PEOPLE ARE LESS GULLIBLE THAN YOU THINK.

AuthorMercier, Hugo

LOOK AT ALL the gibberish people believe. That the earth is a flat disk surrounded by a 200-foot wall of ice. That high-up Democratic operatives run a pedophile ring out of a pizza joint. That former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could teleport and control the weather. Who could doubt that human beings are gullible, that we accept whatever we read or hear?

Yet these beliefs are the exception rather than the rule. By and large, we don't credulously accept whatever we're told. We have evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms to deal with both the benefits and the dangers of communication. If anything, we're too hard rather than too easy to influence.

One popular, but wrong, way of thinking about those cognitive mechanisms is to imagine them as the result of an arms race: Manipulators evolve increasingly sophisticated means of misleading receivers, and receivers evolve increasingly sophisticated means of rejecting manipulators' unreliable messages. This is what we get, for instance, with computer viruses and security software.

The arms race model leads to an association between gullibility and lack of mental acuity. When receivers, because they are exhausted or distracted, cannot use properly their most refined cognitive mechanisms, they're allegedly defenseless against the manipulators' more advanced cognitive devices--much as a security software system that hasn't been updated leaves a computer vulnerable to attacks.

That's the perception. But it isn't how our minds work at all.

BRAINWASHERS AND HIDDEN PERSUADERS

THOUSANDS OF U.S. soldiers were captured during the Korean War. Those who managed to escape brought back tales of horrible mistreatment and torture, from sleep deprivation to waterboarding. When the war ended and the prisoners of war were repatriated, these mistreatments acquired an even darker meaning. Not simply an example of the enemy's wanton cruelty, they were seen as an attempt to brainwash U.S. soldiers into accepting communist doctrine. Twenty-three American POWs chose to follow their captors to China instead of going back to their homeland. This, The New York Times stated at the time, was surely "living proof that Communist brainwashing does work on some persons."

Brainwashing supposedly functioned by shattering people's ability for higher reflection, through "conditioning," "debilitation," and "dissociation-hypnosis-suggestibility." In the 1950s, the idea that people are more easily influenced when they cannot think also showed up in a very different context. In the midst of a movie, it was feared, messages such as "drink Coke," flashed too quickly to be consciously perceived, would make people want to buy a can of Coke. Such messages would soon be called subliminal, meaning "below the threshold"--in this case, the threshold of awareness.

The scares surrounding brainwashing and subliminal influence rely on a pervasive association between inferior cognitive ability and gullibility: The less we think, it's assumed, the worse we think, and the easier to influence we are.

This idea is historically pervasive, and it is often linked to the idea that some populations are better cognitively equipped than others. In the 19th century, the psychologist Gustave Le Bon suggested that crowds shared the "absence...of critical thought...observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution, such as women, savages, and children." (In a striking illustration of motivated reasoning, Le Bon's colleague Gabriel

Tarde claimed that because of its "docility, its credulity...the crowd is feminine"--even when "it is composed, as is usually the case, of males.") In the 21st century, we still find echoes of these unsavory associations, as when Brexiters are dismissed as uneducated plebs.

In the contemporary academic literature, the link between unsophistication and credulity takes the form of dividing thought processes into two types, called System 1 and System 2. According to this view--long established in...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT