Humans 101
Believing Is Easy, but Being Correct Is Difficult
Our fast brains are gullible, and our slow brains can fix things up… when they get around to it
When you encounter new information but have yet to form a belief about it, what’s your immediate response? Do you hold it up in your mental spotlight and subject it to a critical analysis? Do you suspend your belief until you’ve either confirmed or denied it?
We have limited time and mental resources to properly evaluate everything that impinges on our minds. We don’t stop to fact-check every headline that passes by on social media or every claim made by certain news outlets or each idea presented in a book.
What happens to things we encounter but don’t critically analyze? Research suggests that they can slip into our “truth baskets.” Once there, they can persist rather stubbornly.
Believing, it turns out, is the easy part. The second step is where things get tricky.
The library of belief
René Descartes wrote, “All that the intellect does is to enable me to perceive, without affirming or denying anything, the ideas which are subjects for possible judgments.” To Descartes, the mind is supposed to hold ideas up to be…
