William James said that "my experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items I notice shape my mind." The most common strategies for long-haul self-deception involve the management of attention. Through habitual and systematic management of my cognitive gaze, I can come to believe things that I wouldn't believe were I to attend indiscriminately to my surroundings. Through attention management I exercise a degree of control over what comes into my mind. And this, in turn, affects what I believe.
I Told Me So, p32
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