A subsequence of How to Actually Change Your Mind on two of the huger obstacles, the affective death spiral and the cultishness attractor.

Affective death spirals are positive feedback loop caused by the halo effect: Positive characteristics perceptually correlate, so the more nice things we say about X, the more additional nice things we're likely to believe about X.

Cultishness is an empirical attractor in human groups, roughly an affective death spiral, plus peer pressure and outcasting behavior, plus (quite often) defensiveness around something believed to have been perfected.

Some overlap with the Politics is the Mind-Killer subsequence (preferably read that first).

Blog posts

The Affect Heuristic
- Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping
- Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
The Halo Effect
- Superhero Bias
- Mere Messiahs
Affective Death Spirals
Resist the Happy Death Spiral
Uncritical Supercriticality
Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
When None Dare Urge Restraint
The Robbers Cave Experiment
Every Cause Wants to be a Cult
Guardians of the Truth
- Guardians of the Gene Pool
- Guardians of Ayn Rand
The Litany Against Gurus
Two Cult Koans
Asch's Conformity Experiment - The unanimous agreement of surrounding others can make subjects disbelieve (or at least, fail to report) what's right before their eyes. The addition of just one dissenter is enough to dramatically reduce the rates of improper conformity.
Lonely Dissent
Cultish Countercultishness

Other formats

Readlist - view this sequence as an eBook using Readability.

See also

Groupthink
Halo effect
Affective death spiral
Group rationality
Politics is the Mind-Killer
The Craft and the Community

Death Spirals and The Cult Attractor