Greg Motter

“The personality elements of the funnel of misbelief

Personality—broadly understood as individual differences—plays a role in explaining why some of us are more susceptible to misbelief than others.

It is extremely difficult to do personality research on misbelievers, since they instinctively mistrust the motives of the researchers. However, some common traits have been observed.

Being more prone to misremembering, falling into the trap of false recall and false recognition, feeds misbelief.

Seeing patterns where none exist is linked to misbelief.

Overtrusting our intuitions is linked to misbelief.

Decision-making biases such as the conjunction fallacy, illusory correlations, and the hindsight bias are more pronounced in misbelievers.

Narcissism plays a role in misbelief.

Personality cannot be easily changed, but knowing which traits correlate with misbelief can help us to identify risky points.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“No professional counselors or clergy ever spoke with the children of Pleasant Hill about their feelings regarding the tragedy. The prevailing attitude of the time was that the less a grieving person talked about his or her emotions, the faster that individual would heal. No one foresaw that these unconfronted emotions would haunt the Pleasant Hill survivors for their entire lives, manifested through nightmares, unpredictable flashes of panic, and relentless guilt and anger. The parents were also grieving and at a loss to help their children recover from the emotional trauma.”
― Ariana Harner, Children of the Storm: The True Story of The Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy

“Don’t gaslight me, Jesus.”
― Matt Dinniman, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

“The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century