The Understanding Project

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Got a book deal!!
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Got a book deal!!

Falsifiable Friday #11

Maarten van Doorn
Dec 3, 2021
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Got a book deal!!
maartenvandoorn.substack.com

Happy Friday! 😁

Some super exciting news: I got a book deal! šŸ˜€

(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 ā€œpeople believe what they want to believe anyway, so facts don’t matterā€. 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 ā€œpeople sometimes fall for tricky logic puzzles in the psych labā€ to ā€œpeople are bad reasoners in everyday lifeā€ is, once again, terribly overestimated.

  • ā€œPeople are gullible and hence easily manipulated by things like fake news and advertisements.ā€ 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

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Tim Boone
Dec 3, 2021

Maarten, You haven't been paying close enough attention to the authoritarian messaging of the "Big Lie" used by the US Republican party to cause Americans to lose faith in American democratic institutions including even the election system...............

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