The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

Imposter syndrome shows up not unlike a workplace-specific anxiety disorder, said Torres.

The media massacred Holmes for her bizarre behavior, deep voice, and “creepy” eye contact. “But would our response have been different if she were a man? Yes,” Torres continued.

According to The Knowledge Illusion, we divide our cognitive labor so naturally that we’re left with “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other [group] members.” We can’t even identify where search engines’ knowledge starts and ours drops off. Via web search, one can access answers to any question in less than a second.

With cosmic irony, research on superiority complexes has found that people with depression assess their talents more objectively than others, a symptom termed “depressive realism.”

We can assign much of the blame to a bias known as the illusory truth effect—our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times.

Repetition is like a cognitive Tums, aiding in informational digestion. When you come across a sentiment twice and then three times, you start responding to it more quickly, your brain misinterpreting fluency as accuracy. Familiarity breeds comfort, but it also builds an immunity to unlearning and relearning, even in instances where you weren’t that attached to the knowledge in the first place—like the fake origins of wedding flowers.

The trouble is that we don’t sort the things we learn at confidence intervals. Instead, we treat everything filed away in our minds as equally true. As McTier put it, “My brain doesn’t separate ‘things that I’m very sure about’ and ‘things that I’m less sure about.’ It just stores all my knowledge as knowledge.”

processing fluency (whether or not something “rings a bell”) is our default strategy for evaluating truth. Only when that fails do we turn to actual thinking.

In 2018, Yale psychologist Gord Pennycook ran a survey on illusory truth using fake-news headlines from the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. He found that if participants across the political spectrum had seen a false, seemingly absurd headline just once before, it made them up to twice as likely to believe it.

a legend is defined by three core qualities: It’s told as true but clearly carries undertones of doubt; its content is extremely difficult or impossible to confirm; and, not unlike a superstition, it helps us capture and cope with culture-wide fears.

Using our species’ favorite storytelling devices to make information more palatable can either be an educational gift or a sociopolitical weapon.

Like a linguistic halo effect, when an utterance is more attractive, we also take it to be more trustworthy.

I hope I never come down from the thrill of knowing that spectacular earth aliens reigned over this planet for 174 million years, long before humans—who’ve been here for only .01 percent of that time—were ever a twinkle in evolution’s eye.