Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

"Hugo Mercier is a French cognitive scientist who’s pretty young. He’s a student of Dan Sperber who is an anthropologist and a cognitive scientist. Together they wrote a book a few years ago called The Enigma of Reason . In that book, they said, ‘Look, cognitive science will tell you that the human mind is full of bugs, that we’re just hopeless at thinking, we fail all these tests.’ It’s received knowledge that we don’t have very good thinking systems. Confirmation bias would be an example of this. This is the idea that you don’t question your own view: what you do is look for reasons to believe it, and so you ignore information that would go against it (which goes precisely against Popper’s view of how you should proceed). But they take an evolutionary view on it and say, ‘Hang on. Maybe our reasoning system is designed exactly as it should be, it’s just not designed for the purpose that you think. It’s not a device for getting us closer to the truth, it’s a device for generating persuasion.’ So if I have a position that I’m committed to, then I’m better off if I can spot good reasons to provide support for that position and then deploy those using language to convince others. I give them as reasons to others why they should follow me and my position. So that’s the background to the Not Born Yesterday book. The sole-authored book is a follow-up book, in sense, grounded in work that he did together with Sperber and other colleagues. It’s a popularization of some of the more technical work they’ve done. “Language is not very good for conveying truth about the world” What’s so valuable about this book is that it’s a corrective, it’s a reversal of the received knowledge, which is that we’re all gullible. If you could just get control of the media, you can control the population. People vote for Trump or for Brexit because they’ve been brainwashed. He says, ‘No, that’s not the case at all. Humans are not gullible or easily brainwashed,’ and he gives a whole lot of data as to why he believes that. One of the memorable reversals— I reviewed this book for the Times Literary Supplement last year, and it’s the reversals that I emphasized —is of Voltaire , who gets quoted for saying that ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’** The idea is that you feed post-truth to the people, and they will come along and carry out genocide or Brexit. Mercier says, ‘No. It is wanting to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities.’ People are smart. Once they’ve got views and positions that they want to hold to for whatever reason—social reasons, normally—then they’re very good at finding reasons within the discourse around them that they can use to justify those positions. If people are disenfranchised or oppressed, if they are committed to a certain view, then they’re very good at spotting reasons to hold that view. That’s the confirmation bias problem that Popper and Deutsch are saying is not helping us. Mercier’s book is trying to get us to understand that process. It’s too easy to tell people ‘Oh, you’re gullible and you’re being swayed and so forth.’ It’s one of those eye-opening, challenging books. In itself, it’s a nice red-teaming exercise. It’s saying, ‘You all have this view that people are gullible. We’re just not, it’s the exception, by far.’"