5 Methods Your Brain Uses To Fool You All The Time

The human brain is tricky and works in curious ways so that your body does everything the right way and keeps all the biological functions of your body in constant activity. Because we're talking about automatic mechanisms that don't depend on your control, you might get scared, but some of them are bizarre and deceptive tricks. Know them below:

1 - The wrong notion you have about your skills

People who are too confident in what they do and who firmly believe they are great at a given subject are really just too confident. This was proved by a study published in 1999, when David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people who are bad at a particular activity think they are actually good.

The reverse also works: the most competent people often think they are not good enough. "In the most diverse areas of life, incompetent people don't recognize how incompetent they are, " said one of the study's authors. This is because these people have difficulty understanding what it means to be incompetent. Now tell us: does that make sense to you?

2 - The feeling of being a fraud

If you have ever felt that your skills and abilities do not exist and are really just a lie about to be discovered, you can breathe a sigh of relief: you are not a neurotic person. We are all subject to the feeling that we are not as capable as we are told.

This even has a name: impostor syndrome. The first time this pattern of behavior came to light was in 1978, when Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes of Georgia State University noticed that many successful women felt they were a fraud. This feeling was observed in many other people: regardless of their achievements and abilities, everyone believed that they were deceiving someone, who were not that capable.

At first, researchers found that this sensation was more common in women than in men, but later research found that both genders at some point in life feel that they are deceiving others.

Do you know the students who get the highest grades in the class? An engineering professor told a group of overcompetent students about this syndrome, and guess what: most said they also had the feeling that they were fooling someone.

3 - If people think you're dumb, you'll be dumb

Look what a slut, huh! Life is really made of injustices, especially when we talk about this gelatinous mass that we keep in our head. This gets worse if you are part of a stereotypical group, such as blond people.

The phenomenon is known as the “stereotype threat” and it represents precisely this influence that certain labels end up exerting on our intellect. When a person hears for a long time that he is part of a group whose stereotype is negative, this idea is rooted. It is already scientifically proven: women perform poorly in chess when facing a male partner; Older people tend to have poor results on memory tests.

This is not because women are less aware of chess than men. And older people don't necessarily have memory problems. But these two stereotypes, when stated for a long time, end up becoming real.

This stereotype issue has already been proven true in several tests involving female negotiation skills, gay men's child-rearing skills, women at the wheel, and so on. People who fall prey to these stereotypes end up failing and blaming themselves when the mistake actually happens because their brains believe what they hear.

Social change can change this kind of problem, so it is crucial to include as many people as possible in soap operas, TV shows and leadership positions.

4 - People lie to themselves without realizing it.

Do you know that obvious truth your colleague insists on discrediting? You prove you're right, show him you're right, and yet he won't accept that he's wrong. Sounds familiar? This is so with most of us human beings, complicated creatures who when they want to believe something are able to unconsciously come up with arguments to prove them right. Not that these arguments are big lies.

In science, this pattern of behavior is known as “confirmation bias, ” which is nothing more than the human tendency to make up arguments and lie to oneself. "We humans are extraordinarily good at finding justification for any conclusion we want to reach, " said Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies confirmation bias.

Want to test this? Put an atheist and a fervent Christian to argue for divine existence. Both will have strong arguments in favor of their positions and, while one party may seem more convincing, the other will possibly ignore it.

5 - The question of the destiny and reason of all things

One of the thoughts that comforts us most when facing a difficult situation, the death of a loved one, the resignation of a nice job, or the end of a loving relationship is the good old sentence "it was meant to be." The almost romanticized idea that everyone has a plotted destiny, a scheme followed without realizing it, frees us from a great deal of weight, guilt, sadness and grief many times.

The truth is that human beings have an amazing ability to see patterns in everything, to imagine that everything happens for a mysterious reason. This constant search for a special reason may have arisen there among our ancestors, who possibly needed this kind of reasoning that eventually became rooted.

According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who already has a Nobel among his achievements, this kind of behavior can be called a "belief in the law of small numbers"; It's the idea that if a person drowned in a club pool, for example, that place is not safe at all.

It's okay to believe in patterns based on minor events. The point is that this can lead us to make wrong decisions. The problem is not having faith, to be clear, but we often come to believe that one thing will always be the same based on a small sample of evidence.

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So, had you noticed these illusions created by your brain? Tell us in the comments!