Why have the anti-nuclear activists have been so successful? Because they tell lies packaged as emotional stories. Pro Nuclear Democrats examines how human intuitions deceive:
The other night I caught a repeat of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, though my first listening, with the authors who wrote The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
. Near the end of their discussion the subject of causality came up, here is the transcript:
And one of our intuitions is, indeed, that we do try – our minds do try to make sense of things so that if A – if B follows A, then clearly A had something to do with B. You call that the narrative fallacy.
Prof. CHABRIS: Yeah. We also call it the illusion of cause, the idea being that we see things as causally related, one thing causing the other when we see them go together. And one of the ways things go together commonly is in sequence. One thing happens before another
CONAN: Mm-hmm.
Prof. CHABRIS: And storytellers exploit this quite nicely by stringing together a series of facts and leading the reader to automatically infer that they’re happening in some causal sequence, that they happen for a reason and filling in the blanks, in fact, between them to make up a coherent story. Those things are very powerful and they stick in our memory much better than let’s say statistics or other kinds of information that people use to persuade, which don’t really work nearly as well as stories, especially stories with emotional content.
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