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October 26, 2012

Strange But True!

Q. Why do so many people believe in improbable things like ghosts, astrology, psychic phenomena, UFOs?

A. We humans are “cognitive misers,” capable of careful, logical problem solving but much of the time using automatic decision processes and shortcuts to get a “close-enough” answer, says Case Western Reserve University social psychologist Jennifer Butler. Within this framework, we seek plausible explanations for the events that we seem to experience. For example, we might notice that we think of a person right before he or she calls us and conclude that we have psychic powers. But the less exciting answer is we probably think of that person often, yet our attention is drawn to the times when we think of the person right before receiving a call, ignoring the other times when there was no call, or when we didn't think of the person and he or she did call — a classic example of “confirmation bias.”


 
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