Stop Thinking: How Clever Phrases Hijack Your Brain
AI is just like a calculator. You've heard this before. Right? Maybe you've even said it. It sounds reasonable, balanced, common sense.
Leslie Poston:But let me ask you something. How many times this year did your calculator write an email for you? How many times did it make you question whether a photograph or video was real? How many times did it threaten to eliminate your entire profession? Welcome back to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Posten, and today we're talking about something I call thought limiting phrases. Those seemingly wise statements that actually stop you from thinking critically. They're mental stop signs disguised as green lights. Some people call them thought terminating cliches, and once you learn to recognize them, you'll notice them everywhere. So what exactly makes a phrase thought limiting or thought terminating?
Leslie Poston:Well, first, it sounds reasonable, even wise, on the surface. You feel almost foolish questioning it. Second, it shuts down further questions rather than inviting them. It's a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. Third, it creates false equivalencies or oversimplifications.
Leslie Poston:It takes something complex and flattens it into something simple. Fourth, it makes disagreement seem unreasonable, hysterical, or naive. If you push back, you're the problem. Fifth, and this is the key, it often serves someone's interests by keeping you from examining an issue too closely. These phrases are everywhere in politics, technology, your workplace, maybe even in your own head.
Leslie Poston:They're cognitive shortcuts that benefit someone but usually not you. Let me show you what I mean. Let's start with technology and progress. You can't stop progress is one phrase. Really?
Leslie Poston:Can't we? This phrase assumes that all change equals progress. It removes human agency entirely. We've stopped or slowed plenty of things that were presented to us as progress despite their anti progress consequences. Things like leaded gasoline, CFCs, thalidomide, and human cloning.
Leslie Poston:This phrase wants you to believe that technological development is like gravity: inevitable and unstoppable. But it's not. It's a series of human choices, and you can't stop progress is designed to make you stop thinking about whether you should. Here's another one. People said the same thing about the printing press.
Leslie Poston:Or electricity or cars or whatever you want to insert there. This is a false historical parallel. Sure, people have worried about new technologies before, but that doesn't mean all technologies have the same impact, the same risk, or the same distribution of benefits. The printing press didn't guzzle water. Electricity didn't threaten white collar jobs.
Leslie Poston:Cars didn't make you question photographic reality. Context matters, and scale matters. Specifics matter. But this thought limiting phrase wants you to skip over all that. Let's move our focus to privacy.
Leslie Poston:The phrase if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. This one assumes a perfect justice system, no mission creep, and that what's considered wrong by society never changes. It ignores that privacy is a fundamental right, not something you earn by being good. It also ignores power dynamics governments and corporations hiding information from you while demanding transparency from you. But the phrase makes questioning surveillance seem paranoid.
Leslie Poston:Workplace phrases are particularly insidious. Like, We're all family here. No we're not. This exploits emotional bonds to justify unpaid overtime, blurred boundaries, and lack of professional protection. Families don't tend to fire each other for missing quarterly targets.
Leslie Poston:This phrase wants you to feel guilty for having boundaries or asking for fair compensation. And then there's the phrase it is what it is. Fatalism disguised as acceptance. This phrase removes all agency. Nothing is ever just what it is.
Leslie Poston:Someone decided it, someone benefits from it, and someone could change it. But this phrase makes questioning seem pointless. Politics gives us some classics, such as the famous both sides are the same, false equivalence at its finest. This phrase discourages discernment, nuance, and holding specific actors accountable. It's intellectual laziness packaged as political sophistication.
Leslie Poston:Or the phrase let's agree to disagree. Now, sometimes this is legitimate genuine value differences do exist. But when it's used about factual matters or to avoid accountability, it's a thought terminating cliche. Let's agree to disagree about whether climate change is real isn't wisdom it's avoidance. Personal responsibility has some doozies as well, such as the phrase everything happens for a reason.
Leslie Poston:This removes human agency and accountability. It also puts the blame on victims, suggesting that they attracted whatever bad thing into their life. It makes examining systemic causes seem pointless. Things don't happen for a reason they happen because of causes, many of which we can identify and potentially change. One of the most evil examples is the phrase just following orders, which we're hearing more of lately.
Leslie Poston:It's the total abdication of moral responsibility. We literally fought a war and had Nuremberg tribunals about this one, and yet it persists. And finally, in our information landscape, the phrase do your own research. This delegitimizes actual expertise, and implies all sources are equally valid. But someone's three hours on YouTube is not equivalent to someone's decade of peer reviewed study.
Leslie Poston:This phrase has been weaponized to make people distrust experts while trusting random internet strangers. But here's the flip side the phrase trust the science. When this is used to shut down legitimate scientific debate, questions about methodology or discussions about conflicts of interest is just as limiting. Science is debate. It's questioning.
Leslie Poston:Trust the science can become a thought terminating cliche when it's used to avoid an examination of things like who paid for the study, if the study is robust, or whether the study is unbiased, and so on. So these phrases show up everywhere across every domain of life. But why do they work so well on us? What's happening in our brains when we hear them? There are several cognitive mechanisms at play here, and they're all powerful.
Leslie Poston:There's cognitive closure: Humans crave certainty and resolution. Ambiguity feels uncomfortable. These phrases provide a false sense of case closed. They give us the feeling that we've reached the end of inquiry, even when we haven't. That relief you feel when someone says it is what it is is cognitive closure your brain is grateful to stop processing.
Leslie Poston:There's also social proof and conformity. These phrases often invoke everyone knows or people always say dynamics. They carry the weight of collective wisdom even when they're not wise at all. Disagreeing with them can feel like you're disagreeing with everyone, and that's by design. There's also the fluency heuristic, or cognitive ease.
Leslie Poston:Simple explanations feel more true than complex ones. I talked about this in the episode on comfort in more depth. But the phrase AI is just a tool is eight syllables and uses familiar concepts. A nuanced explanation of AI's unique characteristics, risks, and benefits that's work. Your brain prefers the simple version, and that preference gets mistaken for truth.
Leslie Poston:There's also what psychologist Robert J. Lifton called thought terminating cliches. He studied totalitarian systems, particularly thought reform programs, and he identified these cliches or thought limiting phrases as a key feature of ideological control because they provide ready made answers to complex questions, signaling virtue or group membership. And critically, they punish deeper inquiry as inappropriate or suspicious, kind of a you're either with us or against us mentality. It is what it is.
Leslie Poston:Everything happens for a reason. These phrases just injure thinking, and that's their function. There's also status quo bias. We have a cognitive bias towards believing that the current state of things is natural, inevitable, or preferable. Many thought limiting phrases exploit this.
Leslie Poston:Like it's always been this way weaponizes status quo bias. And lastly there's something called a false dichotomy. These phrases force you into predetermined boxes. Phrases like you can't stop progress boxing you into the so are you pro progress or anti progress? Or phrases like if you have nothing to hide boxing you into the so do you have something to hide or not.
Leslie Poston:These aren't real choices, but the phrases make them feel like the only choices. Now here's an uncomfortable question. Who benefits from these phrases? Sometimes it's obvious. Corporations benefit from you can't stop progress.
Leslie Poston:Surveillance states benefit from nothing to hide. Bad bosses benefit from we're all family here. But sometimes we benefit, or we think we do, because thinking is hard and nuance is exhausting, and uncertainty is uncomfortable. Sometimes we want the phrase to be true because it lets us stop wrestling with complexity. These phrases aren't always malicious, but they're always limiting.
Leslie Poston:And understanding why they work, understanding their cognitive mechanisms is your first line of defense. So let's go deep on one example so we can see all of these mechanisms in action. Going back to the phrase AI is just a calculator or the broader version AI is just a tool, let's examine why this phrase works psychologically, and then why it's wrong. Why it works: It appeals to familiarity. We've integrated tools before, and we've survived.
Leslie Poston:Tools like cars, phones, or computers. This frames AI as just another step in a comfortable pattern. It implies that critics are technophobes, or Luddites. It creates a dichotomy reasonable people who accept tools, or fearful people who resist them. It frames AI adoption as inevitable.
Leslie Poston:Tools get adopted. That's what happens. Resistance is futile. And lastly, it shifts the burden of proof. Suddenly, skeptics have to prove harm, rather than proponents having to prove safety or benefit.
Leslie Poston:All of those psychological mechanisms we just discussed are firing on all cylinders here. Now let's look at reality Scale, integration. A calculator does one thing, arithmetic, and you use it occasionally when you choose to. AI attempts to replace human cognition across all domains, and it's being integrated constantly, often invisibly, whether you choose it or not. Then there's learning incompetence.
Leslie Poston:You have to learn mathematics before a calculator is useful, And you must understand what you're calculating and whether the answer makes sense. AI lets you bypass learning entirely in writing, art, coding, every subject. It doesn't augment competence. It replaces the need for it while simultaneously degrading our cognitive abilities. Then there's reliability.
Leslie Poston:A calculator is deterministic. Two plus two is always four. AI is probabilistic. It generates plausible sounding outputs that can be completely wrong, and it does this confidently. A calculator doesn't hallucinate, but AI does frequently.
Leslie Poston:And let's talk about social consequences for a sec. Calculators don't create what people call work slop, that barely coherent AI generated content that shifts the cognitive burden onto others. Your coworkers now have to spend their time fixing what you outsource to AI. That's not productivity, it's cost shifting. Calculators don't threaten mass job displacement.
Leslie Poston:They didn't eliminate accountants, they changed what accountants do. AI is being marketed explicitly as a replacement for human workers across entire sectors customer service, writing, programming, art, and analysis. The scale of impact is completely different. Calculators don't enable industrial scale disinformation. You can't use a calculator to generate thousands of fake news articles, deepfake videos, or propaganda pieces.
Leslie Poston:AI can, and it does. Calculators don't consume massive resources. AI training and operation guzzles water for cooling and electricity at enormous scale. Data centers are straining power grids and water systems and dumping toxic emissions into nearby poor neighborhoods. Your calculator just uses a watch battery.
Leslie Poston:Now the psychological and cultural impacts are there as well. Calculators don't make you question reality. They don't make you wonder if a photo is real or if that voice on the phone is your grandmother or if that video actually happened, but AI does. Calculators don't substitute for human connection. They're not being marketed as companions, therapists, or friends the way AI is, and that's profoundly different and troubling.
Leslie Poston:Calculators don't steal and monetize creators' work. AI systems are trained on millions of copyrighted works without permission or compensation, then used to generate competing outputs. That's not a tool that's systemic appropriation. Now are there similarities between AI and calculators? Of course.
Leslie Poston:Both involve automation. Both can be misused. Both require some human judgment about when and how to use them. But those similarities don't erase the profound differences. The function of the phrase AI is just a tool is to flatten all of those distinctions.
Leslie Poston:It makes AI adoption seem as mundane and inevitable as owning a calculator, and prevents nuanced discussion about implementation, regulation, distribution of benefits and harms, labor impact, environmental cost, and epistemic risk. It shuts down legitimate questions by making them seem naive, and that's exactly what a thought limiting phrase is designed to do. So how do we fight back? Here's a recognition checklist: When you hear a phrase that might be thought limiting, ask yourself: one. Does this phrase make me stop thinking or start thinking?
Leslie Poston:If it feels like a conclusion rather than an invitation to explore, be suspicious. Two, what complexity is being flattened or erased? What distinctions, nuances, or important details is this phrase glossing over? Three, what questions does this phrase discourage me from asking? If you feel like asking questions about it makes you seem unreasonable, that's a red flag.
Leslie Poston:Four, who benefits from me accepting this framing uncritically? Follow the incentives. Five, am I being presented with a false choice or a false equivalence? Are there really only two options here, and are these things really equivalent? Six, does disagreeing with this phrase automatically make me seem unreasonable?
Leslie Poston:If yes, that's not wisdom. It's rhetorical armor. So what about counter strategies? Ask the words and or so. So if someone says a phrase like AI is just a tool, you can say and?
Leslie Poston:What does that tell us about how we should regulate it, implement it, or think about its social costs? The phrase wants to be the end of discussion. Make it the beginning. You can request specificity. If you hear the phrase, it's always been this way, you could, for example, challenge it with, can you point to specific historical examples, and what were the outcomes?
Leslie Poston:How is this situation similar or different? Vague claims collapse under specific questions. You can name the complexity. For example, you're right that AI and calculators are both tools, but calculators don't generate text, images, or replace entire job categories. Can we discuss those specific differences?
Leslie Poston:You're not rejecting the comparison in its entirety you're refusing to let it end the conversation. You can also flip the frame. For example, the phrase if you have nothing to hide becomes privacy isn't about hiding wrongdoing. It's about controlling who has access to information about me and for what purpose. You're not defensive, you're just reframing the question entirely.
Leslie Poston:You can identify the false choice. The phrase you can't stop progress assumes progress is inevitable and monolithic. So you can say something like, We've stopped or regulated plenty of progress, like leaded gasoline, CFCs, and certain pharmaceuticals. The question isn't whether we can stop progress it's what kind of progress do we want. You can demand accountability.
Leslie Poston:For example, with the phrase it is what it is, you can say, what specifically makes it unchangeable? Who decided this, and what would it take to change it? Fatalism crumbles when you ask for specifics. The key in all of these is that you're not being combative you're being curious, just like we advocate on this podcast. You're asking questions and refusing to let a clever phrase do your thinking for you.
Leslie Poston:Here's what I want you to take away from this. Thought limiting phrases are mental shortcuts that benefit someone, and it might not be you. The goal isn't to have perfect answers to every complex question. The goal is to keep asking questions and maintain nuance, resisting the urge to let a clever phrase do your thinking for you. These phrases work because thinking is hard, uncertainty is uncomfortable, and sometimes we just want an answer, any answer, so we can move on.
Leslie Poston:But the best answers come from staying in the discomfort just a little longer, from asking one more question and noticing when something that sounds like wisdom is actually just a stop sign. This week I'd love for you to do something. Listen hard and notice these phrases in media, conversations, maybe even in your own thinking. And when you hear one, pause. Ask yourself, what question is this preventing me from asking?
Leslie Poston:What complexity is being smoothed over? And you don't have to have the answer. You just need to keep the question alive. And if you've got examples of thought limiting phrases that you've encountered in your workplace, politics, tech discourse, or wherever, send them our way on social media. PsyberSpace has accounts on almost every platform.
Leslie Poston:We wanna hear them. And if you comment on the PsyberSpace Blue Sky account, it'll actually appear under the episode. We might do a whole listener examples episode if we get enough. Because once you learn to see these phrases, you can't unsee them, and that's when things get really interesting. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace
Leslie Poston:This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Keep thinking, keep questioning, stay curious, and I'll talk to you next week. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss it, and send it to a friend if you think they'd like it.
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