Misbelief by Dan Ariely

Let’s start with a quick recap of some of the most famous news and events in history - first man landing on moon, attack on the World Trade Center, weird saucer like UFOs, etc. What is common to all of these topics? Yes, they are quite popular but they are all also full of very interesting conspiracy theories. Let’s look at one of the most recent events in the world - Covid-19 pandemic. On one hand when the entire world was fighting this pandemic with never before heard-of restrictions and regulations, the same pandemic was the epicenter for some of the most weird and irrational theories floating around(vaccines with magnets!). There were believers and then there were misbelievers. This phenomenon - of taking a distorted view of the world events which is far from facts - is the topic of the book ‘Misbelief’ by Dan Ariely. Why and how did I got to read this book? Well, I have been a fan of Dan Ariely for a very long time now, and I have read all his books starting from ‘Predictably Irrational’ to ‘Misbelief’. In fact, it’s Dan’s books that piqued my interest in the subject of Behavioral Economics. So when I got a newsletter mentioning his newest book, I knew I had to read it. So what does it contain? Read on.

I had a very little understanding of what a ‘misbelief’ is or who ‘misbelievers’ are until I read this book. As I read the book, it dawned on me that these are not some new terms; instead we are all misbelievers to some extent and we all hold some misbeliefs in our lives - it’s just that we don’t realize them. In fact, the concept of misinformation and misbelief is so prevalent in our world that we become part of the chain of misbelief more often than not without even actively spreading them. Don’t belive me? Take a moment and recollect the information you learnt or came across for one of the earlier mentioned topics. I’m pretty sure you believed in some information that was far from truth. Dan Ariely explores this phenomenon from a behavioral point of view, taking a very methodical approach to understand this peculiar aspect of human behavior.

After the foundations of what constitutes a misbelief is established, Dan presents to us the process of misbelief - a funnel through which people enter at one end where they are completely unaware of the irrational beliefs and over a period of time, they emerge out of the funnel completely bought into the odd theories and becoming a true misbeliever. So, the next question is - what are the factors that could be attributed as the cause of this transformation? To answer this, Dan presents us the four factors:

• The Emotional Elements
• The Cognitive Elements
• The Personality Elements
• The Social Elements

The rest of the book explores each of the above elements in detail, all the while presenting extremely riveting personal stories of real misbelievers. Although the context and motivation for this book is set in the Covid-19 pandemic time, Dan explores the concept of misbelief in general and as something that pervades a lot more topics than just the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the course of the next few chapters, we are presented with some very interesting concepts in human psychology such as heuristics, razors(Occam’s razor, Hitchen’s razor, Hanlon’s razor), confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, conjunction fallacy, social proof, Dunning Kruger effect, congintive dissonance, etc. If these terms sound scary, I assure you that these are presented in very simple terms that an engineer with no background in psychology can understand easily. Once you understand these concepts, you can’t stop yourself from seeing these principles in action in your daily life.

Although Dan talks about the elements playing a vital role in the concept of misbelief, he also presents us with helpful tips all along the way on how to prevent ourselves from falling into the misbelief funnel. Rightfully titled ‘Hopefully Helpful’, these little nuggets of wisdom will surely help you to strengthen the understanding of the human behaior in greater detail. As a closing remark, I can only say this - there are a few books that not just educate you, but they actually make you think about the daily life and this helps in expanding your thoughts into never before dimensions.

Happy reading!