Channeled Attention and Stable Errors

We develop a framework for assessing when a person will notice that a theory she has about the world is wrong, premised on the idea that people neglect information that they view (through the lens of their misconceptions) to be irrelevant. Focusing on the question of when a mistaken theory can persist in the long run even when attention is very cheap, we study the attentional stability of both general psychological biases—such as naivete about present bias or neglecting the redundancy in social information—and context-specific empirical misconceptions—such as false beliefs about medicinal side effects or financial investments. People discover their errors only when the data they deem relevant causes them to incidentally notice that their theory is wrong. We explore which combinations of errors and environments allow an error to persist. People tend to notice costly errors in a particular context when they are right about which factors matter even when they are wrong about how these factors matter, whereas errors that lead people to ubiquitously treat consequential factors as irrelevant will be stable across a broad class of environments. Environments designed to make such factors artificially germane can induce recognition of an error.