), 127–9, 131 International Harvester, 9 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 137–8, 139 internet, 12, 15, 63, 90, 113, 144, 223, 233, 238, 241; randomised experiments and, 235–6, 237; see also Google Iraq war: al Anbar province, 56–7, 58, 64, 76–7; civil war (2006), 39–40; Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), 77; counterinsurgency strategy, 43, 45, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 65; decentralisation and, 76–8, 79; feedback and, 43–5, 46, 57–8, 59–62; FM 3–24 (counter-insurgency manual), 63; Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), 51–3, 57, 65; Haditha killings (19 November 2005), 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 52; new technologies and, 71, 72, 74, 78–9, 196; Samarra bombing (22 February 2006), 39; Tal Afar, 51, 52, 53–5, 61, 64, 74, 77, 79; trial and error and, 64–5, 66–7; US turnaround in, 35, 40, 46, 50–1, 53–6, 57–8, 59–61, 63–5, 78; US/allied incompetence and, 38, 39–40, 42–5, 46, 50, 64, 67, 79, 223; Vietnam parallels, 46 J&P Coats, 9 Jacobs, Jane, 87 James, Jonathan, 30 Jamet, Philippe, 192 Janis, Irving, 62 Japan, 11, 143, 176, 204, 208 Jay-Z, 119 Jo-Ann Fabrics, 235 Jobs, Steve, 19 Joel, Billy, 247–8, 249 Johnson, President Lyndon, 46, 47, 49–50, 60, 62, 64, 78 Jones, Benjamin F., 91–2 Joyce, James, 260 JP Morgan, 188 Kahn, Herman, 93 Kahneman, Daniel, 32, 253 Kantorovich, Leonid, 68–9, 76 Kaplan, Fred, 77 Karlan, Dean, 135 Kauffmann, Stuart, 16, 103 Kay, John, 206–7, 208, 215, 259 Keller, Sharon, 252 Kelly, Terri, 230 Kennedy, President John F., 41, 47, 62–3, 84, 113 Kenya, 127–9, 131 Kerry, John, 20 Keynes, John Maynard, 181 Kilcullen, David, 57, 60–1 Klemperer, Paul, 96, 205 Klinger, Bailey, 145 Kotkin, Stephen, 25 Kremer, Michael, 127–8, 129 Krepinevich, Andy, 45 Lanchester, John, 188 leaders: decision making and, 40–2; failure of feedback and, 30–1, 62; grandiosity and, 27–8; ignoring of failure, 36; mistakes by, 41–2, 56, 67; need to believe in, 5–6; new leader as solution, 59 Leamer, Ed, 132* Leeson, Nick, 184–5, 208 Lehman Brothers, 193, 194, 196–200, 204–5, 208, 215–16 Lenin Dam (Dnieper River), 24 Levine, John, 48–9 Levitt, Steven, 132–3 Liberia, 136–9 light bulbs, 162, 177 Lind, James, 122–3 Lindzen, Richard, 156 Livingstone, Ken, 169 Lloyd’s insurance, 183 Lloyds TSB, 214 Local Motors, 90 Lockheed, Skunk Works division, 89, 93, 224, 242 Lomas, Tony, 196, 197–200, 204, 205, 208, 219 Lomborg, Bjorn, 94 longitude problem, 105–7, 108 Lu Hong, 49 Lübeck, 149–50, 151–2, 153 Luftwaffe, 81–2 MacFarland, Colonel Sean, 56–7, 64, 74, 76–7, 78 Mackay, General Andrew, 67–8, 74 Mackey, John, 227, 234 Madoff, Bernard, 208212–13 Magnitogorsk steel mills, 24–5, 26, 153 Malawi, 119 Mallaby, Sebastian, 150, 151 management gurus, 8, 233 Manhattan Project, 82, 84 Manso, Gustavo, 102 Mao Zedong, 11, 41 market system: competition, 10–11, 17, 19, 75, 95, 170, 239–46; ‘disciplined pluralism’, 259; evolutionary theory and, 17; failure in as natural, 10, 11, 12, 244, 245–6; feedback loops, 141; innovation and, 17, 95–7, 104; patents and, 95–7; trial and error, 20; validation and, 257–8 Markopolos, Harry, 212–13 Marmite, 124 Maskelyne, Nevil, 106 mathematics, 18–19, 83, 146, 247; financial crisis (from 2007) and, 209, 213; prizes, 110, 114 Mayer, Marissa, 232, 234 McDonald’s, 15, 28 McDougal, Michael, 252 McGrath, Michael, 252 McMaster, H.R.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Across the world in 2017, more than 170 tonnes of coal were burned every second.19 The enormity of the climate-change problem and the negligible impact of individual actions are two themes that arise repeatedly in focus groups on public attitudes and are echoed by large corporations and governments.20 Together, they are probably the biggest obstacle to radical action to address climate change. But we should be suspicious: as ever when free-riding beckons, it is extremely tempting to let ourselves off the hook, to assume that individual contributions make no difference.21 The psychology of cognitive dissonance tells us that when the truth is uncomfortable, we often respond by falling into self-deception. This need not be due to selfishness: it may be that if I make an uncomfortable effort or sacrifice now, I will gain much more later. But this kind of self-control is hard to achieve. Psychologists have shown that thinking about an experience in the present will be more ‘salient’ – more vivid, more prominent in our minds – than the same experience in the future.

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air travel, commercial, 63–4 Akerlof, George, 223, 237, 248 altruism, 150–51, 159, 162–4 game theory’s denial of, 31–2, 41, 42–3 misunderstanding of, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 as not depleted through use, 14 seen as disguised selfishness, 11–12, 25, 112, 178–9 Amazon, 155, 178, 208 American Economic Association, 257, 258 Angrist, Joshua, 249 antitrust regulation, 56–8 Apple, 222–3 Aristotle, 14 Arrow, Ken awarded Nobel Prize, 71 and blood donations, 14, 163 at City College, New York, 74–5, 91 collective preference, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 and democracy, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 framework presented as scientific, 81–2, 124–5 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75–7, 78–83, 89, 97 and mathematics, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 9 preference satisfaction’, 80–82, 97, 124–5, 129 and Ramsey, 189 at RAND, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 top-secret-level security clearance, 71–2 ‘A Cautious Case for Socialism’ (1978), 83 ‘On the Optimal Use of Winds for Flight Planning’, 71 Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), 71, 72, 75–7, 78–80, 97 artificial intelligence, 214, 242 Atlas Economic Research Foundation, 7–8 Austen, Jane, 134 austerity policies, recent, 258 Axelrod, Robert, 41 Babbage, Charles, 222 baby-market idea, 61, 138, 145, 146 Bachelier, Louis, 193 Baird, Douglas, 58–9 bandwagon effect, 110 Bank of England, 96, 120, 185, 211–12, 258 bankers excuse/permission to be greedy, 1–2, 204, 238 and Keynesian economics, 5 performance as wholly relative, 204 quantification and recklessness, 213 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 role in 2007 crisis, 1–2, 57, 182, 192 as serial offenders over uncertainty, 201 see also financial markets Barro, Josh, 63, 64 Bateson, Gregory, 28 battery-chicken farming, 7 Baumol, William, 90–92, 93, 94 BBC, 48, 98 Beaverbrook, Lord, 157 Becker, Gary amoral understanding of crime, 137, 152 and citizenship rights, 146 and Coase, 69 Freakonomics followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and Friedman, 126, 131 hidden assumptions of, 130–31, 133–4 human capital idea, 149 and individualism, 134, 135–8 and maximization, 129–31, 133–4, 147 as outsider, 50 and Posner, 56 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132, 133–4, 148 and sale of body parts, 147–8 sees poor health as just a preference, 135, 136, 140 sees values as mere tastes, 136–8, 140 theories as deeply controversial, 127–9, 130 theories as slippery, 129, 133–4 and ‘universality’ of economics, 125, 126–31, 133–4, 135–8, 147–8 version of ‘rational’ behaviour, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Stigler, 1977), 135–6 The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976), 130 The Economics of Discrimination (1957), 126–7 A Treatise on the Family (1981), 127–8, 130–31, 133 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 behavioural economics context and culture, 175–6 framing effects, 170–71, 259 and incentives, 160, 171, 175, 176–7 methods from psychology, 170–71 and Nudge, 171–2 and orthodox economics, 173, 174–5, 247, 255 and physics envy, 175–6 problems with, 173–5, 250–51 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 and welfare maximization, 149 Bell, Alexander Graham, 222 bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196, 201, 203–4, 218–19, 257 Bentham, Jeremy, 102 Berlin, Isiah, 166, 167–8 Beveridge Report (1942), 4 Bezos, Jeff, 208 Black, Duncan, 77–8, 95 Blackstone (private equity firm), 235 black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 Blinder, Alan, The Economics of Brushing Teeth (1974), 136 blood donors, 14, 112, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 Borel, Émile, 185* Brennan, William, 56 broadcasting, 48–50, 98 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49–50 Buchanan, James McGill, 8, 83–5, 87–8, 89, 95, 115 Buffett, Warren, 229, 230, 236 Calcraft, John, 120, 121 Cameron, David, 172 Caplan, Brian, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 245–6 carbon markets, 47, 65–7 Carlson, Jack, 141–2 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 72, 77 cartels and monopolies, 101, 102, 103–4 Cheney, Dick, 232–3 Chicago, University of, 2, 4, 34, 40, 49–51 antitrust ideas, 56–8 Buchanan at, 84 and Coase, 49–52, 53–4, 55, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 Friedman’s dominance, 50, 132 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 revolution of 1968 at, 56, 58–9 zero-transaction-costs assumption, 51–2, 68–9 Chicago law school, 55, 56, 58–9 child labour, 124, 146 China, 65 City College, New York, 74–5, 91 climate change average temperature rises, 205–6, 207 and carbon markets, 47, 65–6 ‘cashing in’ on carbon markets, 67 Coasean worldview on pollution, 65–7, 68 denialists, 8 ‘discount rate’ on future costs, 208–9, 212 discrimination against future generations, 208–9 and free-riding theory, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 Intergovernmental Panel on, 207 measurement in numerical terms, 206–11, 213 and precautionary principle, 211–12 premature deaths due to, 207–9 and Prisoner’s Dilemma, 27 Stern Review, 206, 209–10 threat to economic growth, 209 Coase, Ronald argument given status of theorem, 51–2, 67 awarded Nobel Prize, 52 background of, 47–8 and Chicago School, 49–52, 53–4, 56–7, 61, 68–9, 132 and created markets, 47, 65–7 dismissal of ‘blackboard economics’, 48, 54, 64, 67–9 on Duncan Black, 77 evening at Director’s house (early 1960), 49–51, 132 fundamental misunderstanding of work of, 51, 52–3, 67–9 hypothetical world invoked by, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 62, 68 as Illinois resident, 46–7 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 8 and public-sector monopolies, 48–51 and transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1932 paper), 48 The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960 paper), 47, 48, 50–51, 52, 54–5, 59 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 Cold War, 18–19, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 181 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 and Ellsberg, 184, 197, 198, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 and Impossibility Theorem, 75–6 RAND and military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 and Schelling, 138, 139–40 Washington–Moscow hotline installed, 139–40 collective preference and Ken Arrow, 73–4, 75–7, 78–82 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 communism, 82, 84, 101, 104, 237 Compass Lexecon, 58, 68 Condorcet Paradox, 76, 77 conspiracy theories, 3, 8, 9 cooperation cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 and decision-making processes, 108–10 and free-riding theory, 2, 101, 102, 103–10 office teamwork, 109–10, 112 older perspective on, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Scandinavian countries, 103 view of in game theory, 21–2, 23, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 corporate culture and antitrust regulation, 57–8 changes due to Friedman, 2, 152 Chicago approach to regulation, 40 and climate change, 113, 114, 115 executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 Jensen and Murphy’s article, 229 ‘optimal contracting’/pay-for-performance, 228–30, 238 predatory pricing, 57 and tax evasion/avoidance, 105–6 cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Cowles Commission in Chicago, 78 CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), 222 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 33–4, 140 Damasio, Antonio, 14 data geeks, 248–50 ‘dead peasants insurance’, 124 decision-making processes, 108–10, 122, 170–71 ‘anchoring effect’, 212 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 avoidance of pure uncertainty, 198–9 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200, 205 Linda Problem, 202–3 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 198–200, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 and the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Von Neumann’s theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 see also probability; risk and uncertainty democracy and Ken Arrow, 72–4, 75–7, 78–83, 95, 97 Black’s median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 and economic imperialism, 145–7 equal citizenship principle at heart of, 145–6, 151 free-riding view of voting, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 marketing by political parties, 95–6 modern cynicism about politics, 94–7 paradox of voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 paradox of voting, 75–7 politicians’ support for depoliticization, 96–7 post-war scepticism about, 78–9 and public choice theory, 85–6, 95–7 replacing of with markets, 79 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 voter turnout, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16, 120–21 see also voting systems Dennison, Stanley, 13 dentistry, 258–9, 261 Depression (1930s), 3 digital technology, 68, 214, 222–3 data revolution, 247–50 and rising inequality, 215, 220, 242 Director, Aaron, 4–5, 49–51, 132 Disney World, 123 Dodd–Frank Act, 256 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll), 72, 77 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 Douglas Aircraft Corporation, 18 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), 86, 89, 95 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick film, 1964), 19, 35, 139 DreamTours Florida, 123 Drucker, Peter, 153 Dulles, John Foster, 20 Dundee School of Economics, 48, 77–8 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, The Visit of the Old Lady, 166 earthquakes, 194–5 Econometrica (journal), 77–8 economic imperialism arrogance of, 246–7 auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 continuing damage wrought by, 151–2 and democracy, 145–7 emerges into the limelight, 130 Freakonomics, followers of, 130, 134, 148–9, 156 and inequality, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 markets in citizenship duties, 146 origins of term, 125 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151 purchase of immigration rights, 125, 146 and sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelining of moral questions, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 146–7, 148–9 see also Becker, Gary economic theory Arrow establishes benchmark for, 71 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 Coase Theorem, 45–7, 48–55, 56–7, 61, 63–6 and data revolution, 247–50 exclusion of by data geeks, 248–50 and financial markets, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 as focus of economics courses, 260 Kahneman and Tversky’s theory of irrationality, 12, 171, 250–51 of labour, 237 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* perfect competition, 103, 193–4 profit-maximizing firms, 228–9 rent-seeking, 230, 238 theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 see also game theory; homo economicus; public choice theory; social choice theory economics accidental economists, 47–8 and Arrow’s framework, 78–9, 82 causes of growth, 223, 239 created markets, 47, 65–7 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 digital technology, 68, 214 efficiency as fundamental, 63, 64–5, 141, 153, 155, 193–4, 201, 211, 217–18, 255 empirical research as still rare, 247–8 extension into non-economic aspects of life, 40, 54–60, 65, 123–31, 132–4, 135–6, 145–50 gulf between reality and theory, 10–13, 31–2, 41–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 history of, 260 lack of objective ‘facts’, 253 modern debate on, 9 and Olson’s analysis, 104 our love–hate relationship with, 3, 245 as partially self-fulfilling, 12–13, 14, 159, 253 percentage of GDP impact of climate change, 206–11, 213 positional goods, 239–41 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 predatory pricing, 57 principles for new relationship with, 251–61 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 rise of game theory, 40–41 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 vocational role of, 260 see also behavioural economics; free-market economics economics, aims/pretensions to be science arrogance of, 205, 245–7, 258 Arrow’s framework presented as scientific, 72, 81–2, 124–5 attitude to value judgements, 10, 60–61, 64–9, 112, 136–8, 173–4, 204–5, 218, 247 claims of game theory, 21, 24–6, 28–9, 32, 34, 35, 38, 41 and data revolution, 247–50 desire for neutral science akin to physics, 9–10, 20–21, 34–5, 41, 116, 125, 132–3, 151, 175–6, 187–90, 212, 217–18, 246–56 desire for science of social control, 153, 154, 155, 164, 167 Friedman’s ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’, 132–3 hidden political/ethical agendas, 10, 213, 253, 255–8 measurement of risk in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 natural experiments, 248–50 Pareto improvements, 217–18 and physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 and public choice theorists, 88 quantification of all risks and values, 201–2, 203, 212–13 real world as problem for, 10–13, 31–2, 42–3, 51–3, 64–9, 86–9, 133, 136, 144–5, 228–30, 250–53, 260–61 ‘some number is better than no number’ mantra, 212–13 uncertainty as obstacle to, 190–91, 212–13 and use of mathematics, 9–10, 26, 72, 247, 248, 255, 259 use of term ‘rational’, 12 Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s grand project, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 and wealth-maximization approach, 58, 60 economists advice to former Soviet Bloc nations, 257 conflicts of interest, 256–7, 258 data geeks, 248–50 economics curriculum reform needed, 259–60 errors and misjudgements, 13–14, 16, 132–3, 144–5, 256*, 257–8, 260–61 failure to explain ideas, 254–5 insularity of, 246–7 Keynes’ dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 lack of ethics codes, 257–8 misunderstanding of altruism, 13–14, 25, 31–2, 41–3, 112, 178–9 need to show more humility, 258–9, 260–61 as not separate from economy, 251–3 and ordinary people, 245–6, 254–5, 258, 261 self-image as unsentimental and honest, 10 sneering descriptions of virtuous behaviour, 112 stating of the obvious by, 134, 259 education auctioning of university places, 124, 149–50 Baumol’s cost disease, 91, 92, 93, 94 incentivization as pervasive, 156, 169 value of, 150, 169, 170 ‘efficient market hypothesis’, 193–4, 201, 255 Einstein, Albert, 17, 22, 33, 213 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 19, 20, 231 Ellsberg, Daniel, 182–4, 187, 197–8 Ellsberg Paradox, 184, 199–200 and the ‘Pentagon Papers’, 200 probability experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 ‘Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms’ (paper, 1961), 198–9, 200 Engelbart, Douglas, 222–3 Engels, Friedrich, 223 English, Bill, 222–3 Enlightenment thinking, 11, 185 Epstein, Richard, 127 ethics and morality and autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 bad behaviour redefined as rational, 12 and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Coase Theorem, 46–7, 54–5, 56–7, 61, 63–6 Coasean worldview on pollution, 66–7, 68 as conditioned and limited by economics, 3, 10, 15, 43, 55, 60–61, 64–5, 179, 204–5, 218, 247 cooperative behaviour in game theory, 29, 30–32 core principles of current economic orthodoxy, 253 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economists’ language on virtuous behaviour, 112 inequality as moral issue, 242–3 influence of recent economic ideas, 1–3, 15–16 Keynes on economics as moral science, 252–3 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting incentives, 168–9 and Nash program, 25 Nudge economists, 173–4, 251 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 sale of body parts, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 sidelined by economic imperialism, 125–9, 135–8, 141–5, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 207 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 Smith’s enlightened self-interest, 11 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also altruism; free-riding behaviour European Commission, 96 Facebook UK, 99 fairness, 1, 149, 218, 228, 253 and Coase, 54, 55 and free-riding behaviour, 107 and game theory, 43 and incentives, 177, 179 and lucky geniuses, 221–3 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 60, 61, 62 see also inequality family life, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 famine relief, 99, 114–15 Farmer, Roger, 259 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 48–9 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz, 185 financial crisis, global (2007–10) Becker on, 128–9 and bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 196, 257 ‘blame the regulators’ argument, 1–2 and financial economists, 9, 88, 260–61 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2 and Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57 underlying maths of, 194, 195–6 financial markets Bachelier’s theory of speculation, 193 bell curve thinking, 192, 193–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 benchmarking against the market, 204 Black Monday (1987), 192 deregulation of US banks, 194 derivatives, 253 dot.com bubble, 192, 201 East Asian crisis (1997), 192 and economic theory, 9, 12–13, 182, 253 economists’ ignorance of, 260–61 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 persuasive power of extreme numbers, 181–2, 191, 192 and rent-seekers, 230, 238 rigged pay-for-performance contracts, 229–30, 238 First World War, 185, 210, 211–12 Fisher, Antony, 6–8 Forster, E.

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., 202 Foundation for Economic Education, 7 Franklin, Benjamin, 178 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005), 130, 148, 156, 160 free trade, 246, 255 freedom, individual, 1, 146, 150, 164, 250–51 Arrow’s view of, 82 and Isaiah Berlin, 167–8 and financial incentives, 167 Hayek’s view of, 5, 6, 89 and Nudge economists, 173 RAND’s self-image as defender of, 78 free-market economics appeal of, 125–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84 core principles of current orthodoxy, 253 efficient-market hypothesis, 193–4, 201, 255 election of Thatcher/Reagan as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 emergence and spread of modern ideas, 15–16 ethical influence of recent ideas, 1–3, 15–16 free-market zealotry, 84, 255, 257–8 and greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Hayek sees as all of life, 8 influential thinkers behind triumph of, 8–9 and interests of the rich and powerful, 2–3, 8–9, 11, 15, 57–8, 221–2, 224, 228–31, 238 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 and Olson’s analysis, 104 ‘ordinary people are stupid’ message, 86–7, 160, 175, 245, 251 price as measure of value, 149, 150, 151, 224 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 research institutes and think tanks, 7–8, 15 revolution of 1968, 56, 58–9, 162–3 selfishness assumed as natural, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 shock troops of at Chicago, 2, 4, 40, 49–51, 54, 55 as ‘universal’ way of thinking, 126–31, 132–4, 135–8, 145–50 free-riding behaviour ‘acceptable’ forms of, 106–7 and ‘bandwagon effect’, 110 and cartels, monopolies, price-fixing, 102, 103–4 and climate change, 2, 99, 113–17, 120 and cognitive dissonance, 113–14 contributions already made by others, 115 and decision-making processes, 108–10, 122 dodgy reputation of, 104–5 and fatalistic view of the world, 117 hidden assumptions about cause and effect, 111 and hippie countercultural, 100 illegally downloaded music, 2, 106, 107 and indirect effects of contributions, 115–16, 122 older perspective on, 99, 100–102, 108, 111, 122 and Mancur Olson, 103–4, 108, 109 Olson’s tipping point/threshold, 116, 119–21, 122 and Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 and rational behaviour, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 reasons for doing your bit, 108–13, 122 responsibility arguments, 109, 110–11 shift in the status of, 99–100, 121–2 small contributions as important, 110, 114–15, 122 and Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 and sovereign fantasy, 116–17 tax avoidance and evasion, 2, 99, 105–6, 112–13 and voting, 2, 99, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–21 ‘what if everyone did it?’

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

It is a narrative which is maintained today, with Michael Gove able to talk in an important speech about how we led the world in abolition, without mentioning that we also led the slave trade for decades beforehand. The most disturbing form of erasure, however, is presented in Walvin’s third case study: Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica. What he demonstrates is not amnesia in a precise sense but the denial, or cognitive dissonance, which surely leads to amnesia. The man was nothing less than a sadist. When he bought his slaves, they were branded with ‘TT’ on their shoulder, renamed and their characteristics listed, and he kept detailed notes in his diary on what he did to them. This tells us that he once broke an English oak stick when beating a slave.

…

When Thistlewood left for another plantation, she gave him a gold ring and also visited him in his new post. Their relationship lasted thirty years, she had a son (Mulatto John) and when Thistlewood died in 1785 his will requested her manumission. It would be hyperbolic to say this man is typical of imperial Britons in any way. But his cognitive dissonance, his ability to compartmentalize, his refusal to accept the brutal reality of what he was doing even as he cultivated a sophisticated demeanour, echo a psychological pattern that is common in British approaches to slavery. You see it in the way The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography swerves away from the phrase ‘slave owner’ in favour of euphemistic expressions like ‘plantation owner’ and ‘West Indies merchant’, while slavery is described as possessing ‘considerable property in Jamaica’.

…

It is evident when you read historians describe slave owners as ‘adventurers’ and the slavery system as ‘plantation agriculture’, and use euphemistic terms such as ‘appropriation’ and ‘importation’ when they’re talking about theft, kidnapping and forced enslavement. And you see examples of such cognitive dissonance in British attitudes to empire in general. Such as when Jan Morris tells a story about ‘the young Mahdist commander Emir Mahmoud, captured by Kitchener at Berber in 1897’: ‘Chains were riveted around his ankles, an iron halter was put around his neck, his hands were bound behind him, and he was paraded in ignominy through town’ behind Kitchener, sometimes being dragged, sometimes running, being whipped when he fell.

Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes

California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Gary Taubes, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial

No wonder obesity is so rarely cured. Eating less—that is, undereating—simply doesn’t work for more than a few months, if that. This reality, however, hasn’t stopped the authorities from recommending the approach, which makes reading such recommendations an exercise in what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. Take, for instance, the Handbook of Obesity, a 1998 textbook edited by three of the most prominent authorities in the field—George Bray, Claude Bouchard, and W. P. T. James. “Dietary therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment and the reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of successful weight reduction programs,” the book says.

…

But it then states, a few paragraphs later, that the results of such energy-reduced restricted diets “are known to be poor and not long-lasting.” So why is such an ineffective therapy the cornerstone of treatment? The Handbook of Obesity neglects to say. The latest edition (2005) of Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus, a highly respected textbook for physicians and researchers, is a more recent example of this cognitive dissonance. The chapter on obesity was written by Jeffrey Flier, an obesity researcher who is now dean of Harvard Medical School, and his wife and research colleague, Terry Maratos-Flier. The Fliers also describe “reduction of caloric intake” as “the cornerstone of any therapy for obesity.” But then they enumerate all the ways in which this cornerstone fails.

…

That the official embrace of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets coincided not with a national decline in weight and heart disease but with epidemics of both obesity and diabetes (both of which increase heart disease risk), should make any reasonable person question the underlying assumptions of the advice. But that’s not how people tend to think when confronted with evidence that one of their long-held beliefs is wrong. It’s not how we typically deal with cognitive dissonance. It’s certainly not how institutions and governments do it. For the moment, I’ll just say that the obesity/heart-disease link, combined with the obesity and diabetes epidemics that began more or less coincidentally with the advice to eat less fat, less saturated fat, and more carbohydrates, is a good reason to doubt that it’s the fat and the saturated fat that we have to worry about.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

Soon after, an even more direct message came from an employee survey, which showed that people reporting directly to me were not very invested in their work. That stung, especially since, as a whole, the company had quite good levels of employee engagement. I was gripped by what psychologists label cognitive dissonance: I believed I was doing great, yet the data showed I could do better. Cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable that the typical reaction is to become singularly focused on reconciling the disconnect. Back then, I reconciled it by telling myself there was nothing wrong with me. And if there was nothing wrong with me, then the problem had to be them.

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See also specific businesses call for action for, 233 finances of (see finances) leadership of (see leadership) purpose of, 4–5, 6–7, 51, 63–65, 233 (see also purposeful human organizations) stakeholders of (see customers; employees; shareholders; stakeholders; suppliers) work at (see work) Business Roundtable, 55, 75, 242n10, 242n14 Cales, Amber, 139–140 call for action for boards of directors, 234 for business education institutions, 235 for businesses, 233 for industry sector and community leaders, 234 for investors, analysts, regulators, and rating agencies, 235 for leaders, 232 overview of, 231–232, 236 Calvin, John, 26, 238n5 Canon, 86 capitalism in crisis, 4, 54, 240n1 financial incentives in, 126 leadership for next era of, 5–7 (see also leadership) reinvention of, 62, 65, 73, 74–77 social discord and, 4, 53–54 stakeholder capitalism, 74, 76, 231 Cargill, 111 Carlson, Curt, 224 Carlson Companies challenges as opportunities at, 201 exploring motivating forces at, 137, 222 incentives at, 125, 129 Joly’s departure from, 2 leadership at, 1, 160, 224 lifelong learning at, 191 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 41 performance assessments at, 188–189 strategy at, 111, 174, 199 turnaround at, 111 values days at, 226 women in leadership at, 160 Carlson Nelson, Marilyn, 137, 160, 222 Carlson Wagonlit Travel challenges as opportunities at, 201–202 cutting costs not jobs at, 104–105 financial challenges for, 58 human connections at, 148–149, 151 participative process at, 174 perfectionism challenges at, 37, 39–41 positive environment at, 114 purpose at, 142–143 strategy at, 81–82, 174 women in leadership at, 160 work views at, 27 cathedrals, building, 31, 70–71, 73 Chanel, 89 Chaplin, Charlie, 19 Christensen, Clayton, 216–217, 218, 226–227 Churchill, Winston, 215 Cicero, 238n10 Circuit City, 2, 110 Citrin, Jim, 1–3, 13, 98, 195, 225 Clausewitz, Carl von, 201 coaching vs. training, 185–188, 191 Coalition for the American Dream, 91 codes of behavior, 154 codes of ethics, 144 cognitive dissonance, 40 commissions, 124–125, 127, 128 communities business connection to, 68, 72, 242n14 business support for thriving, 88–91 leadership in, 234 companies. See businesses Cook, Tim, 196 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic agile work methods in, 176 business tied to community health in, 72 capitalism challenges in, 4 challenges as opportunities during, 202–203 human connections in, 149, 156 leadership during, 223, 227–228 purpose focus during, 204, 223 remote working in, 177 work-life balance in, 229 crisis response, 138–140, 223–224, 227.

The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

You’ll go through periods of spending less and enjoying the process, then you’ll splurge for no good reason, then revert to saving again. This is the typical process of change. After you ride up and down on these waves for a while, you’ll enter the phase known as cognitive dissonance. This is when you do something you know you shouldn’t be doing, but your human nature takes over and you do it anyway. When you reach this stage of awareness, you’re well on your way to really making changes in your life. Here is an example of cognitive dissonance. Say you suffer a heart attack. Before the heart attack, you rarely exercised and didn’t think much about it. After the attack, your doctor tells you that if you don’t do 30 minutes of cardiovascular work at least four times a week, you’ll wind up back in the hospital.

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Your primal instincts take over and you rationalize why you must have it now, and why just this one little month and the next you won’t save your $50. You buy the coat. When you get home, if you are in the cognitive dissonance stage, you’ll feel guilty about your purchase. With sufficient guilt, you might return the coat and immediately march to the bank to deposit the money. Prior to cognitive dissonance, you would have shopped on automatic pilot and never given your purchase a second thought. In fact, you would have been very proud of yourself that you saved all that money by buying the coat on sale.

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If you invest that $316 at 9 percent return (compound), you will have $8,500 in two years. If you keep going at the same rate, you will have $24,000 in five years. Voilà!—a down payment on a rental house, or a lump sum to invest in, say, the stock market, mutual fund, or what-have-you. Cognitive Dissonance As you begin to focus on the meaning of your life, you’ll likely find that you don’t need all of the things you once thought you needed in order to be happy. In fact, you’ll probably find that the less you have to worry about, rearrange, dust, and insure, the more freed up you are to pursue meaningful activities.

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

cognitive dissonance, country house hotel, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, fear of failure, Google Earth, invisible hand, nocebo, placebo effect, profit motive, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Perhaps all that they wanted was the reassurance that if the end was to become particularly unpleasant, it could be brought to a quick conclusion and, in the event, their final days passed peacefully. But perhaps it was because, as death approached, they started to hope that they might yet still have a future. We develop what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, where we entertain entirely contradictory thoughts. Part of us knows, and accepts, that we are dying but another part of us feels and thinks that we still have a future. It is as though our brains are hardwired for hope, or at least that part of them is. As death approaches, our sense of self can start to disintegrate.

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My understanding of neuroscience means that I am deprived of the consolation of belief in any kind of life after death and of the restoration of what I have lost as my brain shrinks with age. I know that some neurosurgeons believe in a soul and afterlife, but this seems to me to be the same cognitive dissonance as the hope the dying have that they will yet live. Nevertheless, I have come to find a certain solace in the thought that my own nature, my I – this fragile, conscious self writing these words that seems to sail so uncertainly on the surface of an unfathomable, electrochemical sea into which it sinks every night when I sleep, the product of countless millions of years of evolution – is as great a mystery as the universe itself.

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A sceptical consultant, with a row of medical students, looked in my ear and expressed some doubts. I can’t remember what was said, but I do recall trying to persuade myself that there really was a problem with my ear even though I knew that I was malingering. It was my first experience of cognitive dissonance – entertaining entirely contradictory ideas – and the importance of self-deception in trying to deceive others. I then discovered that music lessons for playing the trumpet were on the same day and at the same time as the swimming class with the vile ex-commando, so I took up the trumpet but did not get on with it.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Old Soviet wargames never achieved so much. War has moved beyond lethality. Today, all instruments of national power must be used, not just the ones that shoot. Nonkinetic weapons can be very effective in war, and cunning strategists can weaponize almost anything, including refugee waves. This causes cognitive dissonance for conventional warriors, who place their faith in firepower, a concept they call the “utility of force.” In doing so, they’re talking about the effectiveness of violence in conflict, and they rate it supreme. For them, the application of enough force can solve any problem. Such thinking led to the meat grinder of World War I and carpet-bombing during World War II.

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Both Nisour and Haditha were comparable crimes, but people’s reaction could not have been more different: mercenaries are butchers, while soldiers make innocent mistakes. This is an irrational prejudice. Murder is murder, no matter what kind of warfighter pulls the trigger. When I point this out, some people grow hostile with the burn of cognitive dissonance. Even enlightened minds balk, so strong is the bias against private warriors. Now that I’m out of the industry, I’m often asked to talk about it in front of large audiences. My best questions come from general audiences, perhaps because they have little received wisdom on the topic and therefore a more open mind.

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Federal Election Commission, 168 Civil affairs, 38, 41, 66–67 Civilian targets, 206–8 Civilian universities, strategic education in, 239–40 Clancy, Tom, 13–14, 21, 23 Clark, Ramsey, 226 Clausewitz, Carl von, 4, 29, 32, 96, 205, 220, 222, 235, 264n, 274n “CNN effect,” 202–3 Coercion, 96–97 Cognitive dissonance, 106, 122 COIN. See Counterinsurgency COINistas, 91, 93–95 Cold War, 21, 33–34, 188 containment policy, 78–79 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 “Collateral damage,” 64, 207 Colonialism, 95, 97, 98, 129, 177, 180 Confirmation bias, 48 Congo, 118, 127, 128, 150, 156–57, 182–83 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 130–31 Conspiracy and deep state, 158–61 Containment policy, 78–79 Contract wars, 128–31 Control the narrative, 41, 66, 67–68, 108–13, 227 Conventional wars, 5–6, 25–42 modeling the future on past, 33–36 redefining war, 179–85 short history of, 30–33 transforming the military, 37–42 use of term, 29 Western way of war, 28–30 Conventional weapon systems, 37–38, 41 Corporations and politics (corporatocracy), 165–68 Corruption, 113, 148–49, 166, 174–75, 216 Counterinsurgency (COIN), 4, 83–102 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 foreign legions, 98–102 Iraq War, xiii–xvi, 90–91, 93–95 successful strategies, 95–98 Countermessaging, 111–13 Crimea annexation, 3, 37, 64, 197–98, 203, 237 Cronkite, Walter, 225 Crusades, 74, 127, 144 Cuba, 211 Cultural dominance, 80 “Cyber,” 15 Cyberwar, 13, 14–17, 137–38, 214 Darfur genocide, 3, 146, 182 Dark arts, 203–6 David and Goliath, 223, 227, 229, 231, 233 Deception, 203–6, 211 Deep state, 158–69 Defense budget, 37–38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 102, 106–7, 445 Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx), 50 Democracy, 80–81, 95, 165 Denigration campaigns, 108–9, 111–12, 215 Dereliction of duty, 263n DeWe Security, 136 Dick, Philip K., 51 Diplomacy, 31, 41–42, 71, 217 Discrediting, 111 “Domino effect,” 78 Double-crossing, 189 “Double government,” 163–64 “Drain the swamp” strategy, 96 Drones, 46, 235 Drug wars, 9, 134, 149, 153, 171–78, 180, 287n Dulles, John and Allen, 209 Dunford, Joseph, 237–39 Dunlop, John, 207 Durable disorder, 8–10, 33, 80, 150, 245, 247 DynCorp, 131 Economic dominance, 80 Egypt, 126, 162–63 82nd Airborne Division, 23, 34, 91–92 Eisenhower, Dwight, 166–67, 168, 209 Eleazar ben Yair, 89 Elizabeth I of England, 79 English Constitution, The (Bagehot), 163–64 Espionage, 204–5 Evro Polis, 134 “Export and relocate” strategy, 96–97 Extortion, 175, 178, 180, 187, 192 Extrajudicial killings, 93, 95 ExxonMobil, 136, 152, 155 Failed states, 147–50 Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, 45 Fake news, 111 False-flag operations, 191, 213 False prophets, 12–17 Farrow, Mia, 146, 151, 154 Fawkes, Guy, 159, 160 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 First Offset Strategy, 48 Fitzgerald, USS, incident, 52–54 “Flag follows trade” policy, 80 Florentine Republic, 123–24 Florus, 83–84, 86 “Fog of war,” 29, 205 Fonda, Jane, 226–27 “Force projection,” 65, 69, 80, 106 Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), 118, 120 Foreign bases, 69 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 216 Foreign legions, 98–102 “Forever wars,” 9, 74, 246 Fragile states, 148–49 Fragile States Index, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 228 Freedman, Lawrence, 11 Freeport-McMoRan, 136 Free trade, 80–81, 165 French Foreign Legion, 99 French invasion of Russia, 230 Friedman, Milton, 180 FSB (Federal Security Service), 207 FUBAR, 71, 119 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 Fuller, John “Boney,” 20–21, 238 Future wars, 244–48 “Futurism,” 17 Futurists.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

No matter how convincingly I’ve argued my case, I am unlikely to have shifted your deep-seated beliefs or fears, formed and reinforced over a lifetime. There is a concept in social psychology called cognitive dissonance that can help here. It describes our desire for consistency between our beliefs and actions. If we consistently act in a way that is not in line with our beliefs, cognitive dissonance shifts our beliefs to align with our actions, which in turn ensures that these behaviors are sustainable, long-term. Let’s imagine you were trying to choose between a Ford F-Series and a Chevrolet Silverado.

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What happens next is interesting: the longer, and the more strongly, you argue for Bonds, the more you begin to convince yourself that the famous left fielder for the Giants really was the greatest baseball player ever to play the game. This isn’t because of your brilliant arguments either; in fact, your opponent is becoming more convinced than ever that Babe Ruth was the best. This is because of cognitive dissonance: when we argue forcefully for something, our beliefs start to come into line with our argument. We’re more likely to persuade ourselves than our opposition! When you apply this to a negotiation, the risk is that the very act of arguing or “negotiating” based on different opinions, can actually drive both opponents further apart, thereby reducing the chances of reaching a workable agreement.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Unlearning isn’t something we know how to do. Human forgetting is an automatic process, not one that we easily control. Yet unlearn we must, if we wish to reframe. This is especially the case when the new frame is seemingly at odds with the old one, when the new frame needs to overcome the cognitive dissonance that it causes. Such cognitive dissonance may happen in one’s mind, but it can also happen in a community, making it difficult to adopt a new frame. Switching frames in such a situation may require many people to refocus on an alternative frame. That may necessitate discussions, negotiations, and persuasion, which are time-consuming endeavors.

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Anyone who has ever seen or played the game has been mesmerized by the sumptuous elegance of the imaginary world, at once minimalist, intricate, and elaborate. When one starts interacting with the stairs, stones, buttons, dials, and other graphical items, they turn out to be forms that cannot exist in real space but can be used in the virtual world. The cognitive dissonance between the reality we know and the virtual world we navigate is what makes Monument Valley so appealing. Humans are suckers for counterfactuals. Whether reading a book, playing a video game, or losing oneself in a daydream, these mental activities are not cognitive idling. Even a couch potato does more than just sit on the couch like a potato.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

But her general thrust remains much the same – in fact, she adds a few more ways in which technology will definitely improve the world, such as in the developing world. 18.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 19.Selective exposure goes back to work by seminal psychologist Leon Festinger (1957), who posited the idea of cognitive dissonance – the discomfort people feel when presented with contradictory information. Selective exposure occurs when, in a bid to avoid cognitive dissonance, people tend to seek only information that confirms their beliefs. 20.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005). 21.Stecklow (2005). 22.Mukul (2006); Raina and Timmons (2011). 23.A phablet is bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet. 24.That the digital divide is a symptom of other socioeconomic divides was astutely noted about telecenters by Economist (2005).

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5(3):211–240, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.5.3.211. Farmer, Paul. (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press. Feenberg, Andrew. (1999). Questioning Technology. Routledge. Festinger, Leon. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. Findlater, Leah, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Kentaro Toyama. (2009). Comparing semiliterate and illiterate users’ ability to transition from audio+text to text-only interaction. Pp. 1751–1760 in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’09).

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See also Economics Carlin, George, 275(n8) Carr, Nicholas, 23 Caste system, 64, 139 Cause and correlation, 35 Censorship Arab Spring uprising, 33 Chinese Internet, 49–52 limiting technology use in the classroom, 119 Changing Lives (Tunstall), 270(n2) Character human maturation and, 161 learning, 165, 262(n29) strengths, 253(n20) See also Heart, mind, and will Charity compared with mentorship, 205 percentage of GDP, 269(n40) See also Nonprofit organizations; Poverty alleviation Charter schools, 62, 73, 239–240(n51) Check dams, 199 Children child-rearing, 192–193, 270(n1) commitment to save, 212–214 digital natives, 10–11 educational technology, 114–121 natural learners, 11 self-control, 265(n3) sexual abuse, 148, 257(n53) teaching and parenting, 202–203 text-messaging, 56 vaccines, 64–65 video games, 12, 114–115, 117, 122, 228(n20) See also Education and training China agricultural extension programs, 207, 273(n20) carbon reduction, 215–216 education, 13, 145, 229(n29) Internet censorship, 49–52 Max Weber, 176, 255(n7) one-child law, 205 PISA results, 229(n29) social media censorship, 23, 49–52 Toms Shoes manufacturing, 243(n31) See also Confucianism Choudhury, Abdul Mannan, 196–201 Civil Rights Act, 63–64 Civil society, Arab Spring and, 32–35, 37 Classroom management, 115–116, 118–119 Climate change, 23, 134, 215–216 Clinton, Bill, 49, 85 Clinton, Hillary, x, 35–36, 152 Coaching, 205 Cobb-Douglas function, 273–274(n25) Coerced partnership arrangements, 198, 205, 270(n1) Cognitive capacity, 28, 227(n10), 263(n43) Cognitive dissonance, 234(n19) Cognitive Surplus (Shirky), 230(n17) Cohen, Jared, 21, 229(n5) Cohen, Roger, 32–33 Cold chain of vaccine delivery, 65 Coleman, James, 145, 256(n42) Collective action. See also Self-help groups Collectivism, individualism and, 93 Colombia: One Laptop Per Child, 8 Communications Arab Spring suppression of, 33–34 cyberbalkanization, 47 history of technologies, 7–8 latent desires driving habits, 40–41 management, 44–46 personal and political interaction, 46–47 telecenters, 105 texting, 25, 56, 69, 235(n33) unintended consequences, 56 See also Mobile phones; Social media Community efforts.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

He then wrote it up as “Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind” and sold it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who published it in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950. Astounding indeed that anyone would accept such science fiction as fact, but such is the power of belief when coupled to a handful of powerful psychological principles. Consider cognitive dissonance, discovered by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 when he joined a UFO end-of-the-world cult at the mountain top to record what would happen when the mothership failed to arrive at the designated midnight hour on December 21. Festinger saw this as an opportunity to study the phenomenon of mental tension created when someone holds two conflicting thoughts simultaneously: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

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., 14 Callahan, Tim, 115–116 Calvin, William, 289 Camus, Renaud, 30 Carlson, Randall, 314 Carroll, Sean, 117, 118, 121 Cassidy, John, 212–213 categorical imperative (Kant), 240 censorship, 1–9arguments against, 19–27 college students’ responses to controversial subjects, 64–78 hate speech, 28–37 Holocaust denial, 38–43 Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives, 78 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 trigger warnings and, 66–67 Center for Inquiry (CFI), 269, 271 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 250–251 Change.org, 33–34 Christakis, Nicholas, 154–156 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre responses to, 28–37 Christian, Fletcher, 156–159 Christian values v. the US Constitution, 81–85 Churchill, Ward, 41 civilization free trade institutions, 249–251 how to get to Civilization,1.0, 251–253 influence of political tribalism, 243–246 pre-financial crisis world, 243 Types of civilization, 246–247 Clark, Kenneth, 299 classical liberalism, 136case for, 138–144 Clinton, Bill, 83, 253 Coase, Ronald, 201 Cockell, Charles S., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.

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United States, 1 Schopf, William, 62 Schumpeter, Joseph, 206 Schwarz, Benjamin, 277 science evolution–creationism controversy, 44–54 freedom of speech and inquiry, 19–27 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 questioning Darwinism, 61–63 scrutiny of ideas, 24–25 search for truth, 26–27 separation from religion, 62–63 Scientific American, 5, 62, 101, 103, 110, 254, 255, 259, 264, 311, 314 scientific and philosophical revolution (seventeenth century), 223emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 scientific creationism, 49 scientific humanism, 236 scientific naturalism, 236emergence of Enlightenment humanism, 223–228 Is-Ought fallacy, 228–235 scientific realism, 306 Scientology, 93–94characteristics in common with cults, 96–98 cognitive dissonance effects, 95–96 creation by L. Ron Hubbard, 95 genesis story, 94–95 origin myths of religions and cults, 101–102 public suspicion of, 99–101 threat from Anonymous group, 99–101 Scopes, John T., 48, 52 Scott, Eugenie, 55, 59–60 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 109, 237–238, 309–310 Second World War, 11, 49, 165 self-justification bias, 24 selfish genes, 106 Sharansky, Natan, 249 Sharman, Eleanor, 73 Shepherd, Lindsay, 303 Shrout, Derek, 171 Singer, Peter, 240 Sitchin, Zecharia, 315 Skeptic magazine, 21, 64, 77, 78, 93, 100, 110, 115, 161, 269, 272, 283, 285, 297, 300, 321 Skeptic.com, 181 Skeptical Inquirer, 271 skeptical movement influence of Paul Kurtz, 269–275 Skepticblog.org, 282 skepticism history of, 269–271 scientific skepticism of Richard Dawkins, 291–295 view of Charles Darwin, 287–288 Skeptics Society, 269, 272, 283 Skilling, Jeffrey, 61 Skousen, Mark, 284 slavery conscription as, 1–2 Smith, Adam, 61, 139, 203–205, 231, 243 Smith, Gary, 263–264 Smith, Quentin, 113 Smolin, Lee, 122 Snowden, Edward, 2 Snyder, Mark, 317 social contract, 240 social movements puritanical purging, 74–75 social spending extent in different countries, 140–142 importance for society, 140–142 societal health relationship to religiosity, 88 Socrates, 269 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 36 South Park, 95 Sowell, Thomas, 256–257 Sparks, John C., 251–253 Sparks’ Law, 253 species altruism, 106 Spencer, Richard, 13, 14 Spinoza, Baruch, 225, 240, 300 Standard & Poor’s, 206 Standard Model of elementary particles, 118 Star Trek, The Next Generation, 304 Starbucks, 136 Stark, Rodney, 96 start-up businesses chances of success, 262–264 status quo bias, 24 Stea, Jonathan N., 308 Stein, Ben Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (documentary film), 55–63 Stenger, Victor, 119, 123 Stern, Charlotte, 75 Sternberg, Richard, 57–59 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 string universes, 123 Strossen, Nadine, 13–14 Sulloway, Frank J., 45, 261–262 sunk-cost bias, 24 supernatural forces, 116–117 symbiogenesis, 62 Tarrant, Brenton, 29, 30–31, 33 Taunton, Larry Alex The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, 276–281 taxation, 203argument for wealth redistribution, 210–213 “sin taxes”, 201–202 Taylor, Jared, 13, 14 Taylor, John, 318–319 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 Terminiello, Arthur, 15 terrorism death rates compared to gun violence deaths, 191–192 The Age of Reason (Paine), 4 The Believing Brain (Shermer), 24 The Edge of Reason?

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

A recently initiated young man may ask himself, ‘Why did people I trust require me to endure having my penis mutilated to become a man?’ This constant search for an answer, over months and years after the ritual, creates deep symbolic meanings that are group-specific. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance shows that people who go through unpleasant initiations end up more bonded to the group because they strive to rationalise why they accepted the challenge and why the peers they trust insisted upon it.36 Tentative conclusions include ‘I did it to prove my loyalty and commitment to the group’ and ‘They insisted we endure the pain to weed out the freeloaders.’37 In addition, extreme acts forced upon the uninitiated create a sense of shared trauma which comes to define them.

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., ‘Neuroimaging “Will to Fight” for Sacred Values: An Empirical Case Study with Supporters of an Al Qaeda Associate’, Royal Society Open Science 6 (2019). 31. ibid. 32. H. Whitehouse, ‘Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41 (2018), 1–62. 33. E. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The Elementary Forms of Religious Life], Paris: Alcan, 1912; L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. 34. F. J. P. Poole, ‘The Ritual Forging of Identity: Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation’, in Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, ed. G. H. Herdt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982; H.

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Whitehouse, ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor, and Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996), 703–15. 35. F. Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. 36. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. 37. J. A. Bulbulia and R. Sosis, ‘Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation’, Religion 4 (2011), 363–88; A. Cimino, ‘The Evolution of Hazing: Motivational Mechanisms and the Abuse of Newcomers’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011), 241–67; J. Henrich, ‘The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and Their Implications for Cultural Evolution’, Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009), 244–60. 38.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Always strive to disentangle the facts of a situation from the elements of human psychology. Stress-Influence Tendency and Cognitive Dissonance Stress (n.): a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. In the fast-paced world of the stock market, adrenaline tends to produce faster and more extreme reactions. Some stress can improve performance, but heavy stress often leads to dysfunction in our cognitive apparatus. One form of stress is cognitive dissonance. We experience this type of stress when we simultaneously hold onto two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or attitudes.

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Bias from consistency and commitment tendency. This bias causes us to remain consistent with prior commitments and ideas, even in the face of disconfirming evidence. This includes confirmation bias—that is, looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignoring or distorting disconfirming evidence to reduce the stress from cognitive dissonance. We tend to double down on our failed efforts because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more time or money we spend on something, the less likely we are to abandon it. When we have made an investment, we tend to seek evidence to confirm that we made the right decision and to ignore information that shows we made the wrong one.

…

In November 2016, I sold my entire holding in SKS Microfinance (now known as Bharat Financial) because I believed that its microfinance business (which depended heavily on cash collections) would be adversely affected by the Indian government’s demonetization announcement and that it would result in a spike in SKS’s nonperforming assets. I was experiencing severe mental stress at the time, as SKS’s stock price was rapidly falling off a cliff. But what I did immediately after my sale of SKS’s stock exemplified cognitive dissonance at its finest. I deployed the sale proceeds into buying shares of Manappuram Finance because I had been closely following it over the past few months and had been enthused by the prospects of its fast-growing microfinance subsidiary. Fortunately, I realized my folly quickly and exited the stock at a minor loss.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.” “Sometimes we wish it would go away,” Silverman added, “because nobody knows how to deal with it.” This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, or the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discussed cognitive dissonance in scientific research—“the awareness of an anomaly in the fit between theory and nature”—he suggested that scientists will typically do what they have invariably done in the past in such cases: “They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”

…

And because dietary carbohydrates and particularly refined carbohydrates elevate blood sugar and insulin and, presumably, induce insulin resistance, the implication is that eating these carbohydrates increases heart-disease risk not only in diabetics but in healthy individuals. By this reasoning, the atherogenic American diet is a carbohydrate-rich diet. Hence, cognitive dissonance. The logic of this argument has to be taken one step further, however, even if the cognitive dissonance is elevated with it. Both diabetes and metabolic syndrome are associated with an elevated incidence of virtually every chronic disease, not just heart disease. Moreover, the diabetic condition is associated with a host of chronic blood-vessel-related problems known as vascular complications: stroke, a stroke-related dementia called vascular dementia, kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage in the extremities, and atheromatous disease in the legs that often leads to amputation.

…

This offers yet another reason to believe the carbohydrate hypothesis of heart disease, since metabolic syndrome is now considered perhaps the dominant heart-disease risk factor—a “coequal partner to cigarette smoking as contributors to premature [coronary heart disease],” as the National Cholesterol Education Program describes it—and both triglycerides and HDL cholesterol are influenced by carbohydrate consumption far more than by any fat. Nonetheless, when small, dense LDL and metabolic syndrome officially entered the orthodox wisdom as risk factors for heart disease in 2002, the cognitive dissonance was clearly present. First the National Cholesterol Education Program published its revised guidelines for cholesterol testing and treatment. This was followed in 2004 by two conference reports: one describing the conclusions of a joint NIH-AHA meeting on scientific issues related to metabolic syndrome, and the other, in which the American Diabetes Association joined in as well, describing joint treatment guidelines.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

People who use motivated reasoning respond defensively to contrary evidence. They actively discredit such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. It’s confirmation bias to the extreme. Why do we defend obvious falsehoods? It can’t be just to always feel as if we’re right. Social scientists posit that our desire to avoid “cognitive dissonance,” as they call it, drives motivated reasoning. In other words, self-delusion feels good. Dan Kahan is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He explains a classic example of motivated reasoning by describing an experiment done in the 1950s when psychologists asked students from two Ivy League universities to watch a film that featured a set of controversial calls made by referees during a football game.3 The game happened to be between teams from their respective schools.

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., 84 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The, 178 Boston University, 47 Bowerman, Bill, 199 brain: decision making in, 227 sleep’s importance to, 208–10 brain cancer, 30 Brave New World (Huxley), viii, 159, 238 Brazil, 199 BRCA genes, 8, 21, 118 breast cancer, 8, 53, 55, 60, 61, 118, 171, 190, 211 genetic mutation and, 21–22 mastectomies and, 21–22 obesity and, 133 statin use and, 220 Breast Cancer Prevention Trial, 53 Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 84 Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 23, 24 Broedel, Max, 73 Brown University, 58 Brunet, Anne, 63 bubonic plague, 95–101 Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 butterfly effect, 236–37 California, 5, 12, 47, 103 tobacco control program in, 237 California, University of: at Berkeley, 25 at Irvine, 3 at San Francisco, 3 Caltech, 102 Cambridge, University of, 125, 134 Cameron, David, 67 Canada, 4, 11 cancer, 41, 108, 128, 175, 215, 237 aggressiveness of, 53–54 alternative treatments for, 18 aspirin and, 216–17 chemotherapy for, 29 childhood, 6, 49, 170–71 context and, 13–14 diet and, 163 early detection and treatment of, 172 fitness and, 190–94 genetic mutations and, 14, 21–22, 50 genotyping of, 117–18 immunotherapy for, 28–33 inflammation in, 175–77 lifestyle and, 153, 168–69 measurement of success in treating of, 32–33 metastasis in, 60–62 molecular therapies for, 23–24, 49–50, 54–55 muscle mass and, 195 p53 gene and, 57–58 Peto’s paradox and, 57 plasma transfusions and, 5 precision medicine and, 115 radiation therapy for, 29 random mutations in, 169–74, 176 as runaway cell copying, 59 self-seeding in, 61 statins and, 218–20 treatment resistance in, 190–91 Watson supercomputer and treatment of, 88–89 see also specific types of cancer cardiovascular disease, 86, 121, 128, 147, 216 airport noise and, 92 risk factors for, 47 Carlson, Mary, 212, 213 Carnegie Mellon University, 214 CAR T cells, 29–30 CBS This Morning, 67 CCR5 gene, 24, 25 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 212–13 Celebrex (celecoxib), 62 celiac disease, 113, 164 cell division, 5 cells: death of (apoptosis), 59 endoplasmic reticulum in, 40 oxidative damage to, 40 receptors on, 59 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development (Duke University), 45 Center for Translational Neuromedicine (University of Rochester), 208 Center for Translational Research in Aging and Longevity (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences), 194 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47, 103, 133, 205 ceritinib (Zykadia), 53 change, self-assessment of, past vs. future in, 38–40, 39 chaos theory, 236–37 Charaka, 113 Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, 204 checkpoint blockage therapy, 29–30 chemotherapy, 29, 60, 190–91 exercise and, 191, 192 Chicago, University of, 17 children, obesity and overweight in, 133 Chittagong University, 232 cholera, 234 cholesterol, 150, 195, 217, 219 dietary vs. blood, 162 online calculator for, 218 chronic disease, 128–29 age-related, 128, 136 diet and, 141–44 management of, 144–46 overweight and, 141 sleep habits and, 147 chronological age, 45, 46, 46, 47, 135–36, 232 circadian rhythm, 123, 138, 139–40, 148, 205 Circulation, 86 climate change, 159 Clinical Practice Research Datalink, 219 clinical trials, 52 double-blind, 53, 155 IRBs and, 52 randomized, 52–53 ClinVar, 9 coarse graining, 229–32, 230 cognitive abilities, 45, 46 cognitive dissonance, 159 Cohen, Jacques, 111–12 colds, 205, 214 Cold War, 94 Coley, William B., 27–29, 28, 33, 48 colitis, 121–22 Collins, Francis, 114, 118 colonoscopies, 93 Colorado, 47 colorectal cancer, 55, 123–24, 190, 217 statin use and, 220 Columbia University, 138 complex carbohydrates, 162 comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), 151 Congress, US, 114, 237 context: adapting to new data in, 159 aging and, 45 baselines for, 150 changes in, 22 databases as, 83, 91–94 data mining and, 101 diet and, 163, 165 disease and, 13–14, 20 genes and, 14, 20–21, 118 health and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 heart disease and, 22 identifying and optimizing, 135–52 lab tests in, 150–52 medical data and, 78–82 medical education and, 75 Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, 192 coordination, 45 Cornell University, 2 coronary artery disease, 151 cortisol, 123 counterfeit drugs, 10–11 C-reactive protein, 175 CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), 24–25, 26, 45 Critical Care, 222 Crohn’s disease, 25, 121 CTLA-4, 29–30 cystic fibrosis, 115–16 Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Vertex, 115–16 cytokines, 123 cytoplasm, 111 cytosol, 40 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Profile program of, 118 Dannon, 235 Dartmouth College, 157 Darwin, Charles, 112 data, medical: context and, 78–82 individual’s role in collection of, 81 databases, medical, 82–83, 95 as context, 83, 91–94 security of, 88–89 data mining, 84–89, 92 context and, 101 infectious diseases and, 100–101 Davos, Switzerland, 161 Dawkins, Richard, 17 death, leading causes of, 129 death certificates, 96 decision-making, 225, 227–28 dehydration, 234 dementia, 5, 41, 90, 91, 151, 204, 210, 215, 221 see also Alzheimer’s disease depression, 122, 211, 215 exercise and, 186 Dhaka, 232 diabetes, 22, 24, 25, 47, 59, 108, 114, 123, 128, 147, 151, 166, 175, 186, 187, 188, 215, 221, 237 gut bacteria and, 120–21 incidence of, 120–21 diet, 22, 114 chronic disease and, 141–44 as contextual, 163 honesty about, 133–34 low-cholesterol, 162 low-fat, 162 moderation in, 144 research on, see nutritional studies weight and, 141 diphtheria, 161 disease: autoimmune, 85, 125, 175 context and, 13–14, 20 genetic markers for, 22, 113–14, 127 surrogate markers for, 127–28 see also chronic disease; infectious diseases; noncommunicable diseases disorders, inherited, newborn screening and, 12 DNA, see genes, genome DNA mismatch repair, 32, 57 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), 182 dopamine, 211 Doudna, Jennifer A., 25 dreaming, 203 drug abuse, 22 drugs, see medications Duke Cancer Institute (DCI), 191 Duke University, 30 Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at, 45 Dulken, Ben, 63 Dunedin Study, 45–47, 46 Dyerberg, Jorn, 182–83 Dyson, Esther, 173 Earls, Felton, 213 East Africa, 44, 107 Eat, Sleep, Poop (Cohen), 137 eating patterns, heart disease and, 138–40 Ebola, 18, 221–22 E. coli, 123 eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), 182 Einstein, Albert, 2, 223 Elder, William, Jr., 115–16 electrodermal response, 230–31 Elledge, Stephen J., 84 emotions, touch and, 214 emulsifiers, microbiome and, 121–22 “end of history illusion,” 38–40, 39 End of Illness, The (Agus), 18 endoplasmic reticulum, 40 endorphins, 211 energy levels, 149 England, see Great Britain environment, see context epidemics: global spread of, 103 prediction of, 103–4 epigenetics, 20–21 esomeprazole (Nexium), 86 esophageal cancer, 217 estrogen, 64 ethics: genome editing and, 24–25 medical advances and, 10, 24 technology and, 25–26 Europe, 77 European Journal of Immunology, 34 exercise, 21, 114, 140, 185–201 chemotherapy and, 191, 192 honesty about, 133–34 ideal amount of, 196–200 intensity of, 197–98 life expectancy and, 189–90 mortality rates and, 148 Exeter, University of, 157 “Experimental Prolongation of the Life Span” (McCay, Lunsford, and Pope), 2 experimental treatments, quicker access to, 56 Facebook, 27 fasting lipid profile, 150 feebleness, aging and, 43 fertility, aging and, 43 Field, Tiffany, 214 financial industry, information technology and, 89 Finland, 220 fish oil, 182–83 Florida, 103 flu vaccine: misinformation about, 157–58 public distrust of, 160 FODMAPs (fermentable oligo-di-monosaccharides and polyols), 164 Fodor, George, 183 food, safety of, 11 Food and Drug Administration, US (FDA), 2, 18, 51, 55, 56, 86, 111, 112, 127–28, 146, 182, 201 Accelerated Approval provisions of, 128 Foundation Medicine, 50 Framingham Heart Study, 47, 118 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 169 free radicals, 208 fruit flies, eating pattern studies with, 138–40 fungi, 119 gait, 45 galvanic skin response (GSR), 230–31 gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), 86 Gates, Bill, 2 Genentech, 56 genes, genome, 45, 83–84 aging and, 20, 41 bacterial, 107, 119 context and, 14, 20–21, 118 DNA mismatch repair and, 32 expression of, 20–21, 125, 139 mitochondrial, see mitochondrial DNA sequencing of, 20, 23, 49–52, 112 SNPs in, 113–14 as switches, 41 viruses and, 119–20 genes, genome, editing of, 24–25, 45 ethics of, 102–5 genetically modified foods (GMOs), 18 genetic markers, 22, 113–14, 127 genetic mutations: aging and, 41 cancer and, 14, 21–22, 50 disease risk and, 9, 12 genetic screening, 103, 117, 137 flawed results in, 8–10 of newborns, 11–12 Georgia State University, 121 Gewirtz, Andrew, 121 Gibson, Peter, 164 Gilbert, Daniel, 38, 39, 40 Gillray, James, 161 Gladwell, Malcolm, 225, 227, 228 Gleevec (imatinib), 55 glial cells, 209 glioblastoma, 30 “Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health” (WHO), 187 gluten, debate over, 163–65 Goldstein, Irwin, 211 Google, 87, 88, 101 Google Flu Trends, 101 Grameen Bank, 232, 233–34, 235 Grameen Danone, 235 Graunt, John, 100 Great Britain, 96, 97, 100, 110, 155 Black Death in, 95–101, 98, 99, 100 Greatist.com, 200 Greenland, 182 Grove, Andy, 7, 7 growth factors, 59 gun violence, 91 gut: inflammation of, 120, 122 microbiome of, see microbiome H2 blockers, 86 habits and routines, 136, 137–41, 228, 237–38 see also diet; lifestyle choices Harlow, Harry, 213 Harvard Medical School, 84 Harvard School of Public Health, 142–43 Harvard University, 3, 23, 24, 37, 178, 186, 196, 212, 213, 216 hash tables, health care and, 87–88 Hawaii, 47 HDL cholesterol, 150 health: biological age and, 47 context and, 48, 76–78, 84, 89–90, 91–94, 101, 113, 114–15, 117, 124–25 family history of, 136–37 honesty about, 131–34 inflection point in, 8 lifestyle and, see lifestyle choices optimism and, 65–69 personal baselines for, 150 retirement and, 91–92 technology and, 37–70 health and fitness apps, 200 Health and Human Services Department, US, 103 health care: Affordable Care Act and, 69–70 hash tables and, 87–88 individual’s responsibility in, 12–13, 26, 70, 75, 78, 131–32 misinformation about, 14–15, 18, 19, 154, 157–58 politics and, 11–12 portable electronic devices and, 79, 90–91 Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 142–43, 217 health threats, prediction of, 103–4 heart: biological age of, 47–48 health of, 48 heart attacks, 76, 86, 182, 217, 218 heart disease, 59, 128, 150, 166, 175, 183, 186, 187, 215, 217, 221 context and, 22 diet and, 163 eating patterns and, 138–40 lifestyle choices and, 22 muscle mass and, 195 heart rates, 231 heart rate variability (HRV), 230 Heathrow Airport, 92 “hedonic reactions,” 38–40 heel sticks, 11–12 hemoglobin A1C test, 151 hepatitis B, 175 hepatitis C, 175 Herceptin (trastuzumab), 55 high blood pressure, 22, 188, 195 high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) test, 151 hippocampus, 214 Hippocrates, 71, 113, 122, 216 HIV/AIDS, 18, 24, 25, 59, 84, 127–28, 131, 159 Hoffmann, Felix, 215, 216 Holland, 41 Homeland Security Department, US, 103 homeostasis, 137–38, 140 Homo sapiens, evolution of, 107 honesty: about health, 131–34 nutritional studies and, 162 hormones, 219 hormone therapy, 201 Horton, Richard, 178 Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (Hospital for Special Surgery), 28 house calls, 80 Houston Methodist, 86 “how do you feel” question, 231 hugs, 214 Human Genome Project, 113, 120 human growth hormone, 200 Human Molecular Genetics, 65 human papilloma virus (HPV), 161, 175 Hurricane Sandy, 84 Huxley, Aldous, viii, 6, 159, 238 Hydra magnipapillata, 42, 42 hyperglycemia, 122 hypertension, 125, 195, 203 IBM, 88–89 imatinib (Gleevec), 55 immune reactions, 5 immune system, 175, 190, 209, 211 aging and, 44 impact of hugs on, 214 immunotherapy, 28–33 polio virus and, 30, 31 incentives, 235–36 Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, 94–95 infant mortality, 87, 97 infants: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 infections, 175–76 infectious diseases, 129 antibiotic-resistant, 67–69, 68 data mining and, 100–101 inflammation, 34, 151, 174–77, 181, 187, 190, 195, 215–22 inflammatory bowel disease, 121 inflection points, 7–8, 7 influenza, 161 risks from, 157 vaccine for, see flu vaccine information, sorting good from bad, 19–20 information technology, financial industry and, 89 inherited disorders, newborn genetic screening and, 12 insomnia, 122 Institute for Sexual Medicine, 211 insulin, 56, 190 insulin sensitivity, 5, 87, 120, 122, 151, 195 insurance companies, off-label drugs and, 55 Intel, 7 International Agency for Research on Cancer, 170 International Prevention Research Institute, 180 intuition, 224–29 Inuits, 182–83 in vitro fertilization (IVF), three-person, 109–12, 110 Ioannidis, John, 178 IRBs (institutional review boards), 52 iron deficiency, 231 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), 164 Islam, 234 Italy, 183 ivacaftor (Kalydeco), 115–16 JAMA Internal Medicine, 142, 143, 192, 196 Jenner, Edward, 160, 161 Jobs, Steve, 2, 23–24, 26, 49 Johns Hopkins Hospital, 71, 72, 128 Hurd Hall at, 74 Osler Medical Housestaff Training Program at, 73–75, 74 Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, 32 Johns Hopkins University, 23, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 215 Jolie, Angelina, 21 Jones, Owen, 43 Journal of Sexual Medicine, 211 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 72, 114–15, 173, 201, 220, 221 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, 154 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 169 Journal of Urology, 168 journals, medical, misinformation in, 154, 179 J.

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., 159 mental health, 145 portable electronic devices and, 90–91 metabolic syndrome, 121, 122 metabolomics, 188 metastasis, 60–62 Metchnikoff, Élie, 33–35, 33, 35, 48 Miami, University of, Miller School of Medicine at, 214 mice and rats: aging experiments with, 1–3, 3, 4 cancer treatment experiments with, 60–62 digestive tract experiments with, 120, 121–22 microbiome, 48, 85, 119–25 beneficial bacteria and, 33–34 diabetes and, 120–21 emulsifiers and, 121–22 gastric surgery and, 123 sleep and, 122–23 microfinance, 232–33 Middle East, 77 mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 203–4 Minnesota, 103 misinformation, medical, 153–84 anecdotal evidence in, 156 cognitive dissonance and, 159 media and, 153–54 in medical studies, 177–84 motivated reasoning and, 157–61 in peer-reviewed journals, 154 post hoc reasoning in, 156 sweeping statements in, 165, 166–69, 184 Wikipedia and, 154 Mississippi, 47 Missouri, 205 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 23, 24, 236 Mitalipov, Shoukhrat, 109 mitochondria, 106–8, 106, 119 mitochondrial diseases, 106, 106, 108–12 mitochondrial DNA, 106, 106, 107–8 mutations in, 107–8 replacement of, 109–12, 110 mitochondrial electron transport chain (mETC), 139–40 “Mitochondrial Eve,” 107 MMR vaccine, 156 moderation, in diet, 144 Monash University, 164 Montana, 3 mood, monitoring of, 149 morbidity, sleep habits and, 146–47 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 138 mortality rates: aging and, 42–43 decline in, 6–7 exercise and, 148 sleep habits and, 146, 147 motivated reasoning, medical misinformation and, 157–61 motivation, 149 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), 230 multimorbidity, 129 multiple sclerosis, 59 muscle mass, 194–96, 199 muscle strength, 45 mutation, see genetic mutations MyBabyFace (app), 87 Napoli, Mike, 202–3 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 53, 114, 196 National Cancer Institute Cohort Consortium, 189 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 47, 141 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 114, 117–18, 205 National Sleep Foundation (NSF), 206 natural immunity, 33–34 Nature, 41, 95, 121, 123 NCI-MATCH (Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice), 117 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), 66 Nedergaard, Maiken, 208–10 Neogest (app), 87 Neurology, 203 newborns: genetic screening of, 11–12 premature, 87 Newcastle University, 108 New England Journal of Medicine, 8, 9, 24, 32, 178, 183, 218 New Jersey, 111 New Mexico, 68 Newtown shooting, 91 New York, N.Y., 28, 116 New York Academy of Medicine, 2 New York Cancer Hospital, 28 see also Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York University, 204 New Zealand, 45, 46 Nexium (esomeprazole), 86 night blindness, 235 NIH Human Microbiome Project, 120 Nike, 199 Nobel Peace Prize, 232 Nobel Prize, 33, 34, 102 “nocebo” effect, 165 noncommunicable diseases, premature deaths from, 130, 131, 132 Northeastern University, 68 Northwestern University, 41 Norton, Larry, 60–61, 62 Nottingham, University of, 87 Nurses’ Health Study, 142–43, 216–17 nursing college, 235 nutritional studies, 161–69 honesty and, 162 lack of reliable data from, 162–63, 164 Nyhan, Brendan, 157, 158, 160 Obama, Barack, 11, 114, 115, 117 obesity and overweight, 22, 47, 121, 122, 123, 147, 188, 194, 215 breast cancer and, 133 chronic disease and, 141 honesty about, 132–34 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 122 Obstetrics & Gynecology, 132–33 Olser Library of Medicine (McGill University), 73 omega-3 fatty acids, 182–83 omeprazole (Prilosec), 86 “On Lines and Planes of Closest Fit to Systems of Points in Space” (Pearson), 95 Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), 7 open-access model, 179 opioids, 145 optimism, health and, 65–69 Oregon, University of, 199 Oregon Health & Science University, 109 Ornish, Dean, 166–68 Osler, William, 15, 37, 71–73, 72, 73, 75, 126, 145, 153, 223 Othello (Shakespeare), 202 Ottawa, University of, 183 overweight, see obesity and overweight Oxford University, 216 oxidative stress, 175 oxytocin, 211 p53 gene, 57–58 pain relievers, risks of, 145–46 Paleo diet, 142, 163 parabiosis, 1–4, 3, 21 parasites, spread of, 103 Parkinson’s disease, 59, 108, 163 pattern recognition, 227 PD-L1, 29–30 Pearson, Karl, 95 Pediatric MATCH, 117 Pediatrics, 133 pelvic bone cancer, 176 Pennington Biomedical Research Center, 192 Pennsylvania, University of, 73, 75 Perelman School of Medicine at, 208 perceptual intuition, 228–29 personalized medicine, see precision medicine Peto, Richard, 57 Peto’s paradox, 57 PET (positron-emission tomography) scan, 230 pharmaceutical industry, 166 drug prices and, 56–57, 115–17 public distrust of, 18, 19, 69, 157 pharmacogenomics, precision medicine and, 115 phenylalanine, 12 phenylketonuria (PKU), 12 Philosophical magazine, 95 physical activity, 140 physicians: house calls by, 80 public distrust of, 17–19, 157 pit latrines, 234 Pittsburgh, University of, 196, 214 placebos, 53 plaques, 183 plasma transfusions, 4–5 plate discipline, 204 Plato, 185 PLOS Medicine, 178 pneumonia, 161 polio virus, in immunotherapy, 30, 31 Pope, Frank, 2 population growth, technology and, 27 portable electronic devices, health care and, 79, 90–91 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, 156 precision medicine, 8, 20, 36, 102–25 art vs. science in, 112, 118 cancer treatment and, 115 context and, 114–15, 117 cost of, 56–57 historical roots of, 113 pharmacogenomics and, 115 technology and, 37–70 Precision Medicine Initiative, 114, 117 “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work by Richard A. Ferri

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Madoff, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

This group was deemed to be more knowledgeable about investment matters than the architects. They overestimated their past performance by 3.4 percentage points.9 The overall results are consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Investors would rather alter the facts than admit they have no special investment skills. This makes it difficult to fix flawed investment strategies. Selective Memory as a Profession Wall Street has turned cognitive dissonance into a business model. Have you ever heard a brokerage firm ever say they were wrong about an investment recommendation? Their analysts say they were early or late on a call, but never wrong.

…

Van den Assem, Guido Baltussen, and Richard H. Thaler, “Deal or No Deal? Decision Making under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (March 2008): 38–71. 8. Calmetta Coleman, “Beardstown Ladies Fess Up to Big Goof,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 18, 1998, cl. 9. William N. Goetzmann and Nadav Peles, “Cognitive Dissonance and Mutual Fund Investors,” Journal of Financial Research 20, no. 2 (1997): 145–58. 10. John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1964), 148. 11. Richard H. Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1, no. 1 (1980): 39–60. 12.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

During the 1980s and 1990s, the field received approximately $20 billion in subsidies from philanthropic foundations and governmental aid. A report from the consultancy firm Monitor has stressed that before the field was financially promising, ‘subsidies in the form of grants, soft loans, and guarantees from philanthropists and aid donors’ were key to the field’s growth.37 A curious sort of cognitive dissonance is at play here. Microfinance advocates often berate governments for placing regulatory caps on interest rates – and yet all admit that without government support the field would have withered long ago. As Lester Frank Ward presciently observed, those who decry state interference are typically the same people whose capital and investment choices depend on state support.38 It is now over a century since Ward wrote those words.

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The website notes that from 1994 to 2006, Bill and Melinda donated more than $26 billion, resulting in savings of 8.3 per cent, or just over $2 billion. And yet, is a gift from the Gates Foundation to a highly profitable company really the best use of money that, if it had been taxed as income rather than placed in a trust, could have benefited federal or state relief programmes? The cognitive dissonance I’ve described above – the continued insistence that new entrepreneurial movements are playing a revolutionary role in global poverty reduction despite the lack of clear evidence – is the truly distinctive aspect of social entrepreneurship. Unlike ideas of corporate social responsibility which were popular in the 1980s and 1990s – and which often had an aura of expiation about them, implying that socially oriented philanthropy was needed to make amends for corporate abuses – the new social investors believe that business success is evidence of social value.

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Thiel bankrolled much of the Tea Party darling Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, and he serves as chair of the board of Palantir, a firm specializing in intelligence-gathering and data-mining solutions for the US government’s defence community. Thiel is also a steering committee member of the Bilderberg Group, the crown jewel of elite international meetings – a Bilderberg invitation makes a Davos invite look like coffee at the local Walmart.16 Thiel and his fellow philanthrocapitalists exhibit the same cognitive dissonance, the same double-mindedness, as the Mont Pelerin enthusiasts who succeeded in shaping government policies in the name of laissez-faire non-interference. They wilfully entrench the market dominance of actors shown to have been complicit in market distortions, such as Goldman Sachs, even as they lament the way that ‘marketplace imperatives’ direct health investment where it is least needed.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

., “Associação Saúde Criança: Trying to Break the Cycle of Poverty and Illness at Scale,” Harvard Business School Case 419-048, 2018. 28 Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança.” 29 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” 104–107. 30 This act of convincing ourselves our behaviors are moral when they are not is one way we overcome cognitive dissonance by adding a consonant cognition. See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). 31 “Princess Diana: A ‘Modern’ Mother Who Ripped Up the Rule Book,” HistoryExtra, November 3, 2020, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/princess-diana-mother-parenting-william-harry-mother-son-relationship/. 32 David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2020). 33 Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019). 34 C.

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Norton, 2011), 77. 64 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Start Publishing LLC, 2013). 65 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Thomas E. Hill, trans. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 66 Yong Huang, “Confucius and Mencius on the Motivation to be Moral,” Philosophy East and West 60, no 1. (2010): 65–87. 67 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford University Press, 1957). 68 Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate. 69 Wilson, On Human Nature, 163. 70 Peter L.

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken. 3.10. Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s.

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When people hear that message, maybe the next day they come to one of these meetups and they meet a dentist who owns bitcoin, an architect who owns bitcoin, a taxi driver who uses bitcoin to send money back to their family—normal people who use bitcoin to give themselves financial power and financial freedom. Every time that message is broken by cognitive dissonance, bitcoin wins. All bitcoin really has to do is survive. So far, it’s doing pretty well. 3.11. Currencies Evolve In the new network-centric world, currencies occupy evolutionary niches. They evolve, like species, based on the stimulus they have from their environment. Bitcoin is a dynamic system with software developers that can change it.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

And we routinely use a handful of “kinesthetic image schemas” as short-cuts.xxxviii Figure 2-22. The experiential basis of metaphors. There’s nothing wrong with using metaphors, provided we’re aware of their source, and realize they contain baggage that shifts from intent to interpretation. Using “department head” may induce cognitive dissonance in an organization that’s flipped the org chart by practicing servant leadership. Isn’t the head on top, like the upper class? Our corporeal experience is embodied in language and subtly changes how we think. This occurs all the time in our use of binary oppositions. In-Out, Up-Down, Front-Back, Self-Other, Us-Them, More-Less, Male-Female, True-False, Fact-Fiction, Public-Private, Open-Closed, Yes-No, Hot-Cold, Reason-Emotion, Mind-Body, Man-Nature, Love-Hate, Win-Lose, Good-Evil While there are no opposites in nature, we use dualism to create order and make sense of experience.

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After the Gates Foundation spent $2 billion to replace large schools with small ones and realized only modest gains, Gates publicly concluded they’d made an expensive mistake, and decided to switch direction. In Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), we’re reminded such honest admissions are refreshing because they’re so rare. The main problem isn’t that we aim to deceive others; it’s that we fool ourselves. The engine of self-justification is cognitive dissonance, the state of tension that occurs when we hold ideas or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent. If a “good person” does a “bad thing” self-deception kicks in. And, if on opposite sides of a decision, time will tear us apart. Imagine two students with similar attitudes and abilities who struggle with the temptation to cheat on a test.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

Maybe to some sort of magical womb tree along with every other fetus whose mom is currently masturbating. They are safe in the tree, guarded by asexual fairies, until their moms cum, after which point the fetuses are free to reenter the womb. Having a baby inside me just does not compute with pleasure. They are two different and disparate things. Yet, I don’t feel this cognitive dissonance regarding sex during pregnancy. Sex, after all, is what makes babies in the first place. It’s natural and beautiful and, during pregnancy, it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been able to stomach the label “making love.”* But I don’t extend the same sentimentality to when I’m gettin’ down to a Pornhub video called “Schoolgirl slut sucks cock to get an A.”

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No one wants to know who in the group hasn’t seen Citizen Kane. 9. Back to Disneyland again. The entirety of Splash Mountain / parts of Small World / half of the Jungle Cruise is racist. I have no idea what to do about it, but it does need to be verbally acknowledged at some point on each ride. The discussion around this cognitive dissonance must last twice as long if everyone in your party is white.* 10. If English is your native language and you always mix up “their” and “they’re,” then YOU ARE NOT A RAVEN-CLAW. 11. If I’m showing you one of my many childhood home movies (again, there are seventy-two of them), please do not comment on the action until I press pause. 12.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

“Altruistic Punishment in Humans.” Nature 415:137–40. Feld, Scott L. 1981. “The Focused Organization of Social Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5):1015–35. Ferdows, Kasra, Michael A. Lewis, and Jose A. D. Machuca. 2004. “Rapid-Fire Fulfillment.” Harvard Business Review 82 (11). Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fiorina, Morris P., Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope. 2005. Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America. New York: Pearson Longman. Fischhoff, Baruch. 1982. “For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Heuristics and Biases in Hindsight.” In Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed.

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Mehta. 2002. “Studying Rare Events Through Qualitative Case Studies: Lessons from a Study of Rampage School Shootings.” Sociological Methods & Research 31 (2):174. Harford, Timothy. 2006. The Undercover Economist. New York: Oxford University Press. Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Judson Mills, eds. 1999. Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a Pivotal Theory in Social Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Harsanyi, John C. 1969. “Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories.” World Politics 21 (4):513–38. Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

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See Nickerson (1998) for a review of confirmation bias. See Bond et al. (2007) for an example of confirmation bias in evaluating consumer products. See Marcus (2008, pp. 53–57) for a discussion of motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. Both biases are also closely to related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) according to which individuals actively seek to reconcile conflicting beliefs (“The car I just bought was more expensive than I can really afford” versus “The car I just bought is awesome”) by exposing themselves selectively to information that supports one view or discredits the other. 16.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished. This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue.

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This activates the mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us a bit of positive reinforcement, releasing a bit of dopamine, and leading us further down that line of thought. Without such organic cues, we try to rely on the re-Tweets and likes we get—even though we have not evolved over hundreds of millennia to respond to those symbols the same way. So, again, we are subjected to the cognitive dissonance between what we are being told and what we are feeling. It just doesn’t register in the same way. We fall out of sync. We cannot orchestrate human activity the same way a chip relegates tasks to the nether regions of its memory. We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

“I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.” One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes.

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In fact, they are seen as violating some essential quality of femininity—warmth, maternal instinct, communal feeling. Deep down we—men and women both—are not gender blind. We still expect women to act one way and men to act another. More than that, men and women both resist thinking any differently because it causes too much confusion and cognitive dissonance. We can glimpse the massive paradigm shift just on the horizon but we are not quite ready for it—a resistance that will fade as more and more women reach visible positions of power. IN 2008, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting.

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., 92, 153 Center for American Progress, 49, 124 Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 20 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 19, 200 Central California Research Laboratories, 170 Chasing Stars (Groysberg), 203 Cheers (television show), 56 Chicago, University of, 185, 251 Business School, 216, 218 Chicopee (Massachusetts), 179 Child care, 14, 54, 218, 221–22, 224, 242, 264 government options for, 244 jobs in, 9, 118, 124 China, 5, 166 China Post, The, 239 Christians, 97 evangelical, 92, 284n Chung, James, 107 Chung, Vivien, 251–52 Citigroup, 205 Civil rights, 132, 148 Civil Rights Commission, U.S., 146 Civil War, 128 Clerical schools, 120, 130 Clovis (California), 169 Coal (television show), 87 Cognitive dissonance, 33 Cohen, Bernard, 68 Cold War, 152 Colorado, 170 Colombia, 55, 81, 237 Color Me Flo (Kennedy), 65 Columbia University, 119 Business School, 200 Comedy Central, 126–27, 143 Competition, 52, 174, 244 academic, in Korea, 232–33 for college admissions, 160 in traditional societies, 174, 188–89 Confucianism, 233, 234, 257 Congress, U.S., 205 Cookie magazine, 11 Coontz, Stephanie, 51 Cooper, Hannah, 113–17, 119–20, 123–24, 126–27, 130, 141–43 Cornwell, Patricia, 176 Cosby, Bill, 90 Cosmopolitan magazine, 31, 40 Creal, Cameron, 156 Creative Korea party, 249 Crime, violent, 175–85 against women, decline in, 19, 176, 182 committed by women, 176–78, 184–85 Daily Beast, The, 219, 228 “Dancing on My Own” (song), 44 Dating sites, 52, 255 Daum, Meghan, 31 Delahunty, Jennifer, 158–59 Deloitte Consulting, 141, 226 Delta Kappa Epsilon, 17 Democratic Party, 148 Denney, Leandra, 88 Denny’s, 179 Despentes, Virginie, 238, 256 Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 228 Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney), 190 DiPrete, Thomas A., 159 Divided Labours (Browne), 174 Divorce, 39–40, 49, 66–68, 94, 98, 101, 269 in Asia, 6, 238, 255 of breadwinner wives and unemployed husbands, 51, 81–82 and career opportunities for women, 152–53, 157 custody of children after, 125 financial impacts of, 68, 91, 283n murder as alternative to, 170, 172 regional differences in rates of, 92 Doctors, female, 59, 117, 132, 255–56 specialties chosen by, 118, 140 Domestic violence, 14, 170, 183 Drew, Ina, 202–3 Druggists’ Bulletin, 129 Drug Topics magazine, 131 Duke University, 43 Dunham, Lena, 43 Dushane, Melodi, 179 eBay, 224 Ebony magazine, 89 Economist, The, 253 Ecuador, 55 Edge City (Garreau), 133 Edin, Kathryn, 92–93 Education Department, U.S., 161, 224 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 41, 63 Eliot, George, 163 Eliot, Lise, 161, 174 Ellis, Bret Easton, 173 El-Scari, Mustafaa, 89–90 Empowerment, 30, 38, 45, 190 EMTs, 264 Engineers, 13, 54, 73, 80, 108, 150, 196 England, Paula, 24–25 Enlightened Power (Gergen), 199 Ericsson, Ronald, 11–13 Ernst & Young, 226 Erotic capital, 30, 37–38 Esteve, Albert, 237–38 Evans, Harry, 228 Evans, Jenelle, 179 Ewha University, 232–33, 239 Facebook, 181, 195, 197, 215, 224, 225, 230 Faludi, Susan, 9 Farber, Henry, 86 Farrell, Warren, 69, 72 Fast-food restaurants, female violence in, 179 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 176 Fels, Anna, 217 Feminism, 11, 12, 14–15, 21, 50, 60, 65–66, 75–76, 155, 182, 233 accusations against, 160 career opportunities and, 115, 124, 129, 152, 198, 215, 219 changing cultural norms in response to, 175 erotic capital and, 30 in Iceland, 202 motherhood and, 75–76, 93, 125 second-wave, 58 sexual norms and, 37–38, 41 Title IX complaints filed by, 17 in views of murders by women, 178 Financial planning, 118 Fiorina, Carly, 219 Fisher, Helen, 266 Flaubert, Gustave, 118 Flexibility, workplace, 140 Florida, Lottery, winners in, 94 Florida State University, 42 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 12 Food preparation, 118, 124 Forbes magazine, 205 Forensic pathology, 118 Fort Lauderdale (Florida), 81, 180 Fortune 500 companies, 81, 198 Fortune magazine, 205 Fox Television, 225 France, 117, 237, 251, 252 Frankel, Lois, 34, 209 Franklin, Bernard, 154, 156 Friedan, Betty, 53 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 266–67 Fulbright scholarships, 255 G.I.

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

I would also suggest this feeling was so compelling, they struggled to let go and risk thudding back to normality. The community’s ability to disregard the inconvenient truths that sonic weapons don’t exist and sound doesn’t damage the brain was also an example of a common response to the experience of cognitive dissonance. This refers to the discomfort we feel when faced with information that doesn’t match a strong belief. Such is the feeling of unease created by cognitive dissonance, it often sees us rationalize what may at first seem like an irrational opinion or choice. False beliefs, like the certainty of the existence of a sonic weapon, are at the heart of the development of many functional disorders.

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Psychosomatic and functional disorders break the rules of every other medical problem because, for all the harm they do, they are sometimes indispensable. There are simply not enough words to express everything a person feels. The complexity of human emotions cannot be distilled into something rational and well thought-out for every person in every situation. Cognitive dissonance exists, as do moral dilemmas, inconceivable choices, inequality and despair. Life will always find a way to set traps that seem impossible to escape. People are not machines, making decisions from algorithms, logical and free of emotion, so perhaps we need release valves and coping mechanisms, face-saving ways of addressing conflict and grappling with ambivalence.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

The problem is that many of these efforts are likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill. A change of heart is needed: a recognition of privilege among the upper middle class. That’s one reason I have written this book, in the hope that it can help to hold up a mirror. Some of us in the upper middle class already feel a degree of cognitive dissonance about the advantages we pile up for our own kids, compared to the truncated opportunities we know exist for others. We want our children to do well, but also want to live in a fairer society. My friend and colleague E. J. Dionne put it to me this way: “I spend my weekdays decrying the problem of inequality, but then I spend my evenings and weekends adding to it.”

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When the daughter of a liberal columnist failed to make it into a highly selective private school, he called a well-placed friend who called a family member who happens to run the school. Then she got in. Each of these individuals is thoughtful and liberal enough to know, at some level, their actions were morally wrong. In each case, their actions conferred an unfair advantage. If more of us start to feel Dionne’s cognitive dissonance, some political space might open up for the kind of reforms I discuss at the end of this book. These make some demands of the upper middle class, not least when it comes to paying for them. The big question is whether we are willing to make some modest sacrifices in order to expand opportunities for others or whether, deep down, we would rather pull up the ladder.

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

The following is a short list of commonly-banned popular things: Drugs Gambling Prostitution Religion Speech Assembly Trade Migration Weapons Labor Books Money This error may arise from failure to accept the Axiom of Resistance [122] while continuing to work in Bitcoin. This is likely to produce cognitive dissonance [123] . The subsequent search for relief may lead one here. However the error eventually becomes undeniable, which may lead to a rage-quit [124] . Hoarding Fallacy There is a theory that an increased level of hoarding produces an increased level of security in a coin . This is the similar to the Dumping Fallacy [125] but is not necessarily based on a split .

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* * * [10] https://libbitcoin.info [11] https://bitcoincore.org [12] Chapter: Dedicated Cost Principle [13] https://www.dtu.dk/english [14] https://twitter.com [15] https://libbitcoin.info [16] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics [17] Chapter: Inflation Principle [18] Chapter: Savings Relation [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki [20] Chapter: Foreword [25] https://libbitcoininstitute.org [26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [27] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-501c3-organizations [28] Chapter: Value Proposition [51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [53] Chapter: Inflation Principle [54] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [55] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [56] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [57] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry [84] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [85] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [86] Chapter: Hearn Error [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [88] Chapter: Value Proposition [89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal [90] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [91] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [92] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [93] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [94] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [95] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [96] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [98] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [100] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [101] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [102] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [103] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [104] http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm [105] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [106] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [107] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [110] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [111] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [112] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [115] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [116] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [117] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [118] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [119] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [120] Chapter: Reservation Principle [121] Chapter: Blockchain Fallacy [122] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance [124] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rage_quit [125] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [126] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [127] Chapter: Inflation Principle [128] Chapter: Lunar Fallacy [131] Chapter: Hearn Error [132] Chapter: Value Proposition [134] Chapter: Other Means Principle [135] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [136] https://www.imf.org [137] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [138] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [139] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [140] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [141] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [142] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [143] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [144] Chapter: Hearn Error [145] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [146] Chapter: Public Data Principle [147] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [148] Chapter: Other Means Principle [149] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [150] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz [151] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [152] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/1075 [153] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [154] https://www.asicboost.com/patent [155] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [156] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [157] Chapter: Public Data Principle [158] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [159] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [160] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [161] Chapter: Value Proposition [162] Chapter: Other Means Principle [174] https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/bitcoin-vs-gold-10-crystal-clear-comparisons [175] Chapter: Stability Property [176] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [177] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [178] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [181] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [182] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer [183] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [184] Chapter: Social Network Principle [185] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)#Directed_graph [186] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) [189] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [190] Chapter: Public Data Principle [191] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [192] Chapter: Cockroach Fallacy [193] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [194] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography [195] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software [196] Chapter: Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy [201] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [203] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [204] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [205] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [206] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [207] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [208] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market [209] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177 [210] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [211] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [212] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [213] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_surface [214] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [215] Chapter: Centralization Risk [216] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [217] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [218] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer [220] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [221] Chapter: Scalability Principle [222] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [223] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [224] Chapter: Value Proposition [225] Chapter: Other Means Principle [226] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [227] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [229] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [230] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [231] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [232] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [233] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [234] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [235] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [236] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility [237] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [238] https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money/html/p/81 [246] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [247] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [248] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [249] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081616/understanding-taxes-physical-goldsilver-investments.asp [250] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [251] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [252] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate#Parallel_exchange_rate [261] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [262] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [263] Chapter: Reservation Principle [264] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [265] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [266] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [273] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [274] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [275] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [276] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [277] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [278] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [279] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [280] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [281] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [282] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System [283] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/pages/discount-rates/current-discount-rates [309] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [310] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/16/how-tight-jeans-almost-ruined-americas-money [311] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html [312] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [313] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona [314] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [315] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [316] Chapter: Value Proposition [320] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return [324] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [328] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [329] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm [330] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [331] https://www.coindesk.com/uasf-revisited-will-bitcoins-user-revolt-leave-lasting-legacy [332] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [337] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [338] Chapter: Stability Property [339] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [340] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [341] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [342] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [343] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [344] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [345] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [346] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [347] http://primecoin.io [349] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox [351] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [352] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function [356] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [357] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value [358] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [359] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake [360] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [361] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [362] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [364] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [365] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function [366] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp [367] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [368] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [369] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [370] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [371] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring [372] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [375] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [376] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win-win_game [377] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [379] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [380] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [381] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [382] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [385] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [386] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [387] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [388] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [389] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [390] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [391] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [392] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [393] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [394] https://www.federalreserve.gov [395] Chapter: State Banking Principle [396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement [397] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [398] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note [399] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [400] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [401] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund [404] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [405] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [406] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [407] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [410] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [411] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf [413] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [414] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [416] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility [418] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [419] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam [420] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [423] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [424] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [425] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [426] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [427] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [428] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system [429] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [430] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [431] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [432] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [433] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [434] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin [435] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [436] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [437] Chapter: Brand Arrogation [438] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core [439] https://libbitcoin.info [440] Chapter: Maximalism Definition [441] Chapter: Custodial Risk Principle [443] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function [444] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [446] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [447] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [448] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [450] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [451] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [452] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham's_law_(Thiers'_law) [453] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [460] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [461] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [462] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [463] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [464] Chapter: Network Effect Fallacy [465] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [466] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [467] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [474] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [475] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [476] Chapter: Substitution Principle [478] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [479] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [482] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [483] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [484] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [485] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf [486] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [487] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [488] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [489] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [490] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [491] Chapter: Other Means Principle [495] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [496] Chapter: Value Proposition [497] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [498] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [499] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [500] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [501] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [502] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [503] Chapter: State Banking Principle [504] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org [505] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance [507] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [508] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics) [509] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [510] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [511] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [515] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [516] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/996 [517] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [518] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves [519] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [520] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Money_creation_by_commercial_banks [521] Chapter: State Banking Principle [522] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/default.htm [543] Chapter: Savings Relation [544] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [545] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [548] Chapter: Production and Consumption [561] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [562] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [563] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [564] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [565] Chapter: Production and Consumption [566] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [569] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [570] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [571] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [572] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [573] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [574] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking [602] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [603] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [604] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining [605] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [607] Chapter: Risk Free Return Fallacy [635] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [636] Chapter: Production and Consumption [637] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [639] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [640] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [641] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [642] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [643] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [644] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [645] Chapter: Savings Relation [646] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [647] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility [648] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [649] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [650] Chapter: Production and Consumption [651] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [652] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [653] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [654] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/926 [655] Chapter: Expression Principle [656] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [657] Chapter: Pure Bank [658] Chapter: Reservation Principle [659] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [661] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [662] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [663] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [664] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [665] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [666] Chapter: Pure Bank [667] Chapter: Reserve Definition [668] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend [677] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [678] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve [679] https://www.fdic.gov [680] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [681] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [682] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [683] Chapter: Inflation Principle [684] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [685] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation [686] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [687] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage [688] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) [689] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [690] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_(finance) [691] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [692] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [693] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest [699] Chapter: Savings Relation [700] Chapter: Inflation Principle [704] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [705] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [706] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [707] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/989 [708] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement [709] Chapter: Expression Principle [715] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [726] Chapter: Savings Relation [727] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [732] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [733] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [734] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [735] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [739] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [740] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [741] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [742] Chapter: Inflation Principle [756] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [757] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [758] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [759] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [760] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange [761] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [762] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [763] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity [764] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [765] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [766] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [767] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [779] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [780] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [788] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [789] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [790] Chapter: Stability Property [791] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [797] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [798] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power [799] Chapter: Inflation Principle [803] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money [808] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [809] https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contractual+Claim [810] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [811] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization [812] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote [813] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate [814] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [815] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/electronic-money.asp [816] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [819] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money [823] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [824] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [825] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [826] Chapter: Reserve Definition [827] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem [828] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [829] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [830] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [831] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [833] Chapter: Collectible Tautology [837] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [838] Chapter: Savings Relation [843] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate [844] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [855] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [856] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [857] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [858] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [860] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [861] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [874] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_past_each_other [875] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [876] Chapter: Value Proposition [877] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallism [878] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [879] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism [880] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [886] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run [887] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [888] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [889] Chapter: State Banking Principle [890] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [891] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation [892] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [893] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [894] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [895] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [897] Chapter: Inflation Principle [898] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [899] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [901] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [905] https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 [906] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [907] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [908] Chapter: Stability Property [909] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx [910] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product [911] https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 [912] Chapter: Stock to Flow Fallacy [913] Chapter: Reservation Principle [914] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [915] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [916] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/949 [917] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [918] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [919] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [920] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [921] Chapter: State Banking Principle [922] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [923] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [924] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [931] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [932] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [933] https://voxeu.org/index.php?

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.23 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24 Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals.

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In the examples I mentioned in introducing the Moralization Gap, perpetrators rationalize a harm they committed out of self-interested motives (reneging on a promise, robbing or raping a victim). But people also rationalize harms they have been pressured into committing in the service of someone else’s motives. They can edit their beliefs to make the action seem justifiable to themselves, the better to justify it to others. This process is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it is a major tactic of self-deception.285 Social psychologists like Milgram, Zimbardo, Baumeister, Leon Festinger, Albert Bandura, and Herbert Kelman have documented that people have many ways of reducing the dissonance between the regrettable things they sometimes do and their ideal of themselves as moral agents.286 One of them is euphemism—the reframing of a harm in words that somehow make it feel less immoral.

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Yet the mere process of identifying our inner demons may be a first step to bringing them under control. The second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology. Academic research increasingly became a part of the conventional wisdom, including dominance hierarchies, the Milgram and Asch experiments, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it wasn’t just scientific psychology that filtered into public awareness; it was the general habit of seeing human affairs through a psychological lens. This half-century saw the growth of a species-wide self-consciousness, encouraged by literacy, mobility, and technology: the way the camera follows us in slow-mo, the way we look to us all.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton

book value, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, rent control, sealed-bid auction, transaction costs, zero-sum game

This combination of support and attack may seem inconsistent. Psychologically, it is; the inconsistency helps make it work. A well-known theory of psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance, holds that people dislike inconsistency and will act to eliminate it. By attacking a problem, such as speeding trucks on a neighborhood street, and at the same time giving the company representative positive support, you create cognitive dissonance for him. To overcome this dissonance, he will be 30 tempted to dissociate himself from the problem in order to join you in doing something about it. Fighting hard on the substantive issues increases the pressure for an effective solution; giving support to the human beings on the other side tends to improve your relationship and to increase the likelihood of reaching agreement.

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

Each of these gestures was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Kim wanted to take North Korea in a new direction. His engagement with China, South Korea, and the United States since January 2018 has revived this line of thinking, even amid fresh reports about North Korea’s progress in its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Observers find the cognitive dissonance of Kim’s actions both disconcerting and promising. But pitted against this hope is the sense that we are certainly heading toward catastrophe. When one considers the frighteningly rapid advancement of North Korea’s cyber, nuclear, and conventional capabilities, the countless rows of soldiers marching in impossible unity at military parades, and the belligerent threats, Kim is suddenly no longer the crazy fat kid but a ten-foot-tall giant with untold and unlimited power: unstoppable, unpredictable, undeterrable, omnipotent.

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The United Nations in 2019 reported that of the 25 million citizens, nearly 11 million are undernourished, 140,000 children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, and nearly 20 percent of children are stunted, making these citizens more vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that millions do not have access to basic sanitation facilities or clean water. Kim’s recognition of the cognitive dissonance between government propaganda and lived realities might be driving his efforts to create “Pyonghattan,” a way to combat fraying ties between the jangmadang generation and the regime, and keep the state relevant despite the decimation of the public distribution system. But if people are not convinced by soft power, Kim has all of the tools of repression built by his grandfather and his father to enforce compliance.

…

The picture of the two leaders slurping the beloved noodle dish lit up South Korean social media. Inspired South Koreans waxed poetic about the noodles, and a cold-noodle mania swept the country, with long lines forming outside restaurants that served the dish. Kim and Moon even held hands at one point and capped off the summit by watching a concert. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Kim’s metamorphosis had begun. A THAW AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS Kim Jong Un’s image rehabilitation began with his New Year’s address, the same speech in which he barked about the “nuclear button” on his desk, celebrated North Korea’s “powerful nuclear deterrent,” and uttered not-so-veiled hints about being able to hit the United States, given the regime’s professed successes in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles during the previous year.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Alternatively, maybe he’s sick or injured? Dispositionalism emerges psychologically in two important ways. First, it makes us uncomfortable with our own inconsistencies. If you’ve had a course in Social Psychology, you might recognize this as Cognitive Dissonance. The available evidence suggests that WEIRD people suffer more severely from Cognitive Dissonance and do a range of mental gymnastics to relieve their discomfort. Second, dispositional thinking also influences how we judge others. Psychologists label this phenomenon the Fundamental Attribution Error, though it’s clearly not that fundamental; it’s WEIRD.

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Many had simply assumed that they could confidently make claims about human brains, hormones, motivations, emotions, and decision-making based on studies with American college students or any other WEIRD sample.54 TABLE 1.1. KEY ELEMENTS IN WEIRD PSYCHOLOGY Individualism and Personal Motivation ■  Self-focus, self-esteem, and self-enhancement ■  Guilt over shame ■  Dispositional thinking (personality): Attribution Errors and Cognitive Dissonance ■  Low conformity and deference to tradition/elders ■  Patience, self-regulation, and self-control ■  Time thrift and hard work (value of labor) ■  Desire for control and love of choice Impersonal Prosociality (and Related Worldviews) ■  Impartial principles over contextual particularism ■  Trust, fairness, honesty, and cooperation with anonymous others, strangers, and impersonal institutions (e.g., government) ■  An emphasis on mental states, especially in moral judgment ■  Muted concerns for revenge but willingness to punish third parties ■  Reduced in-group favoritism ■  Free will: notion that individuals make their own choices and those choices matter ■  Moral universalism: thinking that moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist ■  Linear time and notions of progress Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities and Biases ■  Analytical over holistic thinking ■  Attention to foreground and central actors ■  Endowment effect—overvaluing our own stuff ■  Field independence: isolating objects from background ■  Overconfidence (of our own valued abilities) Despite the growing evidence, many psychologists and economists remain either in shock or denial, as it turns out that much of the material in textbooks and academic journals, as well as in popular works of nonfiction, don’t actually tell us about human psychology, but merely reflect WEIRD cultural psychology.

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Understanding this helps explain why WEIRD people are so much more likely than others to impute the causes of someone’s behavior to their personal dispositions over their contexts and relationships (the Fundamental Attribution Error), and why they are so uncomfortable with their own personal inconsistencies (Cognitive Dissonance). Reacting to this culturally constructed worldview, WEIRD people are forever seeking their “true selves” (good luck!). Thus, while they certainly exist across societies and back into history, dispositions in general, and personalities specifically, are just more important in WEIRD societies.46 THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT Traditionally, Hadza hunter-gatherers engaged in no commerce among themselves and little trade with other groups.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

They generated useful resources but, perhaps more importantly, they created a sense of common purpose. An everyday assumption is that attitudes shape behaviours. Yet psychological studies have shown that very often it works the other way around: behaviours shape attitudes.7 It is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: when there is a discrepancy between a person’s attitudes and their behaviour, such as when you find yourself doing a ‘boring’ task for little reward, your attitude will often move into line with your behaviour (e.g. you conclude that the task is not so dull after all, and that it enables you to relax and clear your mind).

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Chapter 1: Early Steps 1 One of the most basic psychological effects is how familiarity breeds liking, from random sequences of notes to how much we like and trust institutions. 2 I’m grateful to Rory Sutherland for first drawing my attention to the fascinating example of how Frederick the Great encouraged Prussians to adopt the potato. 3 Quoted in Quarterly Journal of Military History, August 2009. 4 UCLA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/victoria.html. 5 The Rotherhithe Tunnel was opened around 1908, and today carries the A101 road from Limehouse to Rotherhithe. As its sharp turns are now considered dangerous, it has a speed limit of just 20 mph. 6 Heide, Robert, and Gilman, John, Home Front America: Popular Culture of the World War II Era. p.36 ISBN 0-8118-0927-7 OCLC 31207708. 7 Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. A classic illustration of the effect, was a study in which students had to do a boring, repetitive task, but were then paid either $1 or $20 to persuade someone in the waiting room that it was fun. When subsequently asked to rate the experiment, those paid just $1 were much more likely to rate it as interesting than those paid $20.

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(page numbers in italics refer to illustrations) advertising: and alcohol 100–1 and humour 100 and shock 98–100, 100 and smoking 99, 100 airport expansion 98 alcohol 100–1, 127 and calories 100 and pregnancy 126–7 Alexander, Danny 281 anaesthetics 17 ‘animal spirits’ 207, 210, 211 Aos, Steve 282 Ariely, Dan 96–7, 134, 325 Aristotle 221, 240 Armstrong, Hilary 34 Asch, Solomon 26 ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) 189 Ashford, Maren 57, 83 attentional spotlight 83–4 Ayres, Ian 142 Bazerman, Max 134, 325 Beales, Greg 36 Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) (see also nudging): arguments lost by 212–14 becomes social-purpose company 350 beginnings of x–xi, 50–8, 56, 58, 341 current numbers employed by xiii, 341 current trials by 341 expansion of xiii governments follow 11 initial appointments to 56–7, 56 initial scepticism towards 9 most frequent early criticisms of 333 naming of x–xi, 52–3 objectives of 54–5 and transparency, efficacy and accountability, see under nudging and webpage design 275–9, 276 World Bank’s request to 125 year of scepticism experienced by 274 behavioural predators 312–13 Benartzi, Shlomo 64 benefits, see welfare benefits Bentham, Jeremy 221–2 BIG lottery 283 ‘Big Society’ 43, 50, 142, 250 BIT, see Behavioural Insights Team Blair, Tony 151, 225 and behavioural approaches in government 302 Brown takes over from 36, 260–1 review into tenure of 34 Strategy Unit of 31 Tories’ admiration of 50 Bogotá 135, 146 Bohnet, Iris 123 Britton, John 188 Brown, Gordon 34 becomes PM 36, 260–1 Byrne, Liam 47 Cameron, David 151 BIT set up by 8 and Coalition Agreement 38 and data transparency 159 Hilton appointed by 43 and randomised controlled trials 274 and response to notes 186 and smoking 194 and well-being 225–8, 227, 250 car tax 3, 91, 92, 275–8 carrier bags 23 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Chand, Raj 146 charities 116–20, 142–4, 144 and reciprocity 116 Chetty, Raj 64 childbirth, see pregnancy and childbirth Cialdini, Robert 34–6, 47, 107–8, 109, 113, 121–2, 308, 312 Clegg, Nick, and Coalition Agreement 38 Cochrane, Dr Archie 269–71, 295, 297 Cochrane Collaboration 271 cocktail-party effect 86 cognitive dissonance 21 cognitive psychology 27–9, 28 Colbourne, Tim 215 College of Policing 282, 289 Collins, Kevan 283, 285 Community First 254–5 commuting 219–20, 263–4 conflict and war 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 cooling-off periods 77 Council Tax 95 crime prevention (see also theft): ‘scared straight’ approach to 266–8, 267 and ‘What Works’ institutes 289 Darley, J. 27, 110 data transparency 153–84 and better nudges 179–80 and consumer feedback 161–9, 167 improvements driven by 168–9 in public sector 163–9, 167 and food labelling 172, 178 and machine-readable code 154, 157, 159 and RACAP 157 in restaurants 178 and understandable information 176–9 on cancer 178–9 on car safety 177–8 on financial products 177 and utility suppliers 154–60, 155 Davey, Ed 157 Deaton, Angus 243 decision fatigue 141 Deep Blue 7 Diener, Ed 231 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) 272 discontinuity design 161–2 doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 Dolan, Paul 47–8, 220 Down, Nick 113 drivers’ behaviour 18, 18 Duckworth, Angela 247 Dunn, Elizabeth 220, 237, 250, 256 Durand, Martine 243 Dweck, Carol 343 e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282 EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) framework 10, 60, 149, 349 Attractive 80–105, 81, 85, 94 Easy 62–79, 68, 72, 73 and jobcentres 200 Social 106–25, 115, 118, 120, 122 (see also social influence) Timely 126–49, 129 Easterlin, Richard 238 eating habits 139, 171, 307 (see also obesity/weight issues) and choice 306–7 and food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 and food tax 301–2 and healthy/unhealthy food 41, 82, 101–2, 216, 302 ‘mindless’ 171 Economic and Social Research Council 283 economy, UK 205–12 econs 6–7, 178, 223 education 137, 282 financial 64 further 146–7 and timely intervention 146–7 and ‘What Works’ institutes 283–7, 284, 286 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 Effectiveness and Efficiency (Cochrane) 295 endowment effect 140 Energy Performance Certificate 179 energy ratings 135 energy and utility suppliers, see utility suppliers Enterprise Bill 159 Epley, Nick 260–1 established behaviour, see habits ethnicity, and recruitment 137–9, 344 experimental government 266–98, 270, 272, 276 and crime prevention 266–8, 267 ethics of 325–8 (see also nudging: and accountability) and growth vouchers 279–80 and organ donation 275–9, 276 and overseas health-aid programmes 273 and radical incrementalism 291 and ‘What Works’ institutes 281–90, 292–4 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 experimental psychology 24–6 farmers 145 ‘fat tax’ 301–2 (see also eating habits) fertiliser 145 Feynman, Richard 296, 297 financial crisis 45, 46, 206, 336 (see also UK economy) financial products 177, 206 fines, collecting 3–4, 52, 89, 90–1 Fischhoff, Baruch ix Fisher, Ronald 291 Fiske, Susan 84, 86, 325, 345 food pyramid/plate illustrations 41, 41 forms, prefilling 73–4 fossils 35 Frederick the Great 15, 16 Freud, Lord 279 Gallagher, Rory 55, 88–9, 158, 197–8, 204, 343, 349 gender equality, and company boards 123 Genovese, Kitty 109–10 Gigerenzer, Gerd 178 Gilbert, Danny 139, 220 Gino, Francesca 347 giving 116–20, 142–4, 144, 250 God Complex 269 Gove, Michael 287 Grant, Adam 347 Green Book 46, 228, 258, 259 Grice, Joe 233 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 222–4, 255 (see also UK economy) Grove, Rohan 211 growth vouchers 279–80 Gyani, Alex 197–8, 203, 204, 343, 349 habits: and early intervention 128–32 key moments to prompt or reshape 132–9 and tax payments 131 Hallsworth, Michael 48, 113 Hancock, Matthew 279 hand washing 99, 140 happy-slave problem 231 Haynes, Laura 56–7 hearing 25 Heider, Fritz 345 Helliwell, John 226–7, 232 Henry VIII 17 herd instinct 161 Heywood, Sir Jeremy 2, 215, 217, 281 The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Halpern) 44 Highway Code 20 Hillman, Nick 165 Hilton, Steve x, 43–4, 51, 53–4, 159, 190, 214, 215, 225–6, 247, 250 and randomised controlled trials 274 hindsight bias ix HMRC 2–3, 8, 87–8, 89, 113, 115, 118, 120, 181–2 (see also tax payments) BIT member’s secondment to 113 non-tax-related business communications sent via 210–11 and online tax forms 74 and randomised controlled trials 274 Homer, Lin 210 honesty 133–4 honours 98 horses’ behaviour 18–19, 19 hospitals: and doctors’ handwriting 72, 72 and patient charts 72–3, 73 Hume, David 221 Hunt, Stefan 209 Hurd, Nick 250 Hutcheson, Francis 221 hyperbolic discounting 139 imprinting 128–9, 129 infant development 128–30 (see also pregnancy and childbirth) and early mother–child ‘meshing’ 129 (see also imprinting) in geese 128–9, 129 and mother’s depression 129 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini) 34–5, 312 Inglehart, Ronald F. 229 Inland Revenue, see HMRC Institute for Government 40, 46–50 J-PAL 294 jobcentres 120–1, 197–205, 200, 201, 343, 349 (see also unemployment) John, Peter 96 The Joyless Economy (Scitovsky) 223 judges 140 Kahneman, Daniel 27, 29–30, 32, 48, 220, 226, 230 BIT’s work commended by 11 Kasparov, Garry 7 Kennedy, Robert F. 218, 222 Kettle, Stuart 125 Keynes, John Maynard 210, 211–12 King, Dom 48, 72 Kirkman, Elspeth 121, 146 knife crime 122 Kuznets, Simon 222 Laibson, David 64–5, 245, 307 Latene, B. 27, 110 Layard, Richard 225, 242, 248 Lazy Town 82 Legatum Institute 242–3 letters/messages, simplifying 71–3 and handwriting 72 in hospitals 72–3, 73 and prefilled forms 73–5 Letwin, Oliver 213, 217, 281, 295 Life satisfaction (discussion paper) 225 (see also well-being) Linos, Elizabeth 137, 344 List, John 286 litter 23, 35, 94, 107–8, 114 Loewenstein, George 307, 324, 345 loft/wall insulation 3, 75–6 Lorenz, Konrad 128–9, 129 lotteries, as incentive 94–6 Luca, Michael 161–2, 166, 177 Lyard, Richard 238 Lyons, Michael 250 MacFadden, Pat 34 Mackenzie, Polly 51, 215 Major, John 46 Manzi, James 295–6 Marcel, Anthony 136 Martin, Steve 113 Matheson, Jill 227 Mayhew, Pat 66 Mazar, Nina 347 Meacher, Michael 224 mental health 246–9 Merkel, Angela 243 midata, see data transparency Milgram, Stanley 26, 327 Miliband, Ed 34 military recruitment advertising 87 Milkman, Katherine 323 Mill, John Stuart 221 MINDSPACE framework 49–50, 50, 60, 72 motorcycle helmets 66–7 Mulgan, Geoff 225, 301–2 Mullainathan, Sendhil 343 National Citizenship Service (NCS) 251–2, 251 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 195, 271, 281, 290 Nesta 350 Nguyen, Sam 55, 197–8, 343 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 240 nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193, 193 (see also smoking) 9/11 28 Norton, Mike 256, 347 Nudge (Thaler, Sunstein) ix–x, 6–7, 39, 157, 234 Nudge Unit, see Behavioural Insights Team nudging (see also Behavioural Insights Team; EAST framework): and accountability 324–5 and experimentation, ethics of 325–8 and the public voice 328–32, 329 defined and discussed 22–4 and efficacy 304, 315–24 and familiarity with approach 319–24 relative 318–19 improving, with better data 179–80 rediscovery of 13 and subconscious priming 136 and transparency 304–15 and behavioural predators 312–13 and choice 306, 314–15 and effective communication vs propaganda 307–11, 311 Nurse Family Partnership 129 Obama, Barack 39–40, 254 acceptance speech of 38 Obama, Michelle 101 obesity/weight issues 101, 170–3, 307 (see also eating habits) in children, levelling of 173 and food labelling 172 and ‘mindless’ eating 171 O’Donnell, Sir Gus (later Lord) 45–6, 47, 57, 225, 227, 227, 242, 258 OECD 293, 340 Office of War Information (US) 21 Olds, David 130 online shopping 109 Ord, Toby 273 organ donation 9, 37, 52, 275–9 Orwell, George 309, 311 Osborne, George 45 and data transparency 159 O’Shaughnessy, James 247 Overman, Henry 288 Paley, William 221 paternalism x, 33, 51, 316 Pelenur, Marcos 135 pensions xii, 9, 62–5, 331 and choice 307 PMSU’s paper on 33 people’s parliaments 332 perception 24–5, 25 Personality responsibility and behaviour change (discussion paper) 301–2 police, ethnic recruits into 137–9, 344 potato consumption 15–16 pregnancy and childbirth 126–7 (see also infant development) Prescott, John 302 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) 31–3, 47, 53, 225, 337 and Personality responsibility and behaviour change paper 301–2 psychological operations (PsyOps) 30, 308–9, 333 Putnam, Robert 253 radical incrementalism 291 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) 8, 113, 132, 182, 252, 270, 274–5, 283, 297–8, 339 and HMRC 274 Raseman, Sophie 157 RECAP 157 recycling 35 Red Tape Challenge 57 Reeves, Richard 51 Revenue and Customs, see HMRC road fuel 23 road traffic, see vehicles Roberto, Christine 101, 178 Rogers, Todd 146, 321 Rolls-Royce 208 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 21 Ruda, Simon 125, 137, 214, 344 Sainsbury, Lord (David) 46–7 Sanders, Michael 57, 116, 119, 142–3, 146 Scheving, Magnús 81, 82–3 Scitovsky, Tibor 223 Scott, Stephen 247 Seligman, Marty 232, 247 Sen, Amartya 231 Service, Owain 2, 56, 69 Sesame Street 101 Shadbolt, Sir Nigel 158 Shafir, Eldar 343, 345 sight 24–5, 25 Silva, Rohan x–xi, 43–5, 51, 53–4, 159 Singer, Tania 345 small businesses 205–9 passim (see also UK economy) smart disclosure 157 smoke detectors 99 smoking 9, 23, 99, 100, 138 and e-cigarettes 188–97, 193, 215 estimated years of life saved by 195, 216 and non-smokers 193–4 and nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) 193 and pregnancy 126–7 prevalence of 189 and quit rates 192–3, 193 by socio-economic grouping 195 SNAP framework 48 social influence 26–7, 106–25 and bystander intervention 110 dark side of 109–10 and litter 107–8, 114 norms of: descriptive vs injunctive 108 picking apart 107–11 in policy 111–15 and online shopping 109 and personal touch 119–21 and reciprocity 115–17 social psychology 107 Soman, Dilip 337 Southern Cross station staircase 85 speed bumps 76–7 Sportacus 81–3, 81 Stanford Prison 26–7 Steinberg, Tom 254 stickk.com 142 subconscious priming 136 suicide 67–9, 68, 77 Sunstein, Cass ix–x, 6–7, 22, 39–42, 44, 57, 73, 305, 307, 314 and RACAP 157 supermarkets 80–1, 84, 86, 171–2 and food labelling 173, 178 Sutherland, Rory 187–8 tailored defaults. 307 tax payments 3, 8, 23, 52, 87–8, 88, 89, 112–14, 118, 120, 131, 181–2 in Central America 125 Council Tax 95 and habits 131 and lottery incentive 96–7 and online tax forms 74–5 and randomised controlled trials 274 road duty 3, 91, 92, 275–8 social-norm-based approach to 113, 115 Tetlock, Philip 192 Thaler, Richard 6–7, 22, 39, 44, 50, 51, 53, 57, 305 and BIT’s name 53 and RACAP 157 theft (see also crime prevention): mobile phones 173–6, 174, 175 and target-hardening 78, 214 vehicles: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 time, perception of 128 time-inconsistent preferences 128, 139–45 Times 301–2 tobacco, see smoking Turner Lord (Adair) xii, 33, 331 Tversky, Amos 27, 29, 230 UK economy 205–12, 215, 216 (see also financial crisis; Gross Domestic Product) unemployment 120–1, 122, 197–205, 200, 201, 216, 343, 349 (see also jobcentres) and well-being 255–6 utilitarianism 221–2 utility suppliers: and data transparency 154–60 switching among 153–4, 155–6, 155, 160, 213 vehicles 18–20 safety of 177–8 and speeding 76–7, 92–5, 100 varied penalties for 147 thefts of: cars 169–70 motorcycles 66–7 Victoria, Queen 17 visas 132 Vlaev, Ivo 48 Volpe, Kevin 320 voter registration 95–6 Walsh, Emily 123 Wansink, Brian 171, 306 war 20–1 war and conflict 20–1, 27, 87, 344–5 weight, see obesity/weight issues welfare benefits 8 and conditional cash transfers 135, 145 and timing of payments 135 well-being 218–65 and community 249–55, 251 and commuting 219–20, 263–4 by country 229, 238, 243 drivers of 235–41 material factors 237–9 social factors 239–41 (see also well-being: and community) sunny disposition 235–7 early concepts of 220–2 and GDP 222–4, 255 and governance and service design 258–62 and happy-slave problem 231 and income, work and markets 255–7 and Life satisfaction paper 225 measuring 222–4 big questions concerning 231–3 subjective 228–31 and mental health 246–9 and National Citizenship Service programme 251–2, 251 by occupation 244 and policy 242–3, 258 subjective 224, 228–31 and giving 250 (see also giving) by occupation 244–5 and prostitutes 231–2 UK government’s programme on 226–8, 233–5, 234, 240 unemployment’s effects on 255–6 and utilitarianism 221–2 What Works institutes 281–90, 292–4, 340 Centre for Ageing Better 282 Centre for Crime Reduction 289 Centre for Local Economic Growth (LEG) 282, 288 Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) 282, 288 Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) 282, 283–7, 284, 286 When Harry Met Sally 160–1 ‘wicked problems’ 170 Willetts, David 165 World Bank 125, 293, 309, 340 World Values Survey (WVS) 229 yelp.com 161–2 Young, Lord 279 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THERE ARE MANY people who deserve thanks and credit for the work and results of the Behavioural Insights Team that this book describes, and a rather shorter list for the writing and editing of the book itself.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit—and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish. Leon Festinger first proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance, today one of the most famous concepts in psychology, in 1957. When we experience an event that counteracts a prior belief, he argued, the resulting tension is too much for us to handle; we can’t hold two opposing beliefs at the same time, at least not consciously. “The individual strives,” Festinger wrote in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, “toward consistency within himself.” True, here and there one might find exceptions. But overall, “It is still overwhelmingly true that related opinions or attitudes are consistent with one another.

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., ref1, ref2 Carnegie, Andrew ref1 Carnegie, Dale ref1, ref2 Carney, Bruce ref1 Carr, Sarah ref1 Carro, Gregory ref1 Catch Me If You Can, ref1 caterpillars ref1 Cayuga, HMCS ref1, ref2 Cerf, Moran ref1, ref2 Chabris, Christopher ref1 Chadwick, Cassie ref1 Chaiken, Shelly ref1 chameleon effect ref1 change strategies ref1, ref2, ref3 Chaucer, Geoffrey ref1 Chen, Peter ref1 choices ref1, ref2, ref3 Chonko, Lawrence ref1 Choong, Lee ref1, ref2 Christie, Richard ref1 Cialdini, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Clore, Gerald ref1 Codol, Jean-Paul ref1 cognitive dissonance ref1 Cohen, Steven ref1 coins ref1, ref2 commons ref1 communities ref1 Confidence Man, The (Melville), ref1 confirmation bias ref1, ref2, ref3 Consumer Fraud Research Group ref1 control, illusion of ref1 conversations ref1 convincer ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cooke, Janet ref1 corporate fraud ref1 Craigslist ref1, ref2 credibility ref1 creeping determinism ref1 Crichton, Judy ref1 Crichton, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Crichton, Sarah ref1 cuckoo finch ref1 cults ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 culture ref1 Cummine, Andrew ref1 Curry, Robert ref1 Dal Cin, Sonya ref1 dark triad of traits ref1, ref2 psychopathy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Davis, Barbara ref1 Dean, Jeremy ref1 DeBruine, Lisa ref1 decision making ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dedalus Foundation ref1, ref2 default effects ref1, ref2 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Jr., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Crichton and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 at monasteries ref1, ref2, ref3 as navy surgeon ref1, ref2, ref3 “papering” tactic of ref1 as prison warden ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 school gifts from ref1 Demara, Ferdinand Waldo, Sr., ref1 Demara, Mary McNelly ref1, ref2 determinism, creeping ref1 Deveraux, Jude ref1 De Védrines, Christine ref1 De Védrines, Ghislaine ref1, ref2 “Diddling” (Poe), ref1 disasters ref1 disrupt-then-reframe ref1 Dittisham Lady, ref1, ref2 door-in-the-face ref1, ref2 Drake, Francis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dunbar, Robin ref1, ref2, ref3 Dunning, David ref1 Dutch tulip mania ref1 Dylan, Bob ref1 Ebola crisis ref1 Egan, Michael ref1 Eiffel Tower ref1 Ekman, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 elaboration likelihood model ref1 elder fraud ref1 Elizabeth I, Queen ref1 Emler, Nicholas ref1, ref2 emotions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 anticipation of ref1 donations and ref1 stories and ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 endowment effect ref1, ref2 entrapment effect ref1 environment ref1 Epley, Nicholas ref1, ref2, ref3 Epstein, Seymour ref1, ref2 Erdely, Sabrina Rubin ref1 Evans, Elizabeth Glendower ref1 even-a-penny scenario ref1, ref2 exceptionalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 expectancies ref1, ref2 exposure ref1, ref2 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), ref1 Eyal, Tal ref1 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 facial expressions ref1, ref2, ref3 Fallon, James ref1 familiarity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farms Not Factories ref1 FBI ref1, ref2, ref3 fear ref1 Feldman, Robert ref1 Fenimore, Karin ref1 Festinger, Leon ref1, ref2, ref3 Fetzer, Barbara ref1 Figes, Orlando ref1 Fischhoff, Baruch ref1, ref2 Fiske, Susan ref1 Fitzgerald, Alan and Eilis ref1 Fitzgerald, Elizabeth (Madame Zingara), ref1, ref2 fix ref1 Folt, Carol ref1 football ref1 foot-in-the-door ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Frampton, Anne-Marie ref1, ref2, ref3 Frampton, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Frank, Jerome ref1 Franklin, Benjamin ref1, ref2 Franklin Syndicate ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fraser, Scott ref1 Freedman, Ann ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Freeman, Jonathan ref1 French, John ref1, ref2 Fund for the New American Century ref1 future ref1 predicting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Galinsky, Adam ref1 gambler’s fallacy ref1, ref2 Gant, Robert ref1 Geis, Florence ref1 genetics ref1 Gerard, Harold ref1 Gerhartsreiter, Christian ref1 Gifford, Adam Lord ref1 Gilbert, Daniel ref1, ref2 Gilligan, Andrew ref1 Gilovich, Thomas ref1 Glass, Stephen ref1, ref2 Goetzinger, Charles ref1 Gondorf, Fred and Charles ref1 Goodrich, Judge ref1 Gordon, John Steel ref1 gorilla experiment ref1 gossip ref1, ref2, ref3 Goya, Francisco ref1 Grazioli, Stefano ref1 Great Imposter, The (Crichton), ref1, ref2, ref3 Green, Melanie ref1, ref2 Green Dot cards ref1 Greg ref1 grifter ref1 grooming ref1 groups, belonging to ref1 Guillotin, Joseph ref1 Gur, Ruben ref1 Gurney, Edmund ref1 Hancock, Jeffrey ref1 Hansen, Chris ref1 Hanson, Robert ref1 happiness ref1, ref2, ref3 Hare, Robert ref1 Harley, Richard ref1 Harlow, E.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

The selection of certain symptoms — increasingly, of certain behaviour — as indicators of mental illness is far from value-free; rather, the reverse. And the majority of research findings may be, as we know, refuted by other findings, but this is ignored by the dominant paradigm. The psychological explanation for this is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. As far as the DSM is concerned: with the best will in the world, the scientific underpinning for its approach is extremely weak. The reason that so little attention is paid to the failure of current psychiatric diagnostics is thus fairly straightforward: the dominant paradigm allows no other viewpoint.

…

The current emphasis on competency-oriented education is driving our youngsters straight into the competition-and-career cluster, with all the associated values following in their wake. What the advocates of the system fail to realise is that this automatically undermines other norms and values. There is no such thing as competitive solidarity. Indeed, its impossibility is clearly illustrated by what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When you hold strongly to a particular value-laden cluster, you simply can’t take in information that contradicts it, however objective and factual. Someone who sets great store by solidarity, public-spiritedness, and spirituality will find it almost impossible to take in information about the advantages of individualism, competitiveness, and materialism.

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522–527. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117–140. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1964). When prophecy fails. New York: Harper & Row. Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (1990). A continuum of impression formation: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation.

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Dyads and triads at 35,000 feet: Factors affecting group process and aircraft performance. American Psychologist, 39, 885–893. Fox, M. W. (1974). Concepts in ethology: Animal and human behavior. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freedman, J. L. (1965). Long-term behavioral effects of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 145–155. Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195–203. Frenzen, J. R., & Davis, H. L. (1990). Purchasing behavior in embedded markets.

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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 248–251. Szabo, L. (2007, February 5). Patient protect thyself. USA Today, p. 8D. Taylor, R. (1978). Marilyn’s friends and Rita’s customers: A study of party selling as play and as work. Sociological Review, 26, 573–611. Tedeschi, J. T., Schlenker, B. R., & Bonoma, T. V. (1971). Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle? American Psychologist, 26, 685–695. Teger, A. I. (1980). Too much invested to quit. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Tesser, A., Campbell, J., & Mickler, S. (1983). The role of social pressure, attention to the stimulus, and self-doubt in conformity.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

With about three cancer deaths associated with every 170 tons of asbestos (Tossavainen 2004), these exports should eventually result in about 4,400 deaths a year. Choosing false beliefs Even if workers know there may be risks to their work, will they evaluate them properly? The textbook model assumes that they will and that appropriate compensation for the extra risk will result. This won’t happen if workers experience what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. People can choose their beliefs about the world, using information selectively to reinforce a belief they would prefer to have (Akerlof and Dickens 1982). In this case, workers have to reconcile their view of themselves as smart people who make the right choices with the actual job they choose.

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Brock (2004) The Bigness Complex: Industry, labour and government in the American economy, 2nd edn, Stanford Economics and Finance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adler, M. (2010) Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the science that makes life dismal, New York: New Press. Akerlof, G. A. and W. T. Dickens (1982) ‘The economic consequences of cognitive dissonance’, American Economic Review, 72(3): 307–19. Akerlof, G. A. and R. J. Shiller (2009) Animal Spirits: How human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Akerlof, G. A. and J. L. Yellen (1988) ‘Fairness and unemployment’, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 78(2): 44–9.

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., 128 Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand, 115 297 Channel One, 80 chemicals, registration of, 160 child labour, prohibition of, 173 child mortality, 83, 216; in Philippines, 239 child poverty, 210 children, vulnerable to advertising, 81–2 choice: freedom of, 42; individual, 38; public, 110, 112; rational, 9 17, 22, 110, 150, 163 Chomsky, Noam, 113, 114, 254 Chrysotile Institute, 162 cigarettes see tobacco industry Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), 112 Clark, J. B., 179–80 climate change, 112, 152–3, 154–7, 165, 253; denial of, 156 closed-end mutual funds, 147 coffee, price of, 233–4 cognitive dissonance, 162 Cohen, Avi, 105, 106, 181, 182–3 Colander, David, 116, 132, 141, 154, 206, 232 collective good, 111, 152 see also public goods Colombia, US military aid to, 240 Commercial Alert, 82, 84 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) (2000), 262 common resources, use of, 152 communities, destruction of, 16, 18 community: notion of, 25–6; omitted from analysis, 251–3; relation to individual, 17–18 comparative advantage, 28–30, 222, 224, 227, 230–1; evaluation of, 43–5; technological change and, 228 comparative static analysis, 48–9, 64 compensation principle, 225–6, 245 competition, 13; imperfect, model of, 66, 106; perfect, 46, 53, 54–7, 60, 65, 93, 102, 104, 107–8, 130, 131, 132, 138, 169, 194, 204, 230 (analysis of, 118–22; efficiency of, 121–2; flawed nature of, 135–8; in labour markets, 63; incompatible requirements of, 65–6; limits of, 118–49; overemphasis on, 247–8) competitive market, definition of, 46 competitive model, 106; as useful approximation, 57–62; empirical testing of, 184–5; inconsistency of, 64–5 computer waste, disposal of, 232 conspicuous consumption, 90, 158, 205 consumer loans, 260 consumer’s surplus, 75–6, 221 consumerism, 79, 248; formation of, 74 see also conspicuous consumption consumers, people as, 74–92 contracts, 60; perceived costlessness of, 245–6; relational, 141–2, 250, 256 conventions, 169 Cook, P.

The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Atul Gawande, cognitive dissonance, Johannes Kepler, medical residency, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, stem cell, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes

Born in Hertfordshire in 1702, Thomas Bayes was a clergyman and philosopher who served as the minister at the chapel in Tunbridge Wells, near London. He published only two significant papers in his lifetime—the first, a defense of God, and the second, a defense of Newton’s theory of calculus (it was a sign of the times that in 1732, a clergyman found no cognitive dissonance between these two efforts). His best-known work—on probability theory—was not published during his lifetime and was only rediscovered decades after his death. The statistical problem that concerned Bayes requires a sophisticated piece of mathematical reasoning. Most of Bayes’s mathematical compatriots were concerned with problems of pure statistics: If you have a box of twenty-five white balls and seventy-five black balls, say, what is the chance of drawing two black balls in a row?

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance. Ordering our surroundings is the rule of how we as humans operate. In childhood we give names to our toys, and in adulthood we give names to our species, chemical elements, asteroids, and cities. By naming, or, more broadly, by categorizing, we are creating an order to an otherwise chaotic and frightening world.

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actuarial escape velocity, 53 Akaike Information Criterion, 69–70 Albert, Réka, 103 aluminum, 53 Ambient Devices, 195 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), 98, 100–101 anatomy, 23 Anaxagoras, 201 Anaximander, 201 Andreessen, Marc, 123 Annals of Internal Medicine, 107 apatosaurus, 79–82 apoptosis (programmed cell death), 111, 194 Aral, Sinan, 143 Arbesman, Harvey, 96–98, 100–101 Arbesman, Samuel, 79 Ariely, Dan, 172 Asimov, Isaac, 35–36 asteroids, 22, 23, 51, 85–86, 183–84 athletes, 51 Atlantic, 86, 198 Australia, 57, 59, 60 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Automated Mathematician, 112 Babbage, Charles, 106–7 Back to the Future (film), 211 Bak, Per, 137–38 Barabási, Albert-László, 103 Battle of New Orleans, 70 Bede, 115–16 Being Wrong (Schulz), 174–75, 201–2 Berlin, 64 Berman, David, 81–82 Bettencourt, Luís, 135 Bingham, Alpheus, 96–97 biomarkers, 98 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 board games, 2, 51 Bohemian Journal of Counting, 86 Bone Wars, 80, 169 bookkeeping, double-entry, 200 Book of Lost Books, The: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read (Kelly), 115 Boston Globe, 86 Bowers, John, 85–86 Boyle, Robert, 94 Bradley, David, 62–63 brain, 205, 207 branching process, 104 Bremer, Arthur, 66 British Medical Journal, 83, 212 brontosaurus, 79–82, 169 Brooks, David, 198 Brooks, Rodney, 46 bubonic plague, 52 Black Death, 52, 64, 71, 73 “Bully for Brontosaurus” (Gould), 82 calculations, 43–44 calculus, 67 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 90 Caplan, Bryan, 58 Cardarelli, François, 146 Carroll, Sean, 36–37 carrying capacity, 45 cell death, programmed, 111, 194 cell phone calls, 69, 77 Census of Marine Life, 37–39 Chabon, Michael, 184 Chabris, Christopher, 178 chain letters, 91–93 change: fast, 207–9 slow, 171, 172, 190, 191 change blindness, 177–79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90 chemical elements, 6, 22, 23, 50–51 atomic number of, 150–51 atomic weight of, 150–52 periodic table of, 50, 150–52, 182 thermal conductivity of, 33–35 Christakis, Nicholas, 21, 75 Christensen, Clayton, 45 chromosomes, 1–2, 89, 92, 143 cirrhosis, 28–30 Cisne, John, 116 citations, 17, 31–32, 90–91, 108 cities, 135–36, 202 citizen science, 19–21 Clarke, Arthur C., 18–19 classification systems, 204–5 Clay Mathematics Institute, 133 climate change, 203 clinical trials, 107–9, 157, 160 coelacanths, 26–27 cognitive biases, 175–76, 177, 188 cognitive dissonance, 4 Colbert, Stephen, 193 Cole, Jonathan, 48–49 Cole, Stephen, 162, 163 computation, human, 20 computers, 20, 41, 53, 110 automated discovery programs, 112–14 Babbage and, 106–7 games and, 2, 51 information transformation and, 43–44, 46 Moore’s Law and, 42 confirmation bias, 177 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 196 Cope, Edward, 80, 81, 169 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 206 CoPub Discovery, 110–12 Cosmos, 121, 129 Couric, Katie, 41 Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie, 26–27 Cowen, Tyler, 23 cryptography, 134 cumulative knowledge, 56–57 Daily Show, The, 159 Darwin, Charles, 79, 80, 105, 166, 187 data science, 167–68 Davy, Humphry, 51 decline effect, 155–56, 157, 162 de Grey, Aubrey, 53 demographics, 204 Dessler, A.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Broken windows theory, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, fudge factor, John Perry Barlow, new economy, operational security, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, social contagion, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly. The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off.

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., 246 cashless society, implications for dishonesty in, 34 Catch Me If You Can (Abagnale), 173 certificates for (false) achievements, 153–54 Chance, Zoë, 145, 264 charitable behavior, 23–24 cheating: aggressive cheaters and, 239 altruistic, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being made blatantly aware of, 156–57 being watched and, 223–25, 227 collaborative, see collaborative cheating desire to benefit from, 12–14, 27, 29, 237 ego depletion, 104–6, 111–12 fake products’ impact on, 125–31 in golf, 55–65 honor codes and, 41–45 increasing creativity to increase level of, 184–87 as infection, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating infidelity and, 244–45 on IQ-like tests, self-deception and, 145–49, 151, 153–54, 156–57 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 removing oneself from tempting situation and, 108–11 signing forms at top and, 46–51 Ten Commandments and, 39–40, 41, 44 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 136 see also dishonesty China, cheating in, 241–42 Chloé accessories, studies with, 123–34 Civil War veterans, 152 classes, infectious nature of cheating in, 195–97 Coca-Cola, stealing money vs., 32–33 cognitive dissonance, 81 cognitive load: ability to resist temptation and, 99–100 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), 173–74 coin logic, 167–68 collaborative cheating, 217–35 altruism and, 222–23, 225–26, 227–28, 232 being watched or monitored and, 223–25, 227–28, 234–35 emphasis on working as group or team and, 217–18 infectious nature of cheating in relation to, 221–22 social utility and, 222–23 companies: being one step removed from money and, 34–37 irrationality of, 51 see also corporate dishonesty compliments, insincere, 159 conflicts of interest, 67–95, 238, 248 in academia, 82, 84–85 in dentistry, 67–71, 93, 94, 230 disclosure and, 88–92 dots task and, 129 eradication of, 92–95 exclusion of experimental data and, 86–88 expert witnesses and, 85–86 in financial services industry, 83–85, 93, 94 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78, 94 honesty threshold and, 130–31 inherent inclination to return favors and, 74–75 medical procedures and, 71–74, 92–94, 229 pharmaceutical companies’ influence in academia and, 82 pharma reps and, 78–82 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 congressional staffers, cheating among, 243 Congress members, PAC money misused by, 208–10 contractors, 93 Conway, Alan, 150–51 Cooper, Cynthia, 215 Cornell University, 250–51 corpora callosa, 164–65 corporate dishonesty: cheating a little bit and, 239–40 Enron collapse and, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 recent spread of, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis, 4–5, 26–27, 237, 239 infectious nature of cheating and, 201–3, 205 see also Simple Model of Rational Crime counterfeits, see fake products creativity, 88, 163–89, 238 brain structure and, 164–65 dark side of, 187–89 fooling oneself and, 165–67 increasing, to increase level of cheating, 184–87 infidelity and, 244 intelligence vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 link between dishonesty and, 170–72, 186–89 logical-sounding rationales for choices and, 163–64 measures of, 171 moral flexibility and, 186–87 pathological liars and, 168–70 revenge and, 177–84 credit card companies, 239–40 crime, reducing, 52 cultural differences, 240–43 Danziger, Shai, 102 decision making: creating efficient process for, 167–68 effectiveness of group work in, 217–18 rationalization process and, 163–67 Denfield, George, 75 dentists: continuity of care and, 228–31 treating patients using equipment that they own, 67–68, 93–94 unnecessary work and, 67–71 depletion, see ego depletion dieting, 98, 109, 112–13, 114–15 what-the-hell effect and, 127, 130 “dine-and-dash,” 79 diplomas, lying about, 135–36, 153, 154 disabled person, author’s adoption of role of, 143–44 disclosure, 88–92, 248 study on impact of, 89–92 discounting, fixed vs. probabilistic, 194 dishonesty: causes of, 3–4, 5 collaborative, see collaborative cheating cultural differences and, 240–43 discouraging small and ubiquitous forms of, 239–40 importance of first act of, 137 infectious nature of, 191–216; see also infectious nature of cheating intelligence vs. creativity as predictor of, 172–77 link between creativity and, 170–72, 186–89 opportunities for, passed up by vast majority, 238 of others, fake products and assessing of, 131–34 rational and irrational forces in, 254 reducing amount of, 39–51, 248–54 society’s means for dealing with, 4–5 summary of forces that shape (figure), 245 when traveling, 183n see also cheating dissertation proposals and defenses, 101 distance factors, 238 in golf, 58–59 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 token experiment and, 33–34 doctors: consulting for or investing in drug companies, 82, 93 continuity of care and, 228–29 lecturing about drugs, 81 pharma reps and, 78–82 treating or testing patients with equipment that they own, 92–94 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 234 dots task: conflict of interest and, 129 description of, 127–29 link between creativity and dishonesty and, 171–72, 185–86 what-the-hell effect and, 129–31 downloads, illegal, 137–39 dressing above one’s station, 120–21 Ebbers, Bernie, 13 ego depletion, 100–116, 238, 249 basic idea behind, 101 cheating and, 104–6 in everyday life, 112–16 removing oneself from tempting situations and, 108–11, 115–16 of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, 103 sometimes succumbing to temptation and, 114–15 sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers at exam time and, 106–8 ego motivation, 27 England, cheating in, 242 Enron, 1–3, 192, 207, 215, 234 essay mills, 210–13 exams, sudden deaths among students’ grandmothers and, 106–8 exhaustion, 249 consumption of junk food and, 97–98 judges’ parole rulings and, 102–3 see also ego depletion experimental data, exclusion of, 86–88 expert witnesses, 85–86 explanations, logical-sounding, creation of, 163–65 external signaling, 120–22 dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 fake products and, 121–22 failures, tendency to turn blind eye to, 151 “fair,” determination of what is, 57 fake products, 119, 121–40, 238 illegal downloads and, 137–39 misrepresentation of academic credentials and, 135–36 rationalizations and, 134–35 self-signaling and, 123–26, 135 signaling value of authentic version diluted by, 121–22 suspiciousness of others and, 131–34 what-the-hell effect and, 127–31, 135 farmer’s market, benevolent behavior toward blind customer in, 23–24 fashion, 117–26 counterfeit goods and, 119, 121–22, 121–40, 123–26; see also fake products dressing above one’s station and, 120–21 external signaling and, 120–22 self-signaling and, 122–26 Fastow, Andrew, 2 favors, 74–82 aesthetic preferences and, 75–77 governmental lobbyists and, 77–78 inherent inclination to return, 74–75 pharma reps and, 78–82 see also conflicts of interest Fawal-Farah, Freeda, 117, 118 FBI, 215 Fedorikhin, Sasha, 99–100 Feynman, Richard, 165 financial crisis of 2008, 83–85, 192, 207, 234, 246–47 financial favors, aesthetic preferences and, 77 financial services industry: anonymous monitoring and, 234–35 cheating among politicians vs., 243 conflicts of interest in, 83–85, 93, 94 government regulation of, 234 fishing, lying about, 28 Frederick, Shane, 173 friends, invited to join in questionable behavior, 195 fudge factor theory, 27–29, 237 acceptable rate of lying and, 28–29, 91 distance between actions and money and, 34–37 getting people to cheat less and, 39–51 infidelity and, 244 rationalization of selfish desires and, 53 stealing Coca-Cola vs. money and, 32–33 Gazzaniga, Michael, 164–65 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 219–20 generous behavior, 23–24 Get Rich Cheating (Kreisler), 14 Gilovich, Tom, 250, 263–64 Gino, Francesca, 45, 104, 123, 127, 131, 145, 170, 184, 197, 225, 234–35, 242, 258–59 Glass, Ira, 6 Gneezy, Ayelet, 177, 257–58 golf, 55–65 cheating by “average golfer” vs. study participants and, 63–64 mistallying score in, 61–64 moving location of ball in, 58–59, 63 mulligans in, 60–61, 63–64 self-monitoring in, 56–57 survey on cheating in, 57–64 government regulations, 234 grandmothers, sudden deaths of, at exam time, 106–8 gray matter, 169–70 Green, Jennifer Wideman, 117 grocery shopping, ego depletion and, 109, 112–13 group or team work, 220–23 performance unaffected by, 233 possible benefits of, 223 predominance of, in professional lives, 217–18, 235 social utility and, 222–23 see also collaborative cheating Grüneisen, Aline, 210–11, 257 guilt, self-inflicted pain and, 250–52 Harford, Tim, 3–4 Harper’s Bazaar, 117–18 Harvard Medical School, 82 Harvey, Ann, 75 Henn, Steve, 209 heretics, external signaling of, 120 Hinduism, 25 honesty threshold, 130–31 honor codes, 41–45, 204 ideological organizations, 232n “I knew it all along” feeling, 149 illegal businesses, loyalty and care for customers in, 138–39 impulsive (or emotional) vs. rational (or deliberative) parts of ourselves, 97–106 cognitive load and, 99–100 ego depletion and, 100–106 exhaustion and, 97–98 Inbar, Yoel, 250, 264 infectious nature of cheating, 191–216, 249 bacterial infections compared to, 192–93 in class, 195–97 collaborative cheating in relation to, 221–22 Congress members’ misuse of PAC money and, 208–10 corporate dishonesty and, 192, 207–8 cost-benefit analysis and, 201–3, 205 essay mills and, 210–13 matrix task and, 197–204 positive side of moral contagion and, 215–16 regaining ethical health and, 214–15 slow and subtle process of accretion in, 193–94, 214–15 social norms and, 195, 201–3, 205–7, 209 social outsiders and, 205–7 vending machine experiment and, 194–95 infidelity, 244–45 “in good faith” notion, 219–20 Inside Job, 84–85 insurance claims, 49–51 intelligence: creativity vs., as predictor of dishonesty, 172–77 measures of, 173–75 IQ-like tests, cheating and self-deception on, 145–49 certificates emphasizing (false) achievement and, 153–54 increasing awareness of cheating and, 156–57 individuals’ tendency to turn a blind eye to their own failures and, 151 IRS, 47–49 Islam, 249 Israel, cheating in, 241 Italy, cheating in, 242 Jerome, Jerome K., 28 Jobs, Steve, 184 Jones, Bobby, 56 Jones, Marilee, 136 Judaism, 45, 249 judges, exhausted, parole decisions and, 102–3 junk food, exhaustion and consumption of, 97–98 Keiser, Kenneth, 135 Kelling, George, 214–15 John F.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These shared points of reference make up life as much as our inside jokes at work or gossip at church. Clay Shirky has made waves in the last few years as being a kind of Marshall McLuhan for the Web 2.0 era. Throughout his two books, Cognitive Dissonance and Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provides the kind of commentary that fills one with excitement for being a part of the web right now. We’re making things happen! It’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do! In Cognitive Dissonance, Shirky uses the lolcats found at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com as a convenient representative for what he calls “the stupidest possible creative act,” as opposed to, say, improving a Wikipedia entry or creating a platform for financing human rights projects in the third world.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

But when it comes to decisions around emotionally charged topics, logic often takes a back seat to what are called cognitive biases—essentially a set of unconscious mechanisms that convince us that it is our feelings about a situation and not the facts that represent the truth. One of the better known of these biases is the theory of cognitive dissonance, which was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In his classic book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger used the example of millennial cults in the days after the prophesied moment of reckoning as an illustration of “disconfirmed” expectations producing counterintuitive results: Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen?

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Some of the others have been alluded to earlier in this book: When SafeMinds members set out to write an academic paper about a hypothesis they already believed to be true, they set themselves up for expectation bias, where a researcher’s initial conjecture leads to the manipulation of data or the misinterpretation of results, and selection bias, where the meaning of data is distorted by the way in which it was collected. In addition to being a natural reaction to the experience of cognitive dissonance, the hardening conviction on the part of vaccine denialists in the face of studies that undercut their theories is an example of the anchoring effect, which occurs when we give too much weight to the past when making decisions about the future, and of irrational escalation, which is when we base how much energy we’ll devote to something on our previous investment and discount new evidence indicating we were likely wrong.

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., 9, 110, 204 Bush, Jenna, 110 Bush, Laura, 110 Bustin, Stephen, 290 Byers, Vera, 288, 294 Byrne, Rhonda, 269 caffeine, 93 California, 18n, 19, 36, 167, 186–87, 229, 272 vaccination rates in, 305 measles outbreak in, 19 mumps outbreak in, 306 pertussis outbreak in, 306 California, University of, at Los Angeles, 70 California, University of, at Santa Cruz, 235n California Department of Public Health, 306 Callous Disregard (Wakefield), 303–4 Calman, Kenneth, 100 calomel, 119–20 Campbell-Smith, Patricia, 288 Canada, 28 cancer, 58, 120, 260 breast, 138–40, 193, 270 drinking milk and, 48n Cardiff University, 163 Carnegie, Andrew, 41 Carrey, Jim, 14n, 256, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 65 case series, 110 Casey, Rhonda, 90, 91 Catholic Church, 81n, 100 cats, 40n, 120 causation, correlation and, 47, 48n, 209 Cedillo, Michael, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 285, 295–97 Cedillo, Michelle, 181–86, 192, 285–97 Omnibus Proceeding and, 190–91, 285, 290, 291, 295–97 Cedillo, Theresa, 181–87, 190–91, 192, 196, 285, 295–97 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 54, 72, 108, 147–50, 195, 199, 221, 223, 280–81 1999 recommendations on thimerosal and, 6, 125–30, 140 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of (ACIP), 152–53, 173 anonymous messages sent to, 200 Blaxill’s views on, 222 flu and, 62, 63, 64 Kirby’s book and, 207, 213 McCarthy and, 255 Morgellons syndrome and, 95–96 pertussis and, 280–81 “Unexplained Dermopathy Project” of, 96n vaccine compensation and, 147, 148 vaccine safety and, 148, 150, 170, 171, 173 central nervous system, 40, 120 cerebral palsy, 151, 164 Chadwick, Nicholas, 291–92 Chain, Ernst Boris, 36 Chávez, Hugo, 8 chelation therapy, 235, 260, 261, 263–64 Chen, Robert, 108, 110–11, 150 Kennedy on, 223, 226 Cherry, James, 70 Chicago, University of, 78n chicken pox vaccine, 7 childhood disintegrative disorder, 81 Childhood Neurology (textbook), 289 child rearing, obsession with, 6, 9–10 Chin-Caplan, Sylvia, 286, 292, 293n, 296–97 Chinese herbs, 288 cholera, 39–40 Christian Science, 33–34, 268 cigarette taxes, 210 Civil Registration System, Danish, 154 Clements, John, 150, 223–24 Clinton, Hillary, 95 clustering illusion, 193 CNN, 84, 88, 90, 204 Coalition for Sensible Action for Ending Mercury Induced Neurological Disorders, see SafeMinds Coast to Coast (radio show), 90n Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 51 cocaine, 94 coffee, 93 cognitive biases, 15, 193–95 cognitive defects, 121, 235n cognitive dissonance, 15, 194 cognitive relativism (truthiness), 9 Cohen, Richard, 66 Colbert, Stephen, 9 Colorado, 57, 83 “commonsense” assumptions, 18 Community Health Council, 101 compensation systems, vaccines, 12, 146–48, 175, 178, 179, 180, 220 Condé Nast, 74n confirmation bias, 194–95 Congress, U.S., 64, 65, 95, 125, 167, 257 drug safety and, 146 swine flu and, 147 vaccine compensation and, 148, 178 Connecticut, 305 conspiracy theories, 237 constipation, 116, 144 of Michelle Cedillo, 183 Consumer Protection Act, 102 Continental Army, 27–29 control studies, 109–10, 153 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 81n Cornell University, 235n correlation, causation and, see causation, correlation and coughing, 274–75, 276, 280–81 cowpox, 31–32 creationism, 197n “Crimes in the Cowpox Ring” (Little), 35 Crohn’s disease, 103–5 Crystals, 251, 253 Cure Autism Now (CAN), 137, 142, 228, 232, 233 Cure Within, The (Harrington), 268 Curtis, Valerie, 26 Cutter Laboratories (Cutter Incident), 46–47, 49–53, 55, 146 cysteine, 143 cytomegalovirus, 289 dancing cat disease, 120 Daniels, Mitch, 204 Darwin, Charles, 158n Davis, case study, 286–87 Dawbarns, 115–16 “Deadly Immunity” (Kennedy), 221–27 deafness, 20, 100 death threats, 200, 230 debates, interpretation of facts and, 198–99 Debold, Sam, 187–89 Debold, Vicky, 187–89, 196 decision making, emotions and, 192–93 Deer, Brian, 236, 237, 300, 302 Defeat Autism Now!

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The key lies in emphasizing the process, which granulates the frame from an authoritarian assertion to an antiauthoritarian exploration of the senses and intellect: “Look, see it yourself?” This has the same effect as Locke’s careful definition of knowledge: It removes science from a rhetorical frame conflict and refocuses the mind on observable reality, causing cognitive dissonance and questioning. When the evolution question is worded with the qualifier “according to the theory of evolution,” that emphasizes process. We could also ask it with the qualifier “according to observations of the fossil record” and would likely get a similar result. This is because science is a physical, objective subset of the broader worldviews that it was carved out from, and that’s okay.

…

But without that, they find it paralyzing and are motivated to disregard the message.”23 SPEAKING CONSERVATESE When the just world belief is held along with a high level of patriotism, this effect seems to be multiplied, Willer and Feinberg found in a follow-up study.24 “Conservatives are on average more patriotic,” says Willer. “One thing that sets up is a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to global warming. You think America is great, you know it’s a greenhouse-gas emitter, and then you’re told that greenhouse gases are bad for the world.” They found that if you experimentally increase people’s patriotism, their belief in global warming tends to go down. In other experiments, Feinberg and Willer found that liberals moralize environmental issues and conservatives don’t.25 So they wondered, “What if you tried to make conservatives think of global warming as a moral issue?

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Sometimes this process can take years to have an impact. But eventually, it does. “I went to the county fairs and I’d meet lots of people,” relates Sanders. “A not infrequent response was ‘Oh, since you’re a scientist you probably believe in global warming.’ This was from people who didn’t. So there was this cognitive dissonance. They know that my being a scientist would make me think that global warming was real, and they both didn’t believe it themselves and thought that there was some dispute about it. And they would maintain the position that it’s an open scientific question. But in person at least, I didn’t feel like they were hostile to me.

Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! The predisposition to disregard news that does not correspond to one’s worldview is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we confront evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

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., 60i, 64 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) index, 45, 46i, 141 Central bank policy, 247 (See also Federal Reserve System [Fed]) Chamberlain, Lawrence, 82 Chamberlain, Neville, 78 Channels, 40 technical analysis and, 294 Chartists (see Technical analysis) Chevron, 176i, 177 ChevronTexaco, 55 Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT): closure due to Chicago River leak, 253, 254i, 255 stock market crash of 1987 and, 273 Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), 264–265 Volatility Index of, 281–282, 282i Chicago Gas, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, stopping of trading on, 276 Index Chicago Purchasing Managers, 244 China: global market share of, 178, 179i, 180, 180i sector allocation and, 177 China Construction Bank, 175 China Mobile, 177, 183 China National Petroleum Corporation, 182 Chrysler, 64 Chunghwa Telecom, 177 Cipsco (Central Illinois Public Service Co.), 48 Circuit breakers, 276–277 Cisco Systems, 38, 57n, 89, 104, 155, 157, 176i on Nasdaq, 44 Citigroup, 144, 175, 176i Clinton, Bill, 75, 227, 238 Clough, Charles, 86 CNBC, 48, 88 Coca-Cola Co., 59i, 61, 64 Cognitive dissonance, 328 Colby, Robert W., 295–296 Colgate-Palmolive, 59i Colombia Acorn Fund, 346 Comcast, 176 Common stock theory of investment, 82 Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments (Smith), 79, 83, 201 Communications technology, bull market and, 88 Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), 184 Conference Board, 244 Conoco (Continental Oil Co.), 57 ConocoPhillips, 176i, 177, 183 Consensus estimate, 239 Consumer choice, rational theory of, 322 Consumer discretionary sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 176 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 245 369 Consumer staples sector: in GICS, 53 global shares in, 175i, 177 Consumer Value Store, 61 Contrarian investing, 333–334 Core earnings, 107–108 Core inflation, 245–246 Corn Products International, 47 Corn Products Refining, 47 Corporate earnings taxes, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 202–203 Correlation coefficient, 168 Corvis Corporation, 156–157 Costs: agency, 100 effects on returns, 350 employment, 246 interest, inflationary biases in, failure of stocks as longterm inflation hedge and, 203–204 pension, controversies in accounting for, 105–107 Cowles, Alfred, 42, 83 Cowles Commission for Economic Research, 42, 83 CPC International, 47 Crane, Richard, 61 Crane Co., 59i, 60i, 61 Cream of Wheat, 62 Creation units, 252 Crowther, Samuel, 3 Cubes (ETFs), 252 Currency hedging, 173 Current yield of bonds, 111 Cutler, David M., 224n CVS Corporation, 61 Cyclical stocks, 144 DaimlerChrysler, 176 Daniel, Kent, 326n Dart Industries, 62 Dash, Srikant, 353n Data mining, 326–327 David, Joseph, 21 DAX index, 238 Day-of-the-week effects, 316–318, 317i Day trading, futures contracts and, 261 Dean Witter, 286 De Bondt, Werner, 302–303, 335 Defined benefit plans, 106–107 Defined contribution plans, 105–106 Delaware and Hudson Canal, 22 Deleveraging, 120 Del Monte Foods, 62 Department of Commerce, 203 Depreciation, failure of stocks as long-term inflation hedge and, 203 Deutsch, Morton, 324n Deutsche Post, 177 Deutsche Telekom, 177 Dexter Corp., 21n Diamonds (ETFs), 252 Dilution of earnings, 104 Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) Small Company fund, 142n Dimson, Elroy, 18, 19n, 20 Discounts, futures contracts and, 258 Distiller’s Securities Corp., 48 Distilling and Cattle Feeding, 47 in DJIA, 39i, 48 Diversifiable risk, 140 Diversification in world markets, 168–178 currency hedging and, 173 efficient portfolios and, 168–172, 169i–171i private and public capital and, 177–178 sector diversification and, 173–177, 174i The Dividend Investor (Knowles and Petty), 147 Dividend payout ratio, 101 Dividend policy, value of stock as related to, 100–102 370 Dividend yields, 145–149, 146i–149i interest rate on government bonds above, 95–97 ratio of market value to, 120, 120i Dodd, David, 77q, 83, 95q, 139q, 141, 145n, 150, 152, 289q, 304n, 334n Dogs of the Dow strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dollar cost averaging, 84 Domino Foods, Inc., 47 Dorfman, John R., 147n Double witching, 260–261 Douvogiannis, Martha, 113n Dow, Charles, 38, 290–291 Dow Chemical, 58 Dow Jones & Co., 38 Dow Jones averages, computation of, 39–40 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 37, 47 breaks 2000, 85 breaks 3000, 85 breaks 8000, 87 crash of 1929 and, 4 creation of, 38 fall in 1998, 88 firms in, 38–39, 39i following Iraq’s defeat in Gulf War, 85 long-term trends in, 40–41, 41i Nasdaq stocks in, 38 during 1922–1932, 269, 270i during 1980–1990, 269, 270i original firms in, 47–49 original members of, 22 predicting future returns using trend lines and, 41–42 as price-weighted index, 40 Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Index, 45 Dow 10 strategy, 147–149, 148i, 149i, 336 Dow Theory (Rhea), 290 Index Dow 36,000 (Hassett), 88 Downes, John, 147 Dr.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Webster, “Motivated Closing of the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’” Psychological Review 103(2) (1996): 263. (4) Decision avoidance: C. J. Anderson, “The Psychology of Doing Nothing: Forms of Decision Avoidance Result from Reason and Emotion,” Psychological Bulletin 129(1) (2003): 139. (5) Cognitive dissonance: L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, vol. 2 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). And (6) Predecisional distortion: J. E. Russo, M. G. Meloy, and V. H. Medvec, “Predecisional Distortion of Product Information,” Journal of Marketing Research (1998): 438–52. clarity on the reasons for our decisions: A.

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behavior affects attitude: This theoretical basis for this phenomenon is something called self-perception theory. The idea is that we infer our characteristics (attitudes, opinions, etc.) based on how we see ourselves behaving; see D. J. Bem, “Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74(3) (1967): 183. See also a discussion of a related concept, the insufficient justification paradigm, discussed in R. E. Nisbett, and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(3) (1977): 231.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

‘The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,’” Westen says.17 Westen's remarkable study showed that neural information processing related to what he terms “motivated reasoning”—that is, political bias (in this case, at least)—appears to be qualitatively different from reasoning when a person has no strong emotional stake in the conclusions to be reached. The study is thus the first to describe the neural processes that underlie political judgment and decision making, as well as to describe processes involving emote control, psychological defense, confirmatory bias, and some forms of cognitive dissonance. The significance of these findings ranges beyond the study of politics: “Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret ‘the facts,’” according to Westen.18 But is emote control really that common—particularly in such areas as public policy, which cry out for reasoned and rational discourse?

…

See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.

…

See identity disturbance, chameleon-like behavior charisma as advantage for Machiavellians, 282, 297 Carolyn's, 128 of Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, 296 powerful men attracted to charisma of troubled, sometimes deeply sinister women, 277 of Princess Diana, 277, 391n54 role of memory in charm and, 312–13 of Texas Southern University's corrupt president, Priscilla Slade, 280 “cheaters” caudate activated (and we feel satisfaction) when we punish, 260 does the percentage of “cheaters” influence culture, 270–71 have led to evolutionary arms race, 258 as Machiavellians, 255–56 Cheng, Nien, suffering during Cultural Revolution, 215–16 Chhang, Youk, haunted by memories of heckling couple being buried alive, 303n “chicken,” game of, exemplifies benefit of seemingly irrational emotional strategies, 260–61 child abuse interference with development of executive control can cause subclinical to descend into clinical borderline, 202 in Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Abraham Lincoln, 219, 219n MAO-A alleles and, 54, 81–82 psychosocial versus neurobiological “push,” 95 Chinese speakers versus English speakers, neurological differences of, 175–76 Chirot, Daniel, competition for power rarely won by faint of heart, 314 Chomsky, Noam, 174–75 Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai, premier of China), 239 Christie, Richard, 40–48, 132, 133, 231, 268, 303n chromosomes explanation and illustration of human, 60, 61 illustration of illnesses associated with chromosome seventeen, 64 Churchill, Randolph, talentless, egotistical son of Winston, 293n Churchill, Winston alcoholism and depression, 307 benefits of his impassioned “emote control,” 188, 293 “I am so conceited…” [the point being, he really was], 293, 293n intelligence, 293 mental flexibility, 301, 314 remarkable memory, 313 Stalin's ability to fool, 29–30 cingulate cortex illustration, 73 MAO-A alleles and decreased reaction in, 80–81 serotonin transporters’ influence on signal to amygdala, 74–75 cingulate gyrus, MAO-A alleles can produce smaller, 80 Cixi, Empress, 27 Clark, Wesley, General, NATO commander, 171 clinically significant inherent flaw in DSM-IV use of concept, 375–76n32 in relation to borderline personality disorder, 162–63 Clinton, Bill excellent memory, 313 gullibility regarding Saddam Hussein, 316–17 temper, 300 clock gene, 233 Cluster A, B, and C personality disorders general description, 133–34 MAO-A and Cluster B personality disorders, 80 Cochran, Gregory argues against historical theory that only social forces matter, 267 Ashkenazi genetic mutations and intelligence, 87 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 cognitive dysfunction anorexia and, 142n borderline personality disorder anterior cingulate cortex dysfunction and inability to focus on something undesirable, 182 as dimensional trait of, 164 as heritable trait in, 85 irrationality under effect of strong emotions, 204 overview related to neuroscience results, 205–206 paranoid thinking (a form of cognitive dysfunction) as trait to define personality disorder used by DSM-IV, 164 delusional thinking outright, 165, 302–307 in schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder, 135, 227 effect of stress on, 202 “end justifies the means” behavior, 204 irrationality provides successful strategy for manipulation and control, 260–61 in Machiavellians, 209 in Machiavellians as part of precise definition used in this book, 281 neuroscience behind anterior cingulate cortex role in focus and attention, 182 cognitive dissonance, neuroimaging study reveals processes underlying, 190 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 181–82, 203 lack of common sense in those with damage to dorsolateral and ventromedial areas, 203 prefrontal cortex dysfunction and, 180 role in irrationally inflexible behavior, 204 ventromedial cortex and, 182, 203 paranoia (a form of cognitive dysfunction) provides for success in dangerous social structures, 250 seen in individuals with subclinical symptoms of borderline personality disorder, 201 in people Diana, Princess, 277 general discussion of good and bad effects, with different examples, 300–307, 306n–307n, 314–15 Lay, Ken, Chairman of Enron, 296–98 Mao.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90 percent! Confronting news that does not correspond to one’s worldview creates what is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we encounter when we address evidence that conflicts with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.

…

Thaler, “Mental Accounting Matters,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 12 (1999), pp. 183-206. 21. Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman, “The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Finance, vol. 40, no. 3 (1985), pp. 777-792. 22. See Tom Chang, David Solomon, and Mark Westerfield, “Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect,” May 2013. 23. Leroy Gross, The Art of Selling Intangibles, New York: New York Institute of Finance, 1982. 24. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, vol. 185 (1974), pp. 1124-1131. 25. Terrance Odean, “Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?”

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

One in twenty households could not afford to feed their children properly.120 Last year, almost two-fifths of teachers said they had seen children who had not had enough to eat turning up for lessons.121 Another recent poll found that nearly half of teachers had taken food in to school to feed ravenous pupils.122 Against this backdrop, all talk of meritocracy brings to mind Richard Tawney’s characterisation of those who preach equality of opportunity while ‘[resisting] most strenuously attempts to apply it’.123 Here is located the fissure on the left between those who genuinely seek to create a socially mobile society and those who pay lip service to it while pursuing policies antithetical to a meritocratic order. Because New Labour’s verbal commitment to social mobility lacked a corresponding drive to reduce inequality, its rhetoric gave off a strong whiff of cognitive dissonance. Thus, after thirteen years of Labour governments, Britain remained a society dominated by the privileged and, invariably, the children of the privileged. If social mobility was not notably worse in 2010 than it was in 1997, it was not demonstrably better either. The acceptance by New Labour of large inequalities of wealth, buttressed by the radical-sounding mantra of equality of opportunity, produced a society in which the odds remained firmly stacked against those from poorer homes.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

We saw the effect with the Vietnam War. Most people (sort of) believed that certain courses of action were absurd, but it was easier to continue than to stop—particularly since one can always spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping (the backfitting story of sour grapes now known as cognitive dissonance). We have been witnessing the same problem in the U.S. attitude toward Saudi Arabia. It is clear since the attack on the World Trade Center (in which most of the attackers were Saudi citizens) that someone in that nonpartying kingdom had a hand—somehow—in the matter. But no bureaucrat, fearful of oil disruptions, made the right decision—instead, the absurd invasion of Iraq was endorsed because it appeared to be simpler.

…

A BRIEF TOUR OF YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ WISDOM Let us now close by sampling a few ideas that exist in both ancient lore and are sort of reconfirmed by modern psychology. These are sampled organically, meaning they are not the result of research but of what spontaneously comes to mind (remember this book is called Skin in the Game), then verified in the texts. Cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory by Leon Festinger about sour grapes, by which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can’t reach got to be sour). It is seen first in Aesop, of course, repackaged by La Fontaine. But its roots look even more ancient, with the Assyrian Ahiqar of Nineveh.

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

It’s a guilt that has obligated me to mutter “My bad” for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film made since 1968. But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one. Uncomfortable with being so comfortable, I make one last attempt to be at one with my people.

…

‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’” The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

* * * He tries to summon moisture to his dry mouth, takes a breath, puts on his best British accent. That’s meant to be worth something here, right? “Excuse me, I was just wondering—do you know how much longer it will be?” She looks up at him from across an expanse of IKEA farmed pine, his skin color and accent triggering a wave of cognitive dissonance to flicker across her face. Her skin pale against the beige. She stares into mid-space, focusing on text he can’t see. “Rushdi Manaan?” “Yes.” “You shouldn’t be too long. They’re just running some background checks. You’ll be out within a couple of hours.” “Okay.” He tries to hide his shock at a couple of hours.

…

At least half sit on the floor, wrapping themselves in blankets, huddled together. Here and there some tend to the injured and fallen. Others stand, grouped together in suspicious circles, whispering to one another and glancing around. Faces are stunned, tired, resigned, and sobbing eyes are bleached red by gas and tears. Anika is struck by a sudden, disturbed cognitive dissonance: all-too-familiar news footage of foreign war zones or distant refugee camps suddenly playing out on her doorstep, and all to a relentless soundtrack of grime-tinged techno. Industrial drums and distorted analog chord stabs. Refugee crisis or music festival? Terrorist attack aftermath or warehouse rave morning-after?

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Of course, I have to get along with those associates on a very regular basis, whereas big business remains at a distance, emotionally, physically, and otherwise. So I tend to mentally blur over the fact that my close associates lie to me so that I may continue to cooperate with them and to enjoy those interactions. Cognitive dissonance rules, but I neglect this reality most of the time, unless of course those lies prevent me from getting what I want, in which case the lies will meet with some partial but still largely nonconfrontational pushback. In contrast, it is easy enough to curse Shell but every now and then pull into one of their stations and fill my car with gas.

…

Bernstein, Elizabeth best sellers See also publishing Bezos, Jeff See also Amazon Big Brother See privacy Big Data Big Pharma Big Tech disappearance of competition impact on intelligence innovation and loss of privacy and overview Bing Bird, Larry Bitcoin Black, Leon BlackBerry Blackstone blockchain Bloxham, Eleanor Blue Cross/Blue Shield brand loyalty Brexit Brin, David Brooks, Nathan bubbles, financial sector Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber) Burger King cable TV cable companies cable news Capital One capitalism “creative destruction” and Friedman on logic of market churn and media and public’s view of short-termism venture capitalists workers and young people and See also crony capitalism Capitalism for the People, A (Zingales) Carr, Nicholas Carrier CEOs deaths of increases in salary overview pay for creating value short-termism and skill set China American manufacturing and Apple and facial recognition technology financial innovations financial institutions multinational corporations and productivity retail and tech companies and See also Alibaba Cialdini, Robert Cisco Citibank Citizens United decision See also Supreme Court Civil War Clark, Andrew E. class Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald cognition cognitive dissonance cognitive efficiency cognitive strengths Collison, Patrick and John compensating differential conspiracy theories control firms co-ops copyright corporations attempts to sway public opinion downside of personalization public dislike of Countrywide “creative destruction” credit cards credit card information credit card system privacy and crony capitalism business influence on government class and multinational corporations overview privilege and state monopoly status quo bias See also capitalism cryptocurrencies See also Bitcoin Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Curry, Stephen CVS cybersecurity “daily effective experiences” See also Kahneman, Daniel; Krueger, Alan Daley, William Damaske, Sarah Damore, James daycare defense spending DejaNews Democratic Party Desan, Mathieu Deutsche Bank discrimination Dollar General Dow Scrubbing Bubbles Dream of the Red Chamber DuckDuckGo Dying for a Paycheck (Pfeffer) eBay education email employment/unemployment European Union ex post Exxon eyeglass companies Facebook advertising and AI and “anti-diversity memo” censorship and China and competition and complaints about employees “filter bubble” income inequality and information and innovation and monopoly and News Feed politics and privacy and Russian-manipulated content venture capital and See also Zuckerberg, Mark facial recognition technology “fake news” See also media Fama, Eugene fast-food Fehr, Ernst Ferguson, Niall financial crisis financial sector America as tax and banking haven American stock performance banks “too big” global importance of US growth information technology and intermediation overview venture capital and American innovation Financial Times fintech flow Ford Motor Company Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Foroohar, Rana fraud, businesses and CEOs in laboratory games comparative perspective cross-cultural game theory nonprofits vs. for-profits overview research on corporate behavior spread of information and tax gap trust and free trade French, Kenneth Friedman, Milton Friendster Fritzon, Katarina fundraising Gabaix, Xavier Gates, Bill GDP General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Electric General Motors Gilens, Martin Glass-Steagall Act Gmail Goetzmann, William N.

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

One suggestion is that lower temperatures during the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the late seventeenth century led to slower tree growth, producing denser wood with superior acoustic properties. Others believe Stradivarius added a secret ingredient to his varnish or used magically endowed wood from ancient churches. The human tendency to experience expensive things as ‘better’ is driven by the psychological phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We become uncomfortable if reality doesn’t live up to our expectations, so we adjust reality accordingly. And it works. If people pay a higher price for an energy drink, like Red Bull, they are able to solve more brain-teasers afterwards than those who paid a lower price for the same drink.

…

K. 1 chickens 1, 2 childbirth 1 Chile 1, 2 chimpanzees 1 China, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Chinchorro 1 chlorine 1 chlorofluorocarbons 1 chocolate 1 Cholula pyramid 1 Chopin, Frédéric 1 chopines 1 chromosomes 1 Christianity 1, 2, 3, 4 Christmas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Churchill, Winston S. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ciabatta 1 Cielo, César 1 cinnamon 1, 2 Cistercians 1 citrus fruit 1, 2 clams 1 Clare of Assisi, St 1 Clarke, Jeremiah 1 CLARKSON, JEREMY 1, 2, 3 claws 1 Clement X, Pope 1 Cleopatra 1 Clinton, Bill 1 cloacal kiss 1 cloning 1 Club 1 2 coal-fired power stations 1 cobras 1 coca leaves 1 cocaine 1 Cochabamba 1 Cochran, Josephine Garis 1 Cockerell, Christopher 1 cockroaches 1 coffee, 1 cognitive dissonance 1 Cold War 1 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1 COLES, RICHARD 1 Colosseum 1 colour 1, 2, 3 Columbus, Christopher 1, 2 comb jellies 1 Commonwealth 1 compost 1 Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 2, 3 conception 1 conditioned response 1 conscription 1 conservation 1 Conservatives 1 contract law 1 Cook, Thomas 1 Cool Running (film) 1 COREN-MITCHELL, VICTORIA 1 Cornelius, Robert 1 Cornwall 1, 2, 3 corrugated iron 1 corsets 1 Corvan, Ned 1 Coryat, Thomas 1 Coutts, Thomas 1 Coventry 1 cowbirds 1 cowboys 1, 2 cows 1, 2 crabs 1, 2, 3, 4 Creighton, James George Aylwin 1 Crick, Francis 1 cricket 1, 2 crickets 1 crime rates 1 Croatia 1 crocodiles 1 Croton 1 Crown Court 1 crows 1, 2 crude oil 1 Cruikshank, John 1 Cruise, Tom 1 crusades 1 crushing 1 cryogenics 1 cryonics 1 Cuba 1, 2 cuckoos 1 Cup-a-Soup 1 Currey, Donald 1 Cyprus 1 Dakar Rally 1 damnatio ad bestias 1 dams 1 dangerous sports 1 Darius the Great 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 Darwin, Emma 1 Darwin, George 1 Darwin, William Erasmus 1 dating 1 dating systems 1 Dauger, Eustache 1 David, Jacques-Louis 1 DAVIES, ALAN 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Dead Sea 1 deductive reasoning 1 DEE, JACK 1 Denmark 1, 2, 3, 4 Dennis the Small 1 deserts 1 diabetes 1, 2 diamonds 1 diarrhoea 1, 2 DiCaprio, Leonardo 1 dictionaries 1 Dienekes 1 Dietrich, Marlene 1 Digby, Everard 1 dinosaurs 1, 2, 3 Dionysus Exiguus 1 dishwashers 1 Disney, Walt 1 DNA 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Doctor Who 1 Dodge City 1 dogs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Dolbear, Amos 1 dolphins 1, 2 Don, Monty 1 Don Juan Pond 1 doves 1 dragonflies 1 Drake, Sir Francis 1, 2 drawings 1 driving tests 1 drowning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 drunkenness 1 dugongs 1 Dumas, Alexandre 1 dumb laws 1 Duncan, King of Scotland 1 dunce 1 Dunlop, John Boyd 1 Duns Scotus 1 Dürer, Albrecht 1 Dutch language 1 dyeing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 E. coli 1 Ea 1 Earth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 atmosphere 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 magnetic field 1, 2, 3 orbit 1, 2, 3 population 1, 2 earthquakes 1 earthshine 1 earthworms 1, 2, 3 Easter 1, 2 eating for two 1 Eaton, Cyrus 1 Ebola 1 echolocation 1 Edinburgh 1 Edward VII, King 1 Edward VIII, King 1 Edward the Confessor 1 eggs 1, 2 Egypt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Einstein, Albert 1, 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1 elasticity 1 Eleanor of Aquitaine 1 elections 1 electricity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 electrolytes 1 elephants 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Elizabeth I, Queen 1, 2 Elizabeth II, Queen 1, 2, 3, 4 Ellis, Eric 1 emissions standards 1 Empire State Building 1, 2 energy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 energy drinks 1 England 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 England, Bank of 1 English Civil War 1 English language 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 eons 1 Ephialtes 1 epigenetics 1 epochs 1 eras 1 ergs 1 Eriksson, Leif 1 Escoffier, Auguste 1 Ethiopia 1, 2 ethylene 1 EU 1 eucalyptus trees 1 Eugenie, Princess 1 euphemisms 1 Europe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 European Convention on Human Rights 1 Eurytus 1 Evening Birds 1 Everest (Churchill’s nanny) 1 Everest (mountain) 1 Eves, Stuart 1 exosphere 1 extracellular matrix 1 eyelids 1 Fair Isle 1 Famous Five 1 Farrow, Mia 1 fascism 1 fashion 1 Faunce, Thomas 1 feathers 1 Federal Reserve 1 feeding of the 5,000 1 female franchise 1 Ferrero Rocher 1 Ferris, George Washington Gale 1 ferris wheels 1, 2 FIELDING, NOEL 1 Fiennes, Sir Ranulph 1 film-making 1 finches 1, 2 fingers 1 Finkelstein, Nat 1 Finland 1 Fiorelli, Giuseppe 1 fire extinguishers 1 First World War 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Fisher, John Arbuthnot 1 Fitzgerald, F.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

When your main scapegoats are Jews and Muslims, and you consider Blacks and Arabs biologically inferior, it can be a little discomfiting to find out you are a quarter Jewish and an eighth Moroccan. New technologies tend to reinforce radicalisation dynamics, but genetic tests show that they can also have the opposite effect. The cognitive dissonance that arises when mono-ethnic ideals of the future meet the multiracial realities of the past can set in motion profound attitude and behaviour changes. Aaron Panofsky of UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Joan Donovan of the Data and Society Research Institute analysed discussions around genetic ancestry on the white supremacist forums of Stormfront.

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Apocalyptic fantasies can be appealing, as they offer a bridge between fictional tales and real life.10 As the British historian Norman Cohn showed in his famous book The Pursuit of the Millennium, millenarian expectations of profound societal transformation often went hand in hand with social unrest in the Middle Ages.11 The term ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means ‘uncovering, disclosure, revelation’.12 But it’s hard to deny that the predicted disclosure has been delayed multiple times by now.13 ‘Lol, 5453 threads, and still no storm’, one commentator wrote mockingly on the image-board website 8chan, which is used widely among far-right and conspiracy-theory adherents. ‘The entire country is laughing at you Q losers.’ As the predicted disclosure is constantly postponed, the clash between imagination and reality can create cognitive dissonance, a feeling of mental discomfort. The incentive to reinterpret facts and reframe experiences tends to grow the more time and money one invests in the failed apocalypse.14 Just take the Doomsday preppers who spend $6,000 on freeze-dried and dehydrated food cans worth around 50,000 servings in order to survive ‘the inevitable zombie apocalypse’, which televangelists like Jim Bakker, host of the American Survival Food show, predict and postpone on a weekly basis.15 (Next to these zombie apocalypse kits the fifteen-kilo Brexit emergency boxes of chicken tikka and beef and potato stew look fairly reasonable.)16 Conspiracy theories, however absurd and counterfactual, can inspire dangerous real-life action.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Among the causes for this extraordinary reversal of public opinion were the austerity policies implemented responsibly by the social democratic government in order to restore the economy; the pro-European Union stand of the governing coalition, in contrast to the nationalistic, xenophobic attitude of traditional Icelandic parties; and the resentment of the majority of the population against their deep indebtedness as a result of the mortgage crisis and the inefficiency of the government in resolving the debt crisis. But perhaps the main source of discontent was the cognitive dissonance between the hopes of the social movement and the grim reality of institutional politics, a recurrent theme in the history of social movements. As a result, the new parliament tabled the project of constitutional reform and one of the most daring experiments in constitutional democracy became yet another faded dream.

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Confirming the pre-eminence of AKP in Turkish politics, the first presidential election held in 2014 after a constitutional change to establish a more presidential regime was easily won by Erdogan, the leader of AKP and the most direct adversary of the Gezi movement. A number of reasons have been advanced to explain this cognitive dissonance between the popularity of the Gezi movement in June 2013 and the undisputed electoral success of AKP and Erdogan in 2014. Beyond specific circumstances that would require a complex analytical journey through the intricacies of Turkish politics, the most convincing explanation is the persistence of fundamental cleavages in the Turkish society that are fixed in rigid political alignments.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it. Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

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See Kazdin (2008), The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills, New York: Houghton Mifflin. The quotations are from p. 34. Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. Chip Heath thanks Bo Brockman for teaching this idea. Steven Kelman. On pp. 22–24, Kelman explains why mere exposure and cognitive dissonance may cause people to resist change. Then, in an insightful analysis on pp. 123–127, he shows how the same factors make change hard to stop once they get going. See Kelman (2005), Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

The sunk-cost fallacy is a major impediment to making positive changes and subsequently living a better life. There are additional psychological factors, however, that hold us back from quitting things in order to be happier or more successful. According Dan Ariely, author of the bestselling 2008 book Predictably Irrational, we’re hindered in quitting by a mental state called “cognitive dissonance.” Ariely says that if we’ve acted in a certain way, over time, we’ll overly justify our behavior. If we’ve put ten years into a job—even though we despise that job on a daily basis—we’ll convince ourselves that we love it. In addition, Ariely suggests that we actually like suffering for things we love.

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., “Are Older Adults Less Subject to the Sunk-Cost Fallacy Than Younger Adults?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 7 (2008): 650–52. “Assume that you have spent”: Hal R. Arkes and Peter Ayton, “The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects: Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals?,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 5 (1999): 591. “cognitive dissonance”: Dan Ariely in Stephen J. Dubner, “The Upside of Quitting,” Freakonomics (podcast), http://bit.ly/​2x8fxoY. See also Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). “smart quitters”: Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (New York: Penguin, 2007).

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

It strikes me as such a strange thing to say, but such an honest one. Perhaps it’s what we should all be saying. The concept of cognitive dissonance, believing two contradictory things simultaneously, is simply a part of being human. We spend far too much time trying to justify our thinking, to make it logical like the ordered world we try to create, but we aren’t consistent or rational beings, and our brains are not simply mushy circuit boards. This cognitive dissonance, of understanding the huge potential scale of coronavirus and yet simply not translating that into true concern, seems nearly universal.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive disson Sance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well: Dilbert reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc. If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.

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Among them I would include the following: The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.20 The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.21 The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.22 The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.23 The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.24 The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.25 The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.26 It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable.

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., & Gächter, S. 2000. Fairness and retaliation: The economics of reciprocity. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 159–181. Fernández-Jalvo, Y., Diez, J. C., Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Carbonell, E., & Arsuaga, J. L. 1996. Evidence of early cannibalism. Science, 271, 277–278. Festinger, L. 1957. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Finch, C. E., & Kirkwood, T. B. L. 2000. Chance, development, and aging. New York: Oxford University Press. Fischoff, S. 1999. Psychology’s quixotic quest for the media-violence connection. Journal of Media Psychology, 4. Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

They planted the idea in our heads that the system would only improve and become progressive through internal, collective criticism. So the notion that things could go very wrong, with war crimes and abuses of power or rape and sexual harassment on the base—that was out of the question. We developed a sense of cognitive dissonance that allowed us to push away all the bad thoughts.” In one of the most glaring instances of Israel’s disregard for civilian life during the Second Intifada, then–Air Force commander Dan Halutz and Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter authorized the assassination of a top-ranking Hamas military commander, Salah Shehadeh, while he slept with his family in a crowded apartment bloc in downtown Gaza City.

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These photos were documents of a colonial culture in which Jewish Israeli youth became conditioned to act as sadistic overlords toward their Palestinian neighbors, and of a perpetual conquest that demanded indoctrination begin at an early age and continue perpetually throughout their lives. The young soldiers provided a perfect example of cognitive dissonance, in which chants of “Am Yisrael Chai!” (“The People of Israel Live!”) alternated easily with “Death to Arabs!” In March 2011, months after her photos drew international attention and widespread condemnation, Abergil began uploading other soldiers’ trophy shots to her Facebook page. She captioned one upload with the increasingly common refrain: “DDDEATHHH to ARABSSSSSS.”

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Among the tower’s most famous residents was Marty Peretz, the former New Republic magazine owner who had abandoned his East Coast intellectual environs. “I’ve made Tel Aviv my locale now because in Jerusalem you wake up in the morning with the Jewish problem, and you go to sleep with the Palestinian problem,” Peretz told a reporter, invoking the cliché of the Tel Aviv bubble. I turned to Jesse to complain about the sense of cognitive dissonance, of hanging out at a hipster bar that could have been anywhere in the West, in Berlin or Brooklyn, with the residue of teargas still on my shirt. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s always incredibly jarring to be in these rural Palestinian villages and experience army raids and repression at demos, and then you get back into this bright urban metropolis where you’re living in the cultural equivalent of Brooklyn, except it’s completely segregated.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

The article argues that the autonomous-car industry must learn from mistakes made in aviation that have led to disasters, such as those mentioned above, which, the author says, partly result from the fact that the technology has made pilots’ tasks more difficult and complex, not easier: The airline industry trend towards higher levels of autonomy created new opportunities for confusion and mistakes – a situation called an ‘automation surprise’. In another irony of automation, this cognitive dissonance often occurred in exactly the kind of unusual situation 42 The triple revolution where advanced technology could have proven most valuable to their human operator. Yet, instead, they were doubly-burdened to sort through a confusing, dangerous and potentially escalating situation.23 Harford sums it up succinctly: ‘Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes but occasionally cause an extraordinary mess.’ 24 Paul Jennings, Professor of Energy and Electrical Systems at WMG, University of Warwick, who is heading a team developing a simulator for driverless cars, is a great advocate of the technology, but he is particularly concerned about the implications of Level 3: I don’t like Level 3.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Why might this be happening and how is it likely to impact a field such as affective computing? Some cognitive scientists have suggested the uncanny valley may be caused by a disconnect between different parts of our brain that we use to categorize and make sense of the world. They suggest this cognitive dissonance arises when our expectations based on an object’s appearance aren’t met by some other feature or aspect of its behavior. Movement is a commonly used example when describing this disconnect because the way a human being or other animal moves is quite distinctive. The graph in Figure 1 above highlights the importance of movement, indicating that the effect can become even more pronounced when faced with something that isn’t static or stationary.

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That said, a good soldier is certainly not an emotionless weapon. Just the opposite. In the field, emotional intelligence is continually called upon in assessing risks, in dealing with civilians on both sides of the conflict, and in maintaining the close-knit connections between comrades. The trauma and cognitive dissonance that arises from all of these conflicting demands on a soldier’s emotions can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and other psychological problems. These conditions can cause difficulties both while in the military and after returning to civilian life. Domestic violence, breakdowns, and suicides are just a few of the outcomes from the emotional discord that can be brought on by the experience of war.2 The global policy think tank RAND reports that at least 20 percent of veterans from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD and depression.

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

Mathewson, “The Effects of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group: A Replication,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2: 278–87 (1966). 23. P. G. Zimbardo, “Control of Pain Motivation by Cognitive Dissonance,” Science 151: 217–19 (1966). 24. See also E. Aronson and J. Mills, “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59: 177–81 (1958); J. L. Freedman, “Long-Term Behavioral Effects of Cognitive Dissonance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1: 145–55 (1965); D. R. Shaffer and C. Hendrick, “Effects of Actual Effort and Anticipated Effort on Task Enhancement,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7: 435–47 (1971); H.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

And it longed for that plaza to be clean and picturesque in the way a good plaza should be: empty of people. But hey, did you see what I did there? I was talking about rats, and then suddenly I was talking about human beings. Did you notice it when you were reading it? Did you feel any cognitive dissonance? What kind of cognitive dissonance did you feel? If you didn’t, it’s probably because ‘rats’ and ‘vermin’ is a common way of talking and thinking about this country’s underclass, the human beings who, because they sell drugs or don’t have a stable home, don’t quite seem like the sort of people we have to care about.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Before the pursuit of fame and fortune and the culture of personality became a defining force from the 1920s onwards, we lived in the age of character where morals, manners, honour and good deeds done without expectation of anything in return, were prized above all else. That I think this is a shame is immaterial. What is important is you do the soul-searching to know what your values are (tip: pick three and stick to them), then let them define your vision and your purpose. This is the key to living a life with meaning: no cognitive dissonance (saying or thinking one thing and doing another). As Darren Hardy writes, values “define both who you are and what you stand for.” He adds: “Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS…nothing creates more stress than when our actions and behaviors aren’t congruent with our values[89].”

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Be-fore we begin, let me give you an insight into our home life a few years ago, that of a married-with-two-children, early-forties couple living in an upmarket suburb of Glasgow: Two hours’ non-work-related social media use a day, while limiting the kids’ screen time. An inability to either do meaningful work or be present in the moment through digital-distractedness. This led to cognitive dissonance: a dad who extolled the virtues of reading to his kids – and himself – but rarely read a book. A fairly tidy house but with ever-growing piles. Exhibit A: kids’ art corner. Exhibit B: two of those 12-hole IKEA units housing rattan cubes, in which lurked a multitude of plastic. We could never find anything we didn’t use every day, leading to stress and precious hours wasted.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In our research, we saw that white fragility prevented people from confronting their latent prejudices. This cognitive dissonance also meant that subjects would often amplify their responses expressing positive statements toward minorities in an effort to satiate their self-concept of “not being racist.” For example, when presented with a series of hypothetical biographies with photos, some respondents who scored higher in prior implicit racial bias testing would rate minority biographies higher than identical white biographies. See? I scored the black person higher, because I am not racist. This cognitive dissonance created an opening: Many respondents were reacting to their own racism not out of concern about how they may be contributing to structural oppression, but rather to protect their own social status.

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

Now he plans to use it to stir up some trouble for Stiritz. He will put Stiritz’s plan under a spotlight. Chapman had written his letter in high English like he’d swallowed a dictionary. He filled it with phrases like “tacitly dissuade,” “egregious inefficiencies,” “proffering,” “efficacious means,” “nepotistic practices,” and “cognitive dissonance.” A shareholder needed a degree in English literature to know what he meant. That won’t be a problem for Loeb. He’s part of the new breed of investors trolling Internet message boards, posting rumors and flaming (insulting) one another. Loeb’s screen name is “Mr. Pink,” who is also one of the main characters in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody heist-gone-wrong film Reservoir Dogs.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

And though that bubble burst in the early 2000s, the aesthetic it spawned – which disguises work as play – remains popular. Does it make it easier to give up our leisure time when a meeting room is called a granny flat and designed in floral prints with easy chairs? What happens when work is going badly and a workspace that looks leisurely is suddenly a place of great stress? There is a cognitive dissonance in form and function here, perhaps the reason an event like brunch becomes such an overt act of leisure, even if in practice it isn’t leisurely. Many other people don’t have anything resembling a workspace at all. Work happens everywhere now. Many of us work from home, or from actual cafés, freelance vagabonds who move from one rickety table to the next, renting the space with our coffee purchases, getting more wired as the day goes on.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

I relied more the on the judgment of The Times than of the King. On behalf of those friends whose assets I was managing, I converted bank deposits and securities into gold and invested in Switzerland and Norway. A few days later the war broke out. Today, the king’s mistaken views would be described by behavioral psychologists as cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias. Somary did not use those terms, yet understood that elites live in bubbles beside other elites. They are often the last to know a crisis is imminent. Somary’s memoir was published in German in 1960; the English-language translation only appeared in 1986. Both editions are long out of print; only a few copies are available from specialty booksellers.

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Empire of Debt The elite worldview rests on the intellectual pillars of equilibrium models, monetarism, Keynesianism, floating exchange rates, free trade, globalization, and fiat money. Meanwhile, the real world is best understood through the lens of complexity theory, conditional probability, behavioral psychology, currency wars, neomercantilism, and gold. Cognitive dissonance between the elite worldview and real-world economics is taking its toll on elite self-confidence and control. The elites now divide into two types: those who are confused by lost credibility, and those who are quietly panicked because they understand their intellectual failure and its consequences.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

A survey of law school students published in 2003 by economists Kip Viscusi and Richard Zeckhauser in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, however, found that around 40 percent of respondents believed their personal risk assessment was higher before the attacks than currently.2 In another study of professional-school students and undergraduate business students in 2005, they showed that over two-thirds of respondents exhibited the same phenomenon.3 These respondents experienced a recollection bias, whereby after the occurrence of a low-probability event, one thinks that one’s prior risk assessment was much higher than it actually was. This could be due to an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance, for self-justification, or simply to misremembering. It may also be a variant of hindsight bias, in which knowing the outcome alters an individual’s assessment of how likely it was to have occurred. For example, in a 1975 study by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who is also a contributor to this book, subjects were given passages to read about the Gurkha raids on the British in the early 1800s.

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From the perspective of an ardent free-marketer, environmental problems are a threat: They require government intervention in the economy. It’s hard to believe both that we need to solve environmental problems and that the government is the problem and not the solution! Believing both leads to cognitive dissonance. Many conservatives ignore environmental problems, pretending that they don’t exist. Roosevelt and Nixon did not have this conflict: In their day, conservatism was consistent with a role for the government. Compounding this ideological change is an empirical one: the rise of climate change as an issue.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Two-thirds of all drivers ‘rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to 8)’. In their own minds, they can’t put a wheel wrong when they’re on the road. As a consequence, while ‘70 per cent of drivers report being a victim of an aggressive driver’, only ‘30 per cent admit to being aggressive drivers’. Such mismatches between perception and reality suggest that cognitive dissonance rules the highways. Drivers operate in a parallel universe where they are perfect and everyone else is bad and dangerous. The territoriality, belligerence, vindictiveness and, above all, double standards that typify road-rage sufferers have been investigated in depth. It’s now treated as a problem in its own right that claims hundreds of casualties each year, and is in urgent need of solution.

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Denmark, which tops its chart, wins partly because average commutes in that country are very short, and 34 per cent of Danish workers travel to their offices by bike. This combination boosts its scores on three counts – health (bicycle commuters have a 28 per cent lower mortality rate than the population average), environment and ‘work/life balance’. So are commuters all suffering from cognitive dissonance and, like smokers, addicted to a habit that will inevitably make them sick and possibly kill them? Some experts think so, and describe such blindness as a ‘weighting mistake’. We humans mess up our priorities: we invest our passions in trivia, and overlook important matters – we splash out on a new pair of shoes, and forget to pay our taxes.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for ourselves. Simply put, it’s killing us. In part, this book is about generalizing this message to all aspects of our lives: when it rains in the mountains, stay out of the river

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See fourth frontier geographic frontiers, 224–25, 226 growth and, 224–27 technological frontiers, 224, 225–26 transfer of resource frontiers, 224, 225, 226 Hobbes, Thomas, 33 hobbits of Flores island, 35 Homo/Homo sapiens, xiv–xv, 32–38 homosexuality, 136 honey, 79–80 horses, 138 how (proximate) questions, 68 Huaorani, 225 Huichol people, 220 human niche, 1–19 adaptive evolution and, 11–14 campfire and, 4, 6–9 consciousness and, 7–9 exchange of ideas and, 4, 6–7 generalists versus specialists and, 5–6, 7, 11 human nature, understanding, 5–6 innovation and, 4 lineage and, 12–13 niche switching as, 10–11, 35–36, 138, 211 Omega principle and, 14–17 oscillation between culture and consciousness and, 9–11 populating New World, 2–4 human paradox, 5–6 humor, 202–3 hunger, 52 hunter-gatherers, xv, 35–36, 80, 113–14 hyenas, 150 hygiene hypothesis, 47 hyper-novelty, xii adulthood and, 189–90 cognitive dissonance spawned by, xii and COVID-19 pandemic, 249 diet and, 77, 79 intuitive sense of fitness value of behaviors and, 204 medicine and, 61, 67, 71–72 olfactory perception and, 57 parenting and, 136–39 sleep disruption and, 98–101 visual perception and, 40 Inca Empire, 225 Indian Deccan Traps, 29 individual consciousness, 8 indri, 60 infanticide, 13 innovation, 4, 5, 171, 209–222 insects, 22, 25, 109, 110, 238 intellectual self-reliance, 178–79 intellectual tools, 177 Inuit, 9–10, 78, 148 jacanas, 111, 112, 126 jackdaws, 131 jaws, 23 jays, 147 jealousy, 116–17, 120, 130 Jefferson, Thomas, 239 justice/freedom trade-off, 232–33 Kenyan children, 151, 152 killer whales, 142, 147 Komodo dragons, 109 !

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975. Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence? The conventional interpretation of this phenomenon is based on cognitive dissonance. When people have taken “irrevocable” actions in the service of a belief—given away all their property in anticipation of the saucers landing—they cannot possibly admit they were mistaken. The challenge to their belief presents an immense cognitive dissonance; they must find reinforcing thoughts to counter the shock, and so become more fanatical. In this interpretation, the increased group fanaticism is the result of increased individual fanaticism.

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You may also think that making things illegal just makes them more expensive, that regulators will abuse their power, or that her individual freedom trumps your desire to meddle with her life. But, as a matter of simple fact, she’s still going to die. We live in an unfair universe. Like all primates, humans have strong negative reactions to perceived unfairness; thus we find this fact stressful. There are two popular methods of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance. First, one may change one’s view of the facts—deny that the unfair events took place, or edit the history to make it appear fair. (This is mediated by the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy.) Second, one may change one’s morality—deny that the events are unfair. Some libertarians might say that if you go into a “banned products shop,” passing clear warning labels that say THINGS IN THIS STORE MAY KILL YOU, and buy something that kills you, then it’s your own fault and you deserve it.

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If the theory is true, supporting evidence will come in shortly, and the probability will climb again. If the theory is false, you don’t really want it anyway. The problem with using black-and-white, binary, qualitative reasoning is that any single observation either destroys the theory or it does not. When not even a single contrary observation is allowed, it creates cognitive dissonance and has to be argued away. And this rules out incremental progress; it rules out correct integration of all the evidence. Reasoning probabilistically, we realize that on average, a correct theory will generate a greater weight of support than countersupport. And so you can, without fear, say to yourself: “This is gently contrary evidence, I will shift my belief downward.”

Reactive Messaging Patterns With the Actor Model: Applications and Integration in Scala and Akka by Vaughn Vernon

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, functional programming, Internet of things, Kickstarter, loose coupling, remote working, type inference, web application

If the application process is more complex, you can introduce a Process Manager (292) or other kind of Message Router (140) between the BookOrderController, BookOrder, and OrderFulfillment. See also Figure 1.5. Figure 1.8 Allow the Actor model to rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. Go ahead, be explicit. Rid your mind of the layers of implicit cognitive dissonance. It’s just you and your software model and perhaps a user interface. Go ahead, be explicit. The rest of the book helps you see how you can put much of the other conventional software layers behind you as a thing of the distant past. You are now in the fast lane with the Actor model and its concurrency and parallelism.

The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsessions With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, feminist movement, longitudinal study, moral hazard, moral panic, profit maximization, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

“Most of the obesity research community has deemed such data [on the risks of weight loss] compelling—but not enough to state that weight-loss attempts by obese 46 Fat Science people are dangerous . . . Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear ‘Diets don’t work.’ In fact, diets do work. It is prescriptions to diet that fail, because patients usually do not follow them.” A better illustration of rampaging cognitive dissonance, as well as of the classic “the operation was a success but the patient died” line of argument, would be difficult to find. As we have seen, such conclusions can be explained by the economic structure of obesity research. As a practical matter, obesity research must be funded either by the weight loss industry or by government grants.

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But then it all goes wrong: “A sexy woman is a woman who likes her body so of course she takes care of it which makes her lose weight which makes her like her body even more which makes her even sexier which makes her exercise more which makes her lose more weight . . .” A more precise description of the theoretical pretzel logic behind the practice of anorexia and bulimia would be difficult to formulate. Even within the context of the doublethink so characteristic of the diet culture, the level of cognitive dissonance at the center of Estrich’s arguments is breathtaking. Again, at the same time that she recognizes such truths as that there isn’t “a single woman alive who doesn’t do better, personally and professionally, when she feels great about herself,” and that the key to a fulfilling life is to choose “to be your best, to be happy with yourself, to be fit and strong and self-confident for however long you are blessed to be here” she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the empirically undeniable fact that, for almost all people— indeed, for Susan Estrich herself, until a couple of years before she wrote 212 Fat Politics this book—feeling great about themselves and being fit and strong and self-confident precludes the whole idea of dieting, which at its core is all about weakness and self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The few who bother to think about such matters only do so as a result of being prompted by an anthropologist, and they have wildly divergent representations of the process.” The ancient Egyptians, however, attempted to turn their mythic patterns into a comprehensive system and, in so doing, uncovered what Assmann has called the “cognitive dissonance” that results from an attempt to resolve the relationship between unity and diversity.22 In a traditional polytheistic cosmology, there's no need for a worldview to be systematic. Each god may have unique powers that are not necessarily consistent with those of another god. However, once we conceive of a sole creative power in the universe, the gods that previously represented natural forces and creatures are no longer the source of divinity.