Illusions and Delusions(Index)

From SkepticWiki

[edit] Sensory Illusions

The "cafe wall illusion": the white figures are squares, and the horizontal lines are parallel.

You can't always trust your eyes, or any other sense for that matter. If "Seeing is Believing", there are many ways to believe things that just aren't true.

• Electronic Voice Phenomenon
• Backward Masking
• Ideomotor effect
• Pareidolia

[edit] Cognitive Errors

In addition to seeing what isn't so, we humans are also very bad at logical reasoning:

• Cognitive Dissonance
• Communal Reinforcement
• Estimation Errors and Anchoring Effects
• Forer Effect
• Logical Fallacies
• Peltzman Effect
• Probability Judgment Failures
• Simplification Errors
• Wason's Four-card Task

[edit] Procedural Illusions

Bad experimental procedure makes any results worthless. Worse, it can seem to demonstrate effects that don't exist, and give these illusions the luster of "scientific proof".

• Clever Hans Effect
• Placebo Effects
• Selection Bias

[edit] Popular Delusions

The ways in which we humans delude ourselves into believing that the unreal is real is truly vast.

Here are just some of the ways:

• Breatharianism
• Chemtrails
• Cargo Cults
• Moon Hoax
• Sympathetic Magic
• Witch Trials