The psychologist Daniel Gilbert, widely known as the author of Stumbling to Happiness, once wrote an essay, titled “How Mental Systems Believe,” in which he developed a theory of believing and unbelieving that he traced to the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction of the best
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