The Benjamin Franklin effect: A friend just passed this on to me.
It is an interesting read and timely.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-franklin-effect-mcraney/
The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters
by Maria Popova
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” But given how much our minds mislead us, what if we don’t realize when we’re pretending — who are we then? That’s precisely what David McRaney explores in You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself (public library) — a “book about self-delusion, but also a celebration of it,” a fascinating and pleasantly uncomfortable-making look at why “self-delusion is as much a part of the human condition as fingers and toes,” and the follow-up to McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, one of the best psychology books of 2011. McRaney, with his signature fusion of intelligent irreverence and irreverent intelligence, writes in the introduction:
The human mind is obviously vaster and more powerful than any other animal mind, and that’s something people throughout all human history couldn’t help but notice. You probably considered this the last time you visited the zoo or watched a dog battle its own hind legs. Your kind seems the absolute pinnacle of what evolution can produce, maybe even the apex and final beautiful result of the universe unfolding itself. It is a delectable idea to entertain. Even before we had roller skates and Salvador Dalí, it was a conviction in which great thinkers liked to wallow. Of course, as soon as you settle into that thought, you’ll accidentally send an e-mail to your boss meant for your proctologist, or you’ll read a news story about how hot dog-stuffed pizza is now the most popular food in the country. It’s always true that whenever you look at the human condition and get a case of the smugs, a nice heaping helping of ridiculousness plops in your lap and remedies the matter.
This tendency of ours is known as “naïve realism” — the assertion that we see the world as it actually is and our impression of it is an objective, accurate representation of “reality” — a concept that comes from ancient philosophy and has since been amply debunked by modern science. McRaney writes:...More
= new reply since forum marked as read
And I have had vast fields of wrongness to play in.
I'm a big fan of humility in all its aspects. However good you are, you're no so hot, and however bad you are, you are far from the worst, but there is no cure for being full of yourself.
The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know. - Socrates 
Linking to and copying a portion of a very old post of mine. (old DU)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x211490
^snip^
The title of the essay is "The Fateful Lightning" and it describes the lightning rod's impact on rational thinking. It is included in the collections "The Stars In Their Courses"
1971) and "The Edge Of Tomorrow" 1985).
What this essay describes is the lightning rod being rejected by Theologians because it claimed to control something they thought was controlled by God. It describes the various steps taken for the lightning rod to begin to be accepted by society until finally the only choice was to either put them on top of churches or allow these building to continue to be the only ones struck by lightning (which made it appear that God didn't like them).
Also applicable to today's argument about climate change.
