Insights

How misinformation spreads through the tangential elements that don’t seem up for debate // Misinformation often spreads subtly in the background of a story, away from the spotlight. It can take the shape of brief mentions barely related to the main topic, often added as something obvious, natural and beyond challenge. Because our brains are […]

How can we build knowledge? To fight our ignorance, we must first admit it // Over the last centuries, we have raised our standards of living and conquered all the physical elements for happiness. But ignorance is still widespread and one of the greatest challenges of our century. With the advent of mass media and

How charismatic leaders silence our own critical thinking and threaten democracy // Misinformation has led us to build extreme, emotionally charged opinions which have largely discredited and exposed our institutions, threatening modern society. To save us from a polarised world with no guardrails, we have put our faith in charismatic leaders that resemble more tribe

We tell ourselves stories all the time in order to make sense of the world around us. It’s a process known as rationalisation. We also tell ourselves stories about us and who we are as individuals. Because nobody wants to be a bad person, our own storytelling usually sheds a positive light on us. Sometimes,

Acknowledging how our emotions influence our opinions is key to refining them // Most of the content that gets to us has some connection to the opinions we already have, and those opinions influence how likely we are to agree with that information regardless of its reliability. As Anaïs Nin once said, “we don’t see

We’re more similar than we think, but our firm belief in rationality divides us // Political positions aren’t as rational as we’d like to think and, in fact, both what we call the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ are formed by the same agnostic instinct of self-preservation. As much as we’d like to believe we’re perfectly

Admitting the ‘evil’ in all of us is the way to become better social and political beings // For thousands of years, we’ve learned to divide the world – and ourselves – into good and evil. To avoid feeling like we belong to the evil bunch, we’ve also learned to rationalise our negative feelings and

How stories shape our world // The stories we’re told deeply influence how we perceive the world around us even when they are not true, and, surprisingly, even when we know that they are not true. They also influence our actions and the causes we come to defend, which makes storytelling a powerful tool of

The Myth of Perception // We tend to trust our perceptions to be neutral and unbiased. In reality, however, this is almost never the case. From our most basic senses, such as sight, to the more complex political and sociological views we build of the world, ours brains draw inferences based on how we expect

The Myth of Our Opinions // Have you ever found yourself trying to convince someone of an idea, only to get frustrated with them not seeing the perfectly logical sequence of facts you presented? If you have, perhaps a time-saving way to start this conversation would have been asking them: “How convinced are you of