What makes people irrational thinkers?

[emjay]

There was a time when it was a completely rationally justified and evidentially supported belief that the earth was the center of the solar system and that all other celestial bodies orbit it, until we learned we were wrong. No tool is perfect, and certainty only speaks to the strength of a particular belief, not to its accuracy.

As I've said before a million times, it only takes playing a game of Mafia to see firsthand, in yourself and others, how unreliable certainty is with regards to truth... it's what happens when confirmation bias is allowed to go to extremes unchecked. For that reason I've always appreciated the game of Mafia not just for the game itself but also for it's usefulness as a kind of psychological/social experiment, and even indeed a kind of allegory/metaphor for real life, except with the bonus that there is a guaranteed 'flip' or 'reveal' at the end, to show just how... more often than not... completely and utterly wrong you were Anyway, I think you played it with me once, so you might remember what it was like, but if nothing else, Mafia is a hotbed for confirmation bias, confined within a limited information environment where only the mod knows the full truth.

My worst experience of the extremes of confirmation bias, in creating an extreme paranoid delusion/conspiracy theory, was one of my earlier games in which after he died in the game, I came to believe, with 100% certainty, that alpha male was still alive, co-controlling the game with the mod, and even when his wife read the thread and told him about my outburst to that effect and he messaged me outside the game in concern, I didn't believe it at the time and thought it was part of the conspiracy... by the end of the game I was literally begging the mod to officially end the game, just to put me out of my misery and reveal the truth. Basically it was the combination of several days of in-game sleeplessness combined with many in-game coincidences that led to this descent into madness/massive and interesting game (Mafia Game #15 - Lost). Also, anyone wanna play? we haven't played in a long time and I guess I'm a glutton for punishment That said though, it is in theory possible to keep delusion and confirmation bias out of the game... depends how level headed you can keep yourself, which was an ongoing challenge for me playing Mafia because it is, or can be, such an immersive game, but was happy of it because, as I said, the game is great for the psychological insight it can provide both in and out of the game.