Anastaska Кузнецова's Key Ideas from Misbelief
by Dan Ariely

To counteract the attraction toward complex stories featuring evil villains, it is useful to keep three “razors” in our cognitive hygiene bag. The term razor is used to describe certain heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, that can help to quickly “shave” away unnecessary information and complexity and get us more quickly to the truth. We discussed two of them above: the slightly modified Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by human fallibility,” and Occam’s razor,

“The simplest explanation is the one we should favor, until it is proven to be inadequate.” To these we can add Hitchens’ razor, named after Christopher Hitchens, the late literary critic, journalist, contrarian, and staunch atheist: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Together, these three tools can prevent us from falling into a spiral of misbelief. They invite us to ask questions such as: Is it reasonable to assume malicious intent over stupidity, human fallibility, or chance? Is it sensible to propose a complex web of ill intention?