I recently found a book that was commissioned by the CIA some time ago to instruct it’s analysts in how to overcome bias and hone their analytical skills. It cites studies and experiments on how human memory and opinion-forming work, with the implications for how analysts can be mislead by certain patterns of data.
Besides being useful to those who want to be better analysts using a similar process, it occurred to me that if TPTB wanted to throw off truth-seeking researchers such as those found on this website, it would reverse-engineer those techniques to lead researchers to false conclusions.
For example, they cite studies showing that theories are very quickly formed, but very slowly changed. For example, if people are given 50% of the evidence at the same time they are more likely to come the correct conclusion than people who are given 10% of the evidence per week for 7 weeks (70% of the evidence.) This is because they form theories with the 10%, which they then try to shoe-horn the remaining in to fit, rather than taking all new evidence as equal to the old evidence. This would suggest that those trying to cover-up something would be wise to release small amounts of information right away, so as to allow people to form false conclusions, before more evidence is found over time.
Thought it might be useful to some of you; free pdf’s can probably be found if you search.