People appear to be particularly adept at generating ideas, explanations and theories [with which to 'fit’ new incoming information into their present perspectives or paradigms] and usually with a fair degree of plausibility.
— Michael S Gazzaniga, The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind, 1985; Richard E Nisbett and T. D. Wilson, Psychology Review, 84: "Telling more than we know: verbal reports on mental process," 1977

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[However] many people today don't want honest answers insofar as 'honest’ means 'unpleasant’ or 'disturbing.’ They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. — Louis Kronenberger, The Cart and the Horse, 1964

 

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
— Francis Bacon

 

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People sometimes seem to believe that evidence derived from small samples may be granted equal significance as evidence derived from large samples.
— Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Psychological Bulletin, 76: "Belief in the law of small numbers," 1971, and Cognitive Psychology, 3: "Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness," 1972

 

...the mere fact that a huge overload of complicated information has to be processed in order to arrive at an optimal choice is sufficient to induce competent and highly efficient decision-makers to resort to simple decision rules that fail to take account of the full complexity of issues at hand. Then, too, there are ego-defensive tendencies and all sorts of self-serving biases that incline a person to lapse into wishful thinking rather than expending the [required] effort to obtain the best available realistic information and evaluate it critically.
— Irving Lester Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 1982

 

The tendency to impute order to ambiguous stimuli is simply built into the cognitive machinery we use to apprehend the world.... The predisposition to detect patterns and make connections is what leads to discovery and advance. The problem, however, is that the tendency is so strong and so automatic that we sometimes detect coherence even when it does not exist.
— Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991

 

[Imagined] scenarios lend themselves to coherent, orderly, and even emotionally compelling presentation. From our point of view, that is exactly what is wrong with them. The inner logic of the coherent, sequentially organized, humanly plausible story [tends to] become much more important than the shreds of actual evidence around which the story has been built. Most fiction makes more sense than most factual stories: Motives [are made] simple, not conflicting. Technical inconveniences can be swept away....Scenarios rarely turn out to be simple or as unequivocally linked with the available data as one would like.

.    .    .    .

The point ... is that the witness is not simply an [unerring, unbiased, unemotional] information source. Rather, the witness is a decision-maker embedded in a social situation in which the decisions have meaningful consequences.
— Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards, Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research, 1993

 

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You mustn’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
because they may have differing tastes!
— George Bernard Shaw

 

...want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge.... Trusting too much to other’s care is the ruin of many.
— Benjamin Franklin, The Way To Wealth, 1733

 

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This web page was last updated on Monday, February 2, 2004.
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