This seems as good a place to start this blog as any other...

Actually, it's a great place to start the blog, with new research about the way people perceive facts.

Here is an article by someone I often disagree with, but still read, Ronald Bailey from Reason Magazine, and here is the research he is talking about from The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale.

Good stuff.

I remember a section in one of my psych text books about how "words" alter perception. If two groups of people are shown a film of a traffic accident between a red car, and a blue car which hits it and at the end they get asked one of two questions:

At what speed were the cars moving when the accident occurred?

-and-

At what speed was the blue car moving when it smashed into the red car?

People asked the second question will usually list a higher speed for the blue car.

I recently saw the absurdity of this on a headline in the Chicago Tribune, it read that a "red line" (part of Chicago's "L" train and subway line) train had killed a man.

Then the article reported that he had probably jumped in front of it.

I'd be willing to place money on the fact that more people remember that the train "killed" someone, rather than someone used a train to commit suicide. I should see if I can find someone to test that, it's an old pet peeve of mine that papers usually report that trains "hit" people, when the truth usually is that people get in front of trains, and once you see a train moving, and see the tracks, you usually see that the train has limited options, but people not on tracks less so.

In that vein I need to qualify that even though I may link to a libertarian magazine article (or later a conservative, or a liberal one), I am not a libertarian.

I try to be a "free thinker", which is harder than you might "think".