WRD 103: Composition & Rhetoric I: Winter Quarter 2015 Rotating Header Image

Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions

From FiveThirtyEight/Science:

Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.” A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology investigates how this illusion influences the way we process new information. Its finding: Causal illusions don’t just cement erroneous ideas in the mind; they can also prevent new information from correcting them.