Sir Frederic, back when professors still looked like professors. Take a look at these sentences: A burning cigarette was carelessly discarded. Several acres of virgin forest were destroyed. You could let them stand as two unrelated utterances. But that’s not what you did, right? You inferred that the cigarette caused a fire, which destroyed the forest. We interpret new information based on what we know (that burning cigarettes can cause fires) to form a coherent representation of a situation . Rather than leaving the sentences unconnected, we impose a causal connection between the events described by the sentences. George W. Bush exploited this tendency to create coherence by continuously juxtaposing Saddam and 9-11 , thus fooling three-quarters of the American public into believing that Saddam was behind the attacks, without stating this explicitly. Sir Frederic Bartlett proposed that we are continuously engaged in an effort after meaning. This is what r...