Illusory Truth Effect Quotes

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against it but that this evidence was starting us in the face all the time.

If you repeat something long enough people believe it's what happened.

An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it's more available to you.

It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.

If you tell them what they want to hear, they don't bother to try to see.

When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

But Annabeth knew that people saw what they wanted to see. They didn’t need the Mist to warp their perceptions.

I've heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

The person who imagined that he could not be the victim of propaganda because he could distinguish truth from falsehood, is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the truth, he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda: moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

It is pointless to believe what you see, if you only see what you believe.

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.