As a journalist, my knowledge is broad but shallow. It is the responsibility of the journalist to identify appropriate experts and to acknowledge significant disagreements in what those experts report, where significant disagreements exist. The majority of the science in this book involves the idea of the brain’s modelling of the world, and the many psychological illusions that have been revealed by experimental psychologists. These ideas are well documented in a range of excellent books and periodicals – both academic and popular – which were my principal source for research. I supplemented this research with interviews with experts, generally on the professor level. Most of the concepts in this strand are relatively uncontroversial and broadly accepted.
In the areas where I explore more controversial science, I checked original studies where necessary and sought expert counsel where those studies threatened to be too complex for a lay journalist to appropriately understand. In the few incidents where interviewees made controversial claims about specific studies, I confirmed these claims either in the original papers, or with the authors of those papers.
Finally, when the first draft of The Unpersuadables was completed, I recruited a team of academics with appropriate specialisms to read through the text. They offered notes and advice where I had erred.
This is an imperfect system, as it relies on many secondary sources. Moreover, I do not declare myself to be free of the biases that afflict any writer, and I’m certainly not immune to making mistakes. If any errors are noted, or if new findings supersede claims made in the text, I would be very grateful to receive notification via my website, willstorr.com, so that any future editions of The Unpersuadables can be corrected and updated.
Naturally, this book contains only a fraction of a fraction of the relevant science. Other academics will, surely, disagree with those whom I quote in these pages. If any of it piques your interest, I urge you to dig deeper, where you will no doubt find science that is newer and in conflict with some of the work here.
Some names have been changed, all interviews are edited, the chronology of some episodes may have been altered in the interests of narrative coherence, ellipses are not used within hybrid quotes, which are used in the interests of concision. Several of these chapters have appeared previously, in different forms, in periodicals.