Insights

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

Notes by a co-founder // When I first heard of ‘fake news’, it was usually linked to something Donald Trump had said – either Trump accusing newspapers of misinformation, or vice versa. Then it gradually became a more apparent topic. People began talking about media literacy, respectable figures were expressing public concern, schools were addressing