Truth and perception have always been uneasy sisters. From time to time they align and understand each other, but most of the time they each go their own way. We tend, individually and as a society, to mislead and deceive ourselves. Despite the odds, we insist on being wrong about a lot of things.
The way we perceive the world is often quite distant from what the facts, figures, studies and experts show. This has huge impacts on our personal lives and also on collective life. Much of his work explores this gap, either to amplify illusions or to take advantage of them.
Ultimately, this dissonance is worth its weight in gold. “The ideal subject for a totalitarian government is an individual for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and between true and false has ceased to exist”, .
Why does this continue to happen, if human beings have managed to have so much information easily at their disposal? It is worth going to the past, to our biological nature, to understand the deep reasons for the power of perceptions.
As mammals, we are designed with a small prefrontal lobe, the “chief executive” of the mind, while the gland that secretes adrenaline, our alarm system, is quite large. Primitive defense mechanisms have been vital for millennia to the “fight or flight” response. Today they continue to help us, of course, but they also cause us problems. They feed a system that generates illusions.
The in a magnificent book called “The Dangers of Perception”. In it he describes that we are recipients of what the media, social networks and politicians tell us, but the way we think is clouded by many erroneous mental shortcuts.
There are at least six biases that, nowadays, are decisive in deforming our view of reality:
1. Illusory superiority bias: We tend to think that we are superior to the average citizen in positive characteristics, such as intelligence, driving talent or leadership skills.
2. Negativity bias: Our brains deal differently with potential threats and negative information and store it in more easily accessible places.
3. Idyllic Hindsight Bias: The past tends to be remembered as better than the present. Reviewing things through rose-colored glasses contributes to our sense of well-being and self-esteem.
4. Captivating story bias: We remember good stories much more easily than boring information and statistics.
5. Confirmation bias: We are attracted to stories that reinforce our preconceived ideas and preconceived beliefs, and we tend to devalue those that contradict them.
6. Bias from the illusory effect of truth: The mere repetition of false information increases its credibility. There are falsehoods that, said repeatedly, are notoriously irremovable.
We cannot change the design of our brain. But we can at least know how it works so we don’t let ourselves be fooled or manipulated so easily. Whether on social media, by people around us or by politicians.
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