Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

Another great book from Dan Ariely. I have been a fan of his since having dinner with him in 2014 at an Insights Conference. His earlier work, Predictably Irrational has helped me with countless clients when we are trying to implement a large change for an enterprise.

This book focuses mostly on the public areas of Misbelief and of course the conspiracy aspects of our current world. There are many aspects of this that can be applied within companies within cultures and of course, as we're looking at change management or at least as I'm looking at change management, there are ingrained beliefs, and of course, the rumors and conspiracy theories that run within companies and have an impact on change management of efforts.

Dan Ariely argues that to understand the irrational appeal of misinformation, we must first understand the behavior of “misbelief”—the psychological and social journey that leads people to mistrust accepted truths, entertain alternative facts, and even embrace full-blown conspiracy theories. Misinformation, it turns out, appeals to something innate in all of us.

💡 Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

“Once a spiral of mistrust begins, someone needs to make the first move to break the cycle, which means extending trust rather than doubling down on mistrust. In our social relationships, the question of who should make the first move can be open for discussion. When a government is involved, I think the answer is clearer. Because of the asymmetrical power differential, it’s incumbent upon the government to take the first steps.”

“When bureaucracy increases, people feel mistrusted and therefore have less goodwill toward the institutions (often governments) that are making the rules. Consequently, more things go wrong that trigger more rules, creating a negative cycle that increases mistrust. Bureaucracy may take care of the particular focal point of a given regulation, but it erodes overall goodwill and destroys people’s motivation to improve and contribute to the institution. Sadly, bureaucracy is increasing almost everywhere.”

“Whitson and Galinsky carried out many other experiments to further explore this topic, including one showing that after recalling a personal experience involving a lower level of control, participants tended to become more superstitious. Overall, their results show that the mind is a sense-making organ that searches for patterns all the time, and therefore all of us see patterns. But when we feel a low level of control, our minds work even harder to find patterns to help us make sense of the world, even if it is made up.”

“solution aversion. Put simply, it means that if we don’t like a proposed solution to a problem, we use motivated reasoning to deny that the problem exists in the first place.”

Hitchens’ razor, named after Christopher Hitchens, the late literary critic, journalist, contrarian, and staunch atheist: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

“scarcity mindset. Research on this topic showed that participants scored much lower on IQ tests when they were relatively poor (farmers who were a few weeks away from the harvest season, for example) compared to when they had some money (farmers who had just harvested and sold their crops).”

Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book