Repetition is the key to truth.
Or to that what we think the truth is.
When we get a new piece of information it doesn´t matter if it´s right or wrong. It is more important that we process the information a few times, which ultimately leads to us believing what we´ve heard more often.
Unfortunately, this so called “illusory truth effect” even happens when people know that the misinformation is false.
Maybe you think that your own thoughts are reasonable, but unfortunately humans are rarely rational beings.
On average we are 61.200 seconds awake per day. During this time we have to make about 35.000 decisions. As you can see there is not much time to process everything as deeply as we might like to.
Of course our brain helps us in these big decision-making-struggles and creates so called “heuristics” for us. These help us to think effectively in a relatively short time and thus make decisions more quickly and effective.
Another factor is the fact that we tend to believe things we already heard as it´s easier for us to process the already known. Furthermore, no one is spared from this behaviour.
The human mind is theoretically capable of weighing information against each other, but also often prefers to take the easier path. In this case, the use of heuristics. We call this preference for easy processing also “processing fluency”.
It is proven that we feel that an information must be accurate if it´s relatively effortless to process.
So maybe every once in a while you could think about the option that takes more effort to process.
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