New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
Illustration by Gérard DuBois
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
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