Our dependence on facts turns out to be somewhat pathetic, since we do not know any facts at all except as they are involved in the experience of man.... When a man says, 'King Charles the First was executed,’ he means, 'I believe King Charles the First was executed.’ Our dependence appears to be on facts, but it is really a dependence on men.... We must use reason to determine which authority to follow....
— David Elton Trueblood, The Logic of Belief, 1942

 

People place a premium on being rational and cognitively consistent. So, they are reluctant[. They] simply disregard pertinent evidence in order to see what they expect to see and believe what they expect to believe. People subtly and carefully 'massage’ the evidence to make it consistent with their expectations.
— Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991

 

Rather than STOP and say, 'Woops! I'm headed in the wrong direction,’ we tend to place a premium on projecting a consistent image of ourselves and try to rationalize our initial decision despite increasing evidence suggesting we ought to do the contrary.
— B M Staw, "The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action," in Academy of Management Review, October 1981; and D R Bobocel and J P Meyer, "Escalating Commitment to a Failing Course of Action: Separating the Roles of Choice and Justification," in Journal of Applied Psychology, June 1994

 

We must be wary of verbal maps that oversimplify and distort the picture.
— Ken Keyes, Jr, Taming Your Mind: A Guide to Sound Decisions, 1975

 

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"I told you so!”
In hindsight, people consistently exaggerate what could have been anticipated in foresight. They not only tend to view what has happened as being inevitable, but also to view it as having appeared 'relatively inevitable’ before it happened. People believe that others should have been able to anticipate events much better than was actually the case. They even misremember their own predictions so as to exaggerate in hindsight what they knew in foresight.
— Baruch Fischhoff, "Debiasing," 1982, in Judgments under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases, by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (Editors)

 

... memory often operates in a highly selective and biased way ... retain[ing] information that is in agreement with our initial preferences ... forget[ting] conflicting or emotionally disturbing ideas.
— Daniel D Wheeler and Irving Lester Janis, A Practical Guide for Making Decisions, 1980

 

Since the mid-1970s [have we investigated] the creation of false memories through exposure to misinformation. Now ... there are hundreds of studies to support a high degree of memory distortion. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a cleanshaven man as having a mustache, straight hair as curly, and even something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all! This growing body of research shows that new, postevent information often becomes incorporated into memory, supplementing and altering a person's recollection. The new information invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence.
— Elizabeth F Loftus, American Psychologist: "Reality of Repressed Memories," May 1993

 

...subtle aspects of how problems are posed, questions are phrased and responses are elicited have substantial impact on judgments that supposedly express ... true values. Furthermore, such lability in expressed preferences is unavoidable; questions must be posed in some manner and that manner may have a large effect on the responses elicited.
— Baruch Fischhoff, P. Slovic and S. Lichtenstein, "Knowing what you want: Measuring labile values," in Cognitive Processes in Choice and Decision Behavior, Thomas S. Wallsten (Editor), 1990

 

The simplest answer is not always the right one; truth is very often not simple.
— Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, XXX

 

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