Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

Unless someone’s parents are secretly Vulcan, no one on earth is a purely rational thinker. We are all affected with cognitive biases, which are the commonly occurring errors in our thinking that generate flawed subjective interpretations of information. It is completely normal for people to process information with bias—in fact, everyone does—and oftentimes these biases are harmless in day-to-day life. These biases are not random in each person. Rather, they are systematic errors, meaning they create patterns in common forms of irrational thinking. In fact, thousands of cognitive biases have been identified in the field of psychology. Some biases are so common and seemingly intuitive that it can be hard for people to even recognize that they are actually irrational. For example, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a study that asked participants a very simple question: “Suppose you sample a word at random from an English text. Is it more likely that the word starts with a k, or that k is the third letter?” Most people responded with the former, that words that start with k (e.g., kitchen, kite, or kilometer) are more likely. However, the opposite is true, and one is actually twice as likely in a typical English text to encounter words where the third letter is a k, such as ask, like, make, joke, or take. They tested for five letters (k, l, n, r, and v) like this. It is easier for people to think of words by first letter because we are taught to or...