Popular Delusions

Popular delusions are individual logical fallacies, cognitive biases and thought paradoxes that are so prevalent in society they exhibit as groupthink. Popular delusions are characterised by their fickle nature and rapid transmissibility.

Figure 1. "Night wind hawkers" sold stock on the streets during the South Sea Bubble. (The Great Picture of Folly, 1720)

Historically, in their acute phase, these delusions have caused frantic activity of people such as the South Sea Bubble, Tulip Mania or Witch Mania. However, many more chronic popular delusions persist today and are perpetuated by our ever ubiquitous art such as movies, computer games and music:

• The Arrival Fallacy - the (false) belief that when we achieve a particular goal, we'll finally become - and remain - happy. Almost every movie which comes out of Hollywood has a happy ending.
• Jevons Paradox - the more efficient our technology becomes the more efficiently we consume more energy.
• Undiagnosed and untreated mass mental illness - narcissism, psychopathy of the wealthy and those in power.

Many of these delusions are propagated by the advertising industry via framing techniques to the benefit of a subsection of the population. Many of their effects can be overcome by inducing Pivotal Mentals States.

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology would infer that any human characteristic brought about by evolutionary change should cause an increase in fitness, it is a wonder therefore how then a delusions often hold negative connotations that they arise. One rationale is the energy frugal brain making shortcuts (heuristics) to save energy. In modern times, the that issue arises here is that these heuristics were made for another time. I.e. all fatty foods taste nice to humans as starvation was prevalent, similarly on the next level computational non critical thought was prevalent until the creation of information junk food like Candy Crush.

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