A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
Interpretation
Frequent repetition of a falsehood can lead people to believe it is true due to its familiarity.
This quote emphasizes how the human mind often conflates familiarity with truth. Daniel Kahneman highlights the psychological tendency to accept repeated statements as valid, which is a tactic utilized by both authoritarian regimes and marketers to shape beliefs and opinions, ultimately suggesting a critical awareness of the information we consume is essential.
In practice
In a debate about misinformation, one could use this quote to highlight the dangers of repeated falsehoods.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
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Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Reproach is infinite, and knows no end So voluble a weapon is the tongue; Wounded, we wound; and neither side can fail For every man has equal strength to rail.
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only by a process of reasoning - which is a phenomenon.
I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
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