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Subjective Validation
Subjective validation, sometimes called personal validation effect, is a cognitive bias by which people will consider a statement or another piece of information to be correct if it has any personal meaning or significance to them. People whose opinion is affected by subjective validation will perceive two unrelated events (i.e., a coincidence) to be related because their personal beliefs demand that they be related. Closely related to the Forer effect, subjective validation is an important element in cold reading. It is considered to be the main reason behind most reports of paranormal phenomena. According to Bob Carroll, psychologist Ray Hyman is considered to be the foremost expert on cold reading. The term ''subjective validation'' first appeared in the 1980 book '' The Psychology of the Psychic'' by David F. Marks and Richard Kammann. Subjective validation describes the tendency of people to believe or accept an idea or statement if it presents to them in a personal and p ...
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Cognitive Bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm (philosophy), norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the Objectivity (philosophy), objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Although it may seem like such misperceptions would be aberrations, biases can help humans find commonalities and shortcuts to assist in the navigation of common situations in life. Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics in judgment and decision-making, heuristic ...
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Marcel Petiot
Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot (17 January 1897 – 25 May 1946) was a French medical doctor and serial killer. He was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II. He is suspected of the murder of about 60 victims during his lifetime, although the true number remains unknown. Early life Marcel Petiot was born on 17 January 1897 in Auxerre, Yonne, in north central France. At the age of 11, Petiot fired his father's gun in class and propositioned a female classmate for sex. During his teenage years, he robbed a postbox and was charged with damage of public property and theft. Petiot was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, resulting in charges being dismissed when it was judged that he had a mental illness. Later accounts make various claims of Petiot's delinquency and criminal acts during his youth, but it is unknown whether they were invented afterwards for public consumption. ...
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Truthiness
Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions. The concept of truthiness has emerged as a major subject of discussion surrounding U.S. politics during the late 20th and early 21st centuries because of the perception among some observers of a rise in propaganda and a growing hostility toward factual reporting and fact-based discussion. American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term ''truthiness'' in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program ''The Colbert Report'' on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetor ...
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Barnum Effect
The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum–Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some paranormal beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, aura reading, and some types of personality tests. These characterizations are often used by practitioners as a con-technique to convince victims that they are endowed with a paranormal gift. Because the assessment statements are so vague, people ascribe their own interpretation, thus the statement becomes "personal" to them. Also, individuals are more likely to accept negative assessments of themselves if they perceive the person presenting the assessment as a high-status professiona ...
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True-believer Syndrome
True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term used by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book ''The Psychic Mafia''. Keene coined the term in that book. He used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon even after it had been proven to have been staged.Keene, Lamar M. (1976). ''The Psychic Mafia''. St. Martin's Press; New YorkKeene and Spragett, p.151 Keene considered it to be a cognitive disorder, and regarded it as being a key factor in the success of many psychic mediums. The term "true believer" was used earlier by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book ''The True Believer'' to describe the psychological roots of fanatical groups. True-believer syndrome could be considered a type of belief perseverance for paranormal phenomena. Psychology In an article published in ''Skeptical Inquirer'', psychologist Matthew J. Sharps and his colleagues analyze and dissect the psychology of True Believers and their behavior after the predicted apocaly ...
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Self Propaganda
Self-propaganda is the way in which people convince themselves of something regardless of the evidence against it. They will go over their side of the argument without considering the alternative arguments. Introduction Self-propaganda is a form of propaganda and indoctrination performed by an individual or a group on oneself. It functions at individual and social levels: political, economic, and religious. It hides behind partial truths and ignores questions of critical thought. The psychological process of utilizing self-propaganda can negatively influence values and beliefs, and subsequent perceptions and judgments, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-propaganda can also be a form of self-deception. Those whose values match the self deceptions are even further impacted. Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance can cause people to further perpetuate the propaganda, reaffirming or reinforcing their beliefs despite contradicting evidence. Historical context Propaga ...
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Self-deception
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception. Brief history While Freudian analysis of the conscious and the unconscious minds dominated the field, psychological scientists in the 1970s became curious about how those two seemingly separate worlds could work together. The lack of mechanistic models available to this line of research, led to the debate being unresolved. Later, the focus has been shifted to vision-related research in social psychology. Theorization Analysis The traditional paradigm of self-deception is modeled after ''interpersonal'' deception, where ''A'' intentionally gets ''B'' to believe some proposition ''p'', all the while knowing or believing truly ¬''p'' (not ''p''). Such deception is intentional and requires the dec ...
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List Of Biases In Judgment And Decision Making
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics. Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processingMartin Hilbert (2012) "Toward a synthesis of cognitive biases: How noisy information processing can bias human decision making"'. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 211–237; free access to the study here: https://www.martinhilbert.net/toward-a-synthesis-of-cognitive-biases/). Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought. Explanations include i ...
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David Marks (psychologist)
David Francis Marks (born 1945) is a psychologist, author and editor of numerous articles and books largely concerned with five areas of psychological research – judgement, health psychology, consciousness, parapsychology and intelligence. Marks is also the originator of the General Theory of Behaviour, and has curated exhibitions and books about artists and their works. Biography Marks was born 12 February 1945 in Liphook, Hampshire, England to Victor W.F. Marks and Mary Dorothy (née Goodman) Marks. Marks earned a BSc at University of Reading in 1966 and a PhD at University of Sheffield in 1970. From there, he moved to New Zealand where he taught at the University of Otago as lecturer then senior lecturer in psychology. He returned to the UK as Head of the School of Psychology at Middlesex University before working at City University London from 2000 to 2010. He founded the ''Journal of Health Psychology'' and ''Health Psychology Open'', an open access journal. His la ...
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Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills. Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects: # '' attitude polarization'' (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence) # '' belief perseverance'' (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false) # the ''i ...
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Belief
A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection. For example, few carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be ''occurrent'' (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), but can instead be ''dispositional'' (e.g. a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). There are various different ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be ( Jerry Fodor), as dispositions to act as if certain things are tr ...
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Bertram Forer
Bertram R. Forer (24 October 1914 – 6 April 2000) was an American psychologist best known for describing the Forer effect, sometimes referred to as subjective validation. Biography Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Forer graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1936. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of California, Los Angeles. He served as a psychologist and administrator in a military hospital in France during World War II. Upon return he worked in a Veterans Administration mental clinic in Los Angeles; and in private practice in Malibu, California. In his classic 1948 experiment, Forer administered a personality test to his students. Rather than scoring the tests and giving individual assessments, he gave all the students exactly the same analysis copied from a newspaper astrology Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern informa ...
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