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A decade ago, Hugo Mercier and some colleagues wrote an article with the catchy title, “Epistemic Vigilance”. It argued that humans are naturally sceptical and not easy to convince, let alone fool.
Many people were… unconvinced.
“What about flat-earthers?” they would ask Mercier. “What about people voting for the Nazis?” Like the rigorous scholar he is, Mercier would go away every time and do some more research, to check that he hadn’t missed a glaring counter-example that proved him wrong. But instead, he found more and more evidence that people are not as gullible as we often assume.
Most people were not taken in by Nazi propaganda, or won over by Hitler’s speeches. Even vocal believers that the earth is flat hold that belief separate from the rest of their lives, which allows them to carry on as normal.
In the end, Mercier told me, he had enough material for a book, “a long argument against the idea that humans are gullible”. Not Born Yesterday analyses the historical examples and classic psychology experiments often cited to show how willingly we suspend our critical faculties and follow the crowd, or follow orders.
The notorious Milgram obedience experiments, for example. Subjects followed orders to the point of delivering what they thought were agonising and dangerous electric shocks to fellow volunteers (in reality, actors). But those who took the whole set up at face value were less likely to comply with the experimenters’ instructions than those who expressed doubts, and authoritarian orders were less effective than appealing to science, with elaborate explanations delivered by a white-coated experimenter.
So while it’s not, after all, horrifying proof that we’re all potential Nazis, it does reveal some nuanced points about context. We don’t take information (or instructions) at face value. We’re constantly weighing up what’s going on. Who is telling me this? Why are they saying it? How far should I trust them? How much weight should I put on my new beliefs?
This is cheering news in today’s world of Fake News and conspiracy theories. Mercier doesn’t think they have much impact on the real world.
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SubscribeYes, the best conspiracy theories are really enjoyable, like good whodunnits. They satisfy a desire for the world to be a coherent place which one can make sense of albeit in a rather roundabout way, which requires one to suspend belief. And at the same time they throw light on all the complex ways society is organised so that the truth is often hidden. Most people aren’t gullible enough to think conspiracy theories are literally the truth, but people who take an interest in conspiracy theories support the kinds of clever people who can dream them up and thereby demonstrate the flaws and holes in the narratives we are fed by those in power.
There are better examples of corona virus gullibility than the rather harmless ones quoted (which were part of a ‘package’ that contained some more reasonable info). For example, the more vicious stuff like the belief that the PM is using a herd immunity strategy in order to cull the elderly and so reduce social welfare costs. Or the more loonball theory of a certain ex-sports commentator that the virus is all part of an international cabal’s plot to frighten us all to the point where they an control us through AI. Most of us laugh at this but a minority does buy in. You can fool some of the people some of the time. Not too many right now let’s hope.
Is it fake new that this is a Chinese virus? (see photo above} Good luck with that, although big tech, most of the political class and CNNCBSNBCABCMSNBC are Chinese sycophants.
You don’t need a lot of people to believe idiocies to be in danger. Just enough.