ABSTRACT
When asked “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” most people respond “two”, even though they know that it was Noah, not Moses, who took the animals on the Ark (Erickson & Mattson, 1981). When a term in a sentence or a question is replaced with a semantically similar but incorrect term, people have difficulty in detecting the distortion. This tendency to overlook distortions in statements is known as the Moses illusion.
