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Not Born Yesterday

Page 33

by Hugo Mercier


  stitution affect its public perception. Nearly all scientific theo-

  ries are deeply counterintuitive, and yet they have percolated

  through most layers of society. This has happened even though

  few people know scientists personally, and even fewer have a

  genuine understanding of the arguments supporting, say, rela-

  tivity theory or evolution by natu ral se lection. The wide spread

  of scientific ideas, in spite of their apparent implausibility, has

  been underpinned by the solid, even if not unblemished, foun-

  dations of trust the scientific enterprise rests on.

  These foundations of trust must be protected and buttressed.

  As an example, my own discipline of psy chol ogy is addressing

  a number of long- standing prob lems, as we strive to improve

  our statistical practices, recruit more diverse samples of partici-

  pants, reduce conflicts of interest, run experiments several

  times to have more faith in their results, and commit to our

  hypotheses ahead of conducting a study, to avoid post hoc in-

  terpretations. Other disciplines from medicine to economics

  are tackling similar issues. They will come out stronger from

  this “credibility revolution,” and, in time, the improved trust-

  worthiness will affect the spread of scientific advances through-

  out society.

  We aren’t gullible: by default we veer on the side of being

  resistant to new ideas. In the absence of the right cues, we reject

  messages that don’t fit with our preconceived views or preexist-

  ing plans. To persuade us other wise takes long- established,

  carefully maintained trust, clearly demonstrated expertise, and

  sound arguments. Science, the media, and other institutions that

  spread accurate but often counterintuitive messages face an

  t he c a se a g a ins t g ul l ib il i t y 271

  uphill battle, as they must transmit these messages and keep

  them credible along great chains of trust and argumentation.

  Quasi- miraculously, these chains connect us to the latest scien-

  tific discoveries and to events on the other side of the planet. We

  can only hope for new means of strengthening and extending

  these ever- fragile links.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Mark Sargant, prominent flat- earther, in the documentary Behind the Curve.

  2. Although they are elsewhere called epistemic vigilance; see Sperber et al., 2010.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Dickson, 2007, p. 10.

  2. Thucydides, The history of the Peloponnesian War, http:// classics. mit .edu

  / Thucydides / pelopwar .mb .txt (accessed July 19, 2018).

  3. Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 565a, trans. Jowett; see also 488d. http:// classics.

  mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.vi i.html (accessed July 19, 2018).

  4. Some scholars (e.g., Greenspan, 2008) have attempted to differentiate credulity

  (“this term refers to a tendency to believe things that on their face are ridicu lous or

  that lack adequate supporting evidence”) and gullibility (“the term gullibility really

  refers to a pattern of being duped, which repeats itself in diff er ent settings, even in the

  face of warning signs”). Here I will use the terms largely interchangeably, to refer to

  when people are influenced by what others tell them without having any good reason

  for being so influenced.

  5. Holbach, 1835, p. 119.

  6. “La crédulité des premières dupes” (Condorcet, 1797, p. 22); “charlatans et leurs

  sorciers” (p. 21). See similar references in Singh, 2018.

  7. Peires, 1989, location 2060–2062.

  8. Eric Killelea, “Alex Jones’ mis- infowars: 7 Bat- Sh*t Conspiracy Theories,” Roll-

  ing Stone, February 21, 2017, http:// www .rol ingstone .com / culture / lists / alex - jones

  - mis - infowars - 7 - bat - sht - conspiracy - theories - w467509 / the - government - is - complicit

  - in - countless - terrorist - and - lone - gunman - attacks - w467737.

  273

  274 no t es t o ch ap t er 1

  9. Callum Borchers, “A harsh truth about fake news: Some people are super gull-

  ible,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https:// www .washingtonpost .com / news

  / the - fix / wp / 2016 / 11 / 22 / a - harsh - truth - about - fake - news - some - people - are - super

  - gullible / .

  10. Heckewelder, 1876, p. 297.

  11. Dawkins, 2010, p. 141.

  12. Truther monkey (@Thedyer1971), “The mind controlled sheeple. Welcome to

  the new world order,” Twitter, September 26, 2017, 12:53 a.m., https:// twitter .com

  / Thedyer1971 / status / 912585964978966528.

  13. Borchers, “A Harsh truth about fake news”; more generally, see Donovan, 2004,

  which shows how often accusations of gullibility are hurled from each side.

  14. Marcuse, 1966, pp. 46, 15; see also Abercrombie, Hil , & Turner, 1980. For a much

  more nuanced take on the role of the dominant ideology, see the work of Antonio

  Gramsci (for an introduction, see Hoare & Sperber, 2015).

  15. Stanley, 2015, p. 27.

  16. Paul Waldman, “Trump and republicans treat their voters like morons,” Wash-

  ington Post, July 26, 2017, https:// www .washingtonpost .com / blogs / plum - line / wp

  / 2017 / 07 / 26 / trump - and - republicans - treat - their - voters - like - morons / .

  17. Asch, 1956. Source for figure 1: https:// en .wikipedia .org / wiki / Asch _ conformity

  _ experiments# / media / File:Asch _ experiment .svg (accessed November 21, 2018), CC

  BY- SA 4.0.

  18. Moscovici, 1985, p. 349, cited by Friend, Rafferty, & Bramel, 1990.

  19. Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz, 1969.

  20. Milgram, 1974.

  21. Perry, 2013, location 145.

  22. Brennan, 2012, p. 8.

  23. Gilbert, Krull, & Malone, 1990, p. 612.

  24. Heraclitus, 2001, fragment 111.

  25. David Robson, “Why are people so incredibly gullible?,” BBC, March 24, 2016,

  http:// www . bbc .com / future / story / 20160323 - why - are - people - so - incredibly

  - gullible.

  26. This was actually not the case for Asch; see Friend et al., 1990.

  27. Hirschfeld, 2002. While this may be true of the majority of anthropologists,

  who did not pay much attention to children, there is also in anthropology and social

  psy chol ogy an old and strong tradition of work on acculturation (e.g., Linton, 1963).

  28. Boyer, 1994, p. 22.

  29. Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 23.

  30. Dawkins, 2010, p. 134.

  31. See Henrich, 2015.

  n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 275

  32. Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Richerson & Boyd, 2005. Their work focuses mostly

  on material culture, for which the issue of gullibility is possibly less pressing than in

  the case of communication.

  33. E.g., Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Pinker, 1997.

  34. Henrich, 2015.

  35. On Laland’s social learning strategies, see, e.g., Laland, 2004.

  36. Or conformist transmission, a member of a family of “frequency- based biases”;

  see Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998. For a recent criticism of the use-

  fulness of these strategies, see Grove, 2018.

  37. Henrich & Gil- White, 2001; for a review of recent evidence, see Jiménez &

  Mesoudi, 2019.

  38. K. Hill & Kintigh, 2009.

  39.
Richerson & Boyd, 2005, pp. 162–167, 187.

  40. Boyd & Richerson, 1985, pp. 204ff; see also Nunn & Sanchez de la Sierra, 2017

  (for a critique of this last reference, see Lou Keep, “The use and abuse of witchdoc-

  tors for life,” Samzdat, June 19, 2017, https:// samzdat .com / 2017 / 06 / 19 / the - use - and

  - abuse - of - witchdoctors - for - life / .

  41. Henrich, 2015, p. 49.

  42. Richerson & Boyd, 2005, p. 124.

  43. Boyd & Richerson, 2005.

  44. Boyd & Richerson, 2005, p. 18.

  45. Marx & Engels, 1970, p. 64.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Caro, 1986a.

  2. Ostreiher & Heifetz, 2017; Sommer, 2011.

  3. See references in Haig, 1993.

  4. Wray, Klein, Mattila, & Seeley, 2008, which suggests that prior contrary results

  (Gould & Gould, 1982) were artifacts. See also Dunlap, Nielsen, Dornhaus, & Papaj,

  2016.

  5. Scott- Phil ips, 2008, 2014; Scott- Phil ips, Blythe, Gardner, & West, 2012.

  6. Seyfarth, Cheney, & Marler, 1980.

  7. Nishida et al . , 2006.

  8. Dawkins & Krebs, 1978; Krebs & Dawkins, 1984; Maynard Smith & Harper, 2003.

  9. Haig, 1993, 1996.

  10. Haig, 1993, p. 511.

  11. Blumstein, Steinmetz, Armitage, & Daniel, 1997. For vervet monkeys, one of the

  mechanisms that allows the alarm calls to remain stable is that vervets can learn to ignore

  276 no t es t o ch ap t er 3

  the signals of unreliable callers, thus keeping the costs of dishonest signals low and

  providing an incentive for callers to send honest signals (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1988).

  12. J. Wright, 1997; J. Wright, Parker, & Lundy, 1999.

  13. See C. T. Bergstrom & Lachmann, 2001.

  14. O. Hasson, 1991.

  15. Caro, 1986b.

  16. For all the evidence that follows, see Caro, 1986a, 1986b; FitzGibbon &

  Fanshawe, 1988.

  17. Nelissen & Meijers, 2011.

  18. E.g., Henrich, 2009; Iannaccone, 1992.

  19. E. A. Smith & Bird, 2000.

  20. See, e.g., Higham, 2013.

  21. Borgia, 1985. For more references, see Madden, 2002.

  22. Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997.

  23. Borgia, 1993.

  24. Madden, 2002.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Dubreuil, 2010; Sterelny, 2012.

  2. Dediu & Levinson, 2018; Hoffmann et al., 2018; see also Andrew Lawler, “Ne-

  andertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean,” Science, April 24,

  2018, http:// www .sciencemag .org / news / 2018 / 04 / neandertals - stone - age - people - may

  - have - voyaged - mediterranean.

  3. Dan Sperber and his colleagues made this point in a 2010 article: Sperber et al.,

  2010; see also Clément, 2006; Harris, 2012; O. Morin, 2016.

  4. Cited in Carruthers, 2009, p. 175.

  5. Anthony, 1999.

  6. Cited in Carruthers, 2009, p. 192.

  7. Life magazine, cited in Carruthers, 2009, p. 192.

  8. Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992, chap. 34.

  9. Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992, chap. 34.

  10. Reicher, 1996.

  11. Cited in Barrows, 1981, p. 48.

  12. Cited in Barrows, 1981, p. 47.

  13. Taine, 1876, p. 226.

  14. F. G. Robinson, 1988, p. 387.

  15. Paul Waldman, “Trump and Republicans treat their voters like morons,” Wash-

  ington Post, July 26, 2017, https:// www .washingtonpost .com / blogs / plum - line / wp

  / 2017 / 07 / 26 / trump - and - republicans - treat - their - voters - like - morons / ; Jason Brennan,

  n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 277

  “Trump won because voters are ignorant, literally,” Foreign Policy, November 10, 2016,

  http:// foreignpolicy .com / 2016 / 11 / 10 / the - dance - of - the - dunces - trump - clinton

  - election - republican - democrat / .

  16. Peter Kate Piercy, “Classist innuendo about educated Remain voters and the

  ‘white man van’ of Leave has revealed something very distasteful about Britain,” In-

  de pen dent, June 20, 2016, http:// www .independent .co .uk / voices / classist - innuendo

  - about - educated - remain - voters - and - the - white - van - men - of - leave - has - revealed

  - something - a7091206 .html.

  17. Zimbardo, Johnson, & McCann, 2012, p. 286.

  18. Myers, 2009, p. 263.

  19. Bonnefon, Hopfensitz, & De Neys, 2017; Todorov, Funk, & Olivola, 2015.

  20. There are many issues with these dual- process models, which Dan Sperber and

  I have previously criticized; see Mercier & Sperber, 2017.

  21. Frederick, 2005.

  22. Although most people only do so when the correct answer is explained by

  someone else. Most people who provide the correct answer on their own do so in-

  tuitively; see Bago & De Neys, 2019.

  23. Gilbert et al., 1990; Gilbert, Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993.

  24. Gilbert et al., 1993.

  25. Kahneman, 2011, p. 81.

  26. Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012.

  27. Aarnio & Lindeman, 2005; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, & Fugelsang,

  2012.

  28. Tyndale- Biscoe, 2005, p. 234.

  29. Ratcliffe, Fenton, & Galef, 2003.

  30. Rozin, 1976, p. 28.

  31. Rozin, 1976.

  32. Garcia, Kimeldorf, & Koel ing, 1955.

  33. Rozin, 1976, p. 26.

  34. Rozin, 1976.

  35. Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990.

  36. de Waal, 1982.

  37. Cheney, Seyfarth, & Silk, 1995.

  38. Desrochers, Morissette, & Ricard, 1995.

  39. Tomasello, Call, & Gluckman, 1997.

  40. J. Wood, Glynn, Phil ips, & Hauser, 2007.

  41. An argument I had previously made in Mercier, 2013.

  42. Carruthers, 2009.

  43. Alexander & Bruning, 2008; Meissner, Surmon- Böhr, Oleszkiewicz, & Alison,

  2017.

  278 no t es t o ch ap t er 4

  44. Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992.

  45. Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992; see also Trappey, 1996.

  46. Strahan, Spencer, & Zanna, 2002. Experiments on subliminal influence might

  not be fully reliable, as many of them are embroiled in a replication controversy: even

  if the results were obtained once, it is not clear they can be obtained again, so that the

  initial results might have been a statistical fluke (e.g., Open Science Col aboration,

  2015).

  47. Richter, Schroeder, & Wöhrmann, 2009.

  48. U. Hasson, Simmons, & Todorov, 2005.

  49. Kahneman, 2011, p. 81.

  50. B. Bergstrom & Boyer, submitted. For more on these debates, see Isberner &

  Richter, 2013, 2014; Sklar et al., 2012; Wiswede, Koranyi, Müller, Langner, & Rother-

  mund, 2012.

  51. Gervais et al., 2018.

  52. Majima, 2015.

  53. Mascaro & Morin, 2014.

  54. Couil ard & Woodward, 1999.

  55. Mascaro & Morin, 2014.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Nyhan & Reifler, 2010.

  2. Nyhan & Reifler, 2015.

  3. Bonaccio & Dalal, 2006; Yaniv, 2004; the one- third figure can be found, for in-

  stance, in Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000. This is actually slightly misleading. In fact, on

  each item, two- thirds of the people don’t change their minds, and one- third adopt the

  other opinion wholesale (as a first approximation). People’s preference for choosing

  one of the two opinions (theirs or that of the other individual), instead of averaging

  between the two, is suboptimal (Larrick & Sol , 2006).

  4. T. Wood & Porter, 20
16.

  5. Aird, Ecker, Swire, Berinsky, & Lewandowsky, 2018; Chan, Jones, Hall Jamie-

  son, & Albarracin, 2017; De Vries, Hobolt, & Tilley, 2018; Dixon, Hmielowski, &

  Ma, 2017; Dockendorff & Mercier, in preparation; Ecker, O’Reilly, Reid, & Chang,

  2019; Facchini, Margalit, & Nakata, 2016; Grigorieff, Roth, & Ubfal, 2018; Guess

  & Coppock, 2015, 2018; S. J. Hill, 2017; Hopkins, Sides, & Citrin, 2019; J. W. Kim,

  2018; Leeper & Slothuus, 2015; Nair, 2018; Nyhan, Porter, Reifler, & Wood, 2017;

  Tappin & Gadsby, 2019; van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2019; Walter &

  Murphy, 2018.

  6. For some evidence that people are not good at doing this when the task is very

  explicit, see Dewitt, Lagnado, & Fenton, submitted.

  n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 279

  7. See Thagard, 2005.

  8. I thank Jennifer Nagel for introducing it to me.

  9. Trouche, Sander, & Mercier, 2014.

  10. Claidière, Trouche, & Mercier, 2017.

  11. Mercier, 2012; Mercier, Bonnier, & Trouche, 2016; Mercier & Sperber, 2011,

  2017.

  12. Sperber & Mercier, 2018.

  13. Plato, Meno, Jowett translation, https:// en .wikisource .org / wiki / Meno (accessed on July 28 2019).

  14. There are exceptions: people might want to justify their views (to display their

  rationality) or to limit their exposure if what they say turns out to be mistaken; see

  Mercier & Sperber, 2017.

  15. Liberman, Minson, Bryan, & Ross, 2012; Minson, Liberman, & Ross, 2011.

  16. See references in Mercier, 2016a.

  17. Trouche, Shao, & Mercier, 2019; for evidence in children, see Castelain, Ber-

  nard, Van der Henst, & Mercier, 2016.

  18. For reviews, see Hahn & Oaksford, 2007; Petty & Wegener, 1998; see also, for

  some observational evidence, Priniski & Horne, 2018. Other experiments appear to

  show that we are biased when we evaluate arguments that challenge our beliefs (e.g.,

  Edwards & Smith, 1996; Greenwald, 1968; Taber & Lodge, 2006). However, it can be

  argued that this apparent bias stems from the production of arguments, rather than

  the evaluation of arguments, suggesting that the evaluation of arguments is in fact

  unbiased (Mercier, 2016b; Trouche et al., 2019).

  19. “Incompleteness theorems,” Wikipedia, https:// en .wikipedia .org / wiki

  / G%C3%B6del%27s _ incompleteness _ theorems (accessed April 24, 2019).

  20. Mancosu, 1999.

  21. Planck, 1968, pp. 33–34.

  22. Nitecki, Lemke, Pullman, & Johnson, 1978; Oreskes, 1988. For other examples,

 

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