Smart Stupidity Can Strike Anywhere
— Mortimer R Feinberg and John J Tarrant,
Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, 1995

 

People in contemporary society have inherited and learned unconsciously an enormous number of ancient modes of thought, some of which can be traced back for many millions of years....For millions of years these 'defaults’ of the mind have worked well [but] they do not...work so well in the day-to-day world of modern life.
— Robert Ornstein and Paul R Ehrlich, New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution, 1989

 

Even when we become professionals, this sort of erring works away within our minds....[It] is governed, in large part, unconsciously by two spontaneous rules: 'acquiescence’ and 'segregation.’ We can think of these as rules of ... 'mental sloth’:

'Acquiescence’ means that when we are faced with a reasonable formulation of a problem involving choice, we accept it in the terms in which it is formulated and do not seek an alternative form. In other words, we ... seek to solve a problem as presented. Thanks to our cognitive sloth, we become prisoners of the frame we are offered.

[Segregation:] We isolate the problem from its global context; the problem itself becomes the immediate and exclusive center of our attention. We do not take into account all the pros and cons of our choice and its consequences. Having narrowly considered only the choices offered us, rather than considering the various global possibilities or probabilities available ... in myopic fashion we take up only those actions and solutions that have an immediate effect on the situation.

— Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, 1994

 

When making judgments and decisions, we employ a variety of informal rules and strategies that simplify fundamentally difficult problems and allow us to solve them without excessive effort and stress. These strategies are generally effective, but the benefit of simplification is paid for at the cost of occasional systematic error. There is, in other words, an ease/accuracy trade-off in human judgment.
— Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991

 

We can sometimes become overly impressed by data which, upon closer inspection, merely suggests credence to a particular argument or idea. Subsequently accepting this hypothesis as true, despite the apparent inadequacies, we fail to see beyond this 'illusion of validity.’ The belief then becomes accepted, incorporating itself in our personal paradigms, with the believer(s) consequently professing vehemently that this is a 'logical’ conclusion drawn from 'objective evidence’ that 'any rational person can see.’
— H. J. Einhorn and Robin M Hogarth, Psychology Review, 85: "Confidence in judgment: persistence of the illusion of validity," 1977

 

Habits — one of the results of learning, the formation of new but relatively fixed ways of response — in their totality, make up the character of the individual; that is, they are the individual, as he appears to other people.
— Knight Dunlap, Habits: Their Making and Unmaking, 1932

 

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs, institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.
— Ruth Fulton Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934

 

Individuals shape their world through their perceptions. Once they have created this world, they resist changing it. [They] selectively process information in order to keep their perceptions intact. They hear what they want to hear. They ignore information that challenges the world they've created.
— Stephen P Robbins, Essentials of Organizational Behavior (6th ed.), 1999

[..more on next several pages >>]

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