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Part 3 in the Moral Warfare 101 series:

Ninety-eight percent. That’s an estimate of how much of human thought is unconscious.

Most of your ideas, thoughts and opinions exist in your brain without you having any awareness of them. They just seem to automatically be there. From “The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientists Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics”:

“The science of mind has lit up the vast landscape of unconscious thought — the 98 percent of thinking your brain does that you’re not aware of. Most of it matters for politics. The mind we cannot see plays an enormous role in how our country is governed. Yet most unconscious thought does not just automatically or magically appear in your brain. It is implanted and shaped by the world around you. Framing plays an important role in shaping, and maintaining, your unconscious beliefs.”

These unconscious beliefs help determine our deeply-held moral, social and political beliefs.

Powerful metaphors and frames, often repeated by politicians and the media, sink into our unconscious and create a concept of “common sense” — even when the ideas behind them are the opposite of sensible.

Read more at the FrameLab Newsletter, which just hit 10,000 subscribers!

FrameLab: The Power of Unconscious Thought