Not Born Yesterday

The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

Hugo Mercier

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691198842
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

Why people are not as gullible as we think Not Born Yesterday explains how we decide who we can trust and what we should believe—and argues that we're pretty good at making these decisions. In this lively and provocative book, Hugo Mercier demonstrates how virtually all attempts at mass persuasion—whether by religious leaders, politicians, or advertisers—fail miserably. Drawing on recent findings from political science and other fields ranging from history to anthropology, Mercier shows that the narrative of widespread gullibility, in which a credulous public is easily misled by demagogues and charlatans, is simply wrong.Why is mass persuasion so difficult? Mercier uses the latest findings from experimental psychology to show how each of us is endowed with sophisticated cognitive mechanisms of open vigilance. Computing a variety of cues, these mechanisms enable us to be on guard against harmful beliefs, while being open enough to change our minds when presented with the right evidence. Even failures—when we accept false confessions, spread wild rumors, or fall for quack medicine—are better explained as bugs in otherwise well-functioning cognitive mechanisms than as symptoms of general gullibility. Not Born Yesterday shows how we filter the flow of information that surrounds us, argues that we do it well, and explains how we can do it better still.

1

THE CASE FOR GULLIBILITY

FOR MILLENNIA, people have accepted many bizarre beliefs and have been persuaded to engage in irrational behaviors (or so it appears). These beliefs and behaviors gave credence to the idea that the masses are gullible. In reality I believe the story is more complicated (or even completely different, as we’ll see in the following chapters). But I must start by laying out the case for gullibility.

In 425 BCE, Athens had been locked for years in a mutually destructive war with Sparta. At the Battle of Pylos, the Athenian naval and ground forces managed to trap Spartan troops on the island of Sphacteria. Seeing that a significant number of their elite were among the captives, the Spartan leaders sued for peace, offering advantageous terms to Athens. The Athenians declined the offer. The war went on, Sparta regained the edge, and when a (temporary) peace treaty was signed, in 421 BCE, the terms were much less favorable to Athens. This blunder was only one of a series of terrible Athenian decisions. Some were morally repellent—killing all the citizens of a conquered city—others were strategically disastrous—launching a doomed expedition to Sicily. In the end, Athens lost the war and would never regain its former power.

In 1212, a “multitude of paupers” in France and Germany took the cross to fight the infidels and reclaim Jerusalem for the Catholic Church.¹ As many of these paupers were very young, this movement was dubbed the Children’s Crusade. The youth made it to Saint-Denis, prayed in the cathedral, met the French king, hoped for a miracle. No miracle happened. What can be expected of an army of untrained, unfunded, disorganized preteens? Not much, which is what they achieved: none reached Jerusalem, and many died along the way.

In the mid-eighteenth century the Xhosa, a pastoralist people of South Africa, were suffering under the newly imposed British rule. Some of the Xhosa believed killing all their cattle and burning their crops would raise a ghost army that would fend off the British. They sacrificed thousands of heads of cattle and set fire to their fields. No ghost army arose. The British stayed. The Xhosa died.

On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC, carrying an assault rifle, a revolver, and a shotgun. He wasn’t there to rob the restaurant. Instead, he wanted to make sure that no children were being held hostage in the basement. There had been rumors that the Clintons—the former U.S. president and his wife, then campaigning for the presidency—were running a sex trafficking ring, and that Comet Ping Pong was one of their lairs. Welch was arrested and is now serving a prison sentence.

BLIND TRUST

Scholars, feeling superior to the masses, have often explained these questionable decisions and weird beliefs by a human disposition to be overly trusting, a disposition that would make the masses instinctively defer to charismatic leaders regardless of their competence or motivations, believe whatever they hear or read irrespective of its plausibility, and follow the crowd even when doing so leads to disaster. This explanation—the masses are credulous—has proven very influential throughout history even if, as will soon become clear, it is misguided.

Why did the Athenians lose the war against Sparta? Starting with Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, many commentators have blamed the influence of demagogues such as Cleon, a parvenu “very powerful with the multitude,” who was deemed responsible for some of the war’s worst blunders.² A generation later, Plato extended Thucydides’s argument into a general indictment of democracy. For Plato, the rule of the many unavoidably gives rise to leaders who, “having a mob entirely at [their] disposal,” turn into tyrants.³

Why would a bunch of youngsters abandon their homes in the vain hope of invading a faraway land? They were responding to the calls for a new crusade launched by Pope Innocent III, their supposed credulity inspiring the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose magic flute grants him absolute power over all the children who hear it.⁴ People’s crusades also help explain the accusations that emerged in the Enlightenment, by the likes of the Baron d’Holbach, who chastised the Christian Church for “deliver[ing] mankind into [the] hands of [despots and tyrants] as a herd of slaves, of whom they may dispose at their pleasure.”⁵

Why did the Xhosa kill their cattle? A century earlier, the Marquis de Condorcet, a central figure of the French Enlightenment, suggested that members of small-scale societies suffered from the “credulity of the first dupes,” putting too much faith in “charlatans and sorcerers.”⁶ The Xhosa seem to fit this picture. They were taken in by Nongqawuse, a young prophetess who had had visions of the dead rising to fight the British, and of a new world in which “nobody would ever lead a troubled life. People would get whatever they wanted. Everything would be available in abundance.”⁷ Who would say no to that? Apparently not the Xhosa.

Why did Edgar Maddison Welch risk jail to deliver nonexistent children from the nonexistent basement of a harmless pizzeria? He had been listening to Alex Jones, the charismatic radio host who specializes in the craziest conspiracy theories, from the great Satanist takeover of America to government-sponsored calamities.⁸ For a time, Jones took up the idea that the Clintons and their aides led an organization trafficking children for sex. As a Washington Post reporter put it, Jones and his ilk can peddle their wild theories because “gullibility helps create a market for it.”⁹

All of these observers agree that people are often credulous, easily accept unsubstantiated arguments, and are routinely talked into stupid and costly behaviors. Indeed, it is difficult to find an idea that so well unites radically different thinkers. Preachers lambaste the “credulous multitude” who believe in gods other than the preachers’ own.¹⁰ Atheists point out “the almost superhuman gullibility” of those who follow religious preachers, whatever their god might be.¹¹ Conspiracy theorists feel superior to the “mind controlled sheeple” who accept the official news.¹² Debunkers think conspiracy theorists “super gullible” for believing the tall tales peddled by angry entertainers.¹³ Conservative writers accuse the masses of criminal credulity when they revolt, prodded by shameless demagogues and driven mad by contagious emotions. Old-school leftists explain the passivity of the masses by their acceptance of the dominant ideology: “The individual lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life: he desires what he is supposed to desire,” instead of acting on “his original instinctual needs.”¹⁴

For most of history, the concept of widespread credulity has been fundamental to our understanding of society. The assumption that people are easily taken in by demagogues runs across Western thought, from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, creating “political philosophy’s central reason for skepticism about democracy.”¹⁵ Contemporary commenters still deplore how easily politicians sway voters by “pander[ing] to their gullibility.”¹⁶ But the ease with which people can be influenced has never been so (apparently) well illustrated as through a number of famous experiments conducted by social psychologists since the 1950s.

PSYCHOLOGISTS OF GULLIBILITY

First came Solomon Asch. In his most famous experiment he asked people to answer a simple question: Which of three lines (depicted in figure 1) is as long as the first line?¹⁷ The three lines were clearly of different lengths, and one of them was an obvious match for the first. Yet participants made a mistake more than 30 percent of the time. Why would people provide such blatantly wrong answers? Before each participant was asked for their opinion, several participants had already replied. Unbeknownst to the actual participant, these other participants were confederates, planted by the experimenter. On some trials, all the confederates agreed on one of the wrong answers. These confederates held no power over the participants, who did not even know them, and they were providing plainly wrong answers. Still, more than 60 percent of participants chose at least once to follow the group’s lead. A textbook written by Serge Moscovici, an influential social psychologist, describes these results as “one of the most dramatic illustrations of conformity, of blindly going along with the group, even when the individual realizes that by doing so he turns his back on reality and truth.”¹⁸

FIGURE 1. The lines in the Asch conformity experiments. Source: Wikipedia.

After Solomon Asch came Stanley Milgram. Milgram’s first famous study was, like Asch’s experiments, a study of conformity. He asked some of his students to stand on a sidewalk, looking at a building’s window, and counted how many of the people passing by would imitate them.¹⁹ When enough students were looking in the same direction—the critical group size seemed to be about five—nearly all those who passed by followed the students in looking at the building. It was as if people could not help but follow the crowd.

But Milgram is best known for a later, much more provocative experiment.²⁰ In this study, participants were asked to take part in research bearing ostensibly on learning. In the lab, they were introduced to another participant—who, once again, was actually a confederate. The experimenter pretended to randomly pick one of the two—always the confederate—to be the learner. Participants were then told the study tested whether someone who was motivated to avoid electric shocks would learn better. The learner had to memorize a list of words; when he made a mistake, the participant would be asked to administer an electric shock.

The participants sat in front of a big machine with a series of switches corresponding to electric shocks of increasingly high voltage. The confederate was led slightly away, to an experimental booth, but the participants could still hear him through a microphone. At first, the confederate did a good enough job memorizing the words, but as the task grew more difficult, he started making mistakes. The experimenter prompted the participants to shock the confederate, and all of them did. This was hardly surprising, as the first switches were marked as delivering only a “slight shock.” As the...