Ask who Moses took on the ark, and most people answer without blinking

Ask 'How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?' and most people confidently answer 'two' — missing that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the ark. The brain partially matches a sentence against a familiar script and skips over the one wrong detail. Erickson and Mattson named this the Moses illusion in 1981 after testing exactly this question.

— Thomas D. Erickson and Mark E. Mattson, From words to meaning: A semantic illusion — Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1981

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