Got a book deal!!

Falsifiable Friday #11

Happy Friday! 😁

Some super exciting news: I got a book deal! 😀

(Unfortunately, the book will be in Dutch. But who knows: maybe it will be translated someday.)

It will cover the topics I’ve been researching the last years (and occasionally writing about in this newsletter). Here they are, formulated in three misconceptions:

• Motivated reasoning, or “people believe what they want to believe anyway, so facts don’t matter”. This happens, but way less often than most people think. Though a few scientific issues become religious or political bloody shirts, most do not. Despite their partisan biases, most people are pretty good at judging the veracity of headlines, and when they are presented with clear and trustworthy corrections of a false claim, they change their minds, whether it was politically congenial or not.

• Biases. Yes, we have them. But the extent to which you can generalize from “people sometimes fall for tricky logic puzzles in the psych lab” to “people are bad reasoners in everyday life” is, once again, terribly overestimated.

• “People are gullible and hence easily manipulated by things like fake news and advertisements.” In fact, most attempts at mass persuasion - whether by religious leaders, politicians, or advertisers - fail.

If you have any source recommendations for stuff you think should be in the book, I’d love to know!

Have a wonderful weekend,

Maarten