A Short Guide to Gullibility

This seems like an appropriate moment to put up a piece I wrote for The Mekong Review:

No conspiracy theory is now too ridiculous to circulate on social media. Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in Washington, DC. Laughable until the restaurant was shot up by a man armed with an assault rifle who wanted to investigate what by then was inevitably called ‘Pizzagate’. It also was not even the most absurd conspiracy theory involving paedophilia and government officials to circulate. A year later, in 2017, NASA had to deny that it was running a child sex ring on Mars.

Inevitably, anxieties about Covid-19 have amped it all up. The virus has been blamed on Bill Gates, 5G, a Chinese research lab, a Canadian research lab, the US military, Israel, Muslims, a British research lab and the polio vaccine. Doubtless there are many more conspiracy theories to come. The circulation of conspiracy theories waxes and wanes as high levels of nationalism and general social anxiety dampen our capacity for scepticism.

People have always held beliefs that made many roll their eyes in despair at their gullibility, but the profusion of nonsense sometimes seems overwhelming. What makes people believe these ideas? A body of work, much of it done over the past two decades by evolutionary psychologists, suggests our brains may be particularly prone to bullshit. What helped us survive for 200,000 years in small bands of hunter-gatherers is not working well in the era of Facebook. It is not just one maladaptation either: it turns out we have quite a few hard-wired cognitive failings that make us willing to subscribe to false ideas.

The first is known as the acceptance bias. We tend to accept new information as true, and only after some mental work are we likely to question it. This particularly happens if we are distracted by other information or are stressed. In emotional circumstances, we often don’t take the next steps to question and reject false information. When research subjects had their cognitive capacities reduced by being given multiple demanding tasks to do at the same time, they were much more inclined to accept false information.

There is also the repetition-induced truth effect. The more often we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it. When people are shown some piece of information over and over and are then told it is false, they are still more likely to believe it. It seems obvious that repetition doesn’t make something true; as Wittgenstein wrote, you can’t ‘buy several copies of the morning paper to ensure that the content is true’. But the more often a statement is repeated, the more likely someone is to remember it. People believe information if it feels familiar. This may have had some use when most information was directly experienced and involved natural systems; seeing many people become sick after eating a plant would help you avoid that plant. Inferring truth from repetition is useful and provides a ‘good enough’ system on which to base beliefs. Even if you are wrong, the downside is limited to slightly reduced nutrition. But in a world of remotely sourced and symbolic information, repetition no longer helps you form useful beliefs.

People tend to overestimate the likelihood of events happening together in what is known as the conjunction fallacy. This is a tendency to believe that multiple specific conditions are more likely than a single general one. The more detailed and specific a set of events, the more likely people are to believe it. Occam may have had his razor, but the human brain will often go with the more complicated story. Rather than accepting a simple rationale for an event, we tend to go with the one with more details, hence the tendency of those wearing tinfoil hats to embroider ever more elaborate conspiracies.

We also love a story. Heuristics are essentially little stories or associations that we use to order a complex world, and they have a significant effect on the way we see things. But they also lead to us to see problems where they do not exist. Running away from the tree branch on the ground you think is a snake may make you feel ridiculous when you realise your mistake, but it is better than stepping on a real snake. Hasty judgements may help you survive.

Pattern judgement helps us all survive on a daily basis—but we tend to underestimate the randomness of outcomes. Illusory pattern perception, also known as the clustering illusion, is a common problem. People like to think they can see patterns in blackjack or roulette, and so the casino wins big because there are no patterns. Other animals do the same thing: pigeons fed at regular intervals will start adopting the same behaviour they were doing just before they were last fed. They come to believe that it is their behaviour that is producing the food, rather than it is just arriving at a regular interval. Nod your head this way and you get fed. It turns out we are as dumb as pigeons. People who show stronger illusory pattern perception are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena.

Pattern detection goes together with agency detection to keep us alive. This is the ability to tell if someone does something deliberately, and it is vital for maintaining the social systems that keep us alive. It stems from a broader capacity called ‘theory of mind’, which is our ability to have a sense of what others are feeling or thinking. We know what will cause offence and reduce our social links, and so we mostly don’t do those things. It also allows us to know whether someone was acting deliberately or did something by accident. But our skills in this area mean that we tend to over-ascribe agency, even to objects that don’t have it, in a process known as illusory agency detection. Many of us like to believe that events happen for a reason or that objects have some sort of decision-making capacity. Anthropomorphising objects or animals closely predicts a belief in conspiracies.

Small things have large consequences as anyone caught up in a viral pandemic will tell you. But mentally we have a hard time with that in what is called the proportionality bias. If something is so dramatic as to unsettle you in a profound way, then it must have been caused by something earth-shaking. But no, that often isn’t the case. When consequences are significant, people are more likely to believe they were caused by a major event. Princess Diana dies because of a drunk driver, and a thousand conspiracies are spawned because people felt it had to occur for more important reasons. (Conspiracy theories don’t even have to be coherent: one study found that those who believed Diana staged her own death were also more likely to believe that she was murdered.)

So what is the function of gullibility? Humans made their biggest mental leap when they moved from being able to act only on information in their immediate surroundings to being able to act on symbolic information agreed with others. Large scale organisation requires that we all accept certain abstract ideas as if they were real. If we are to organise around a king, we all need to believe the fiction that the king is better than us or somehow connected to a god, and we have to accept this even if we’ve never met him. Contemporary humans have to do the same around all sorts of abstract concepts, from money to liberty.

Gullibility builds social cohesion. Belonging to a group is important for survival, and cohesion of that group is vital. It requires that we accept generally held beliefs, even if they are not supported by evidence. We mentally go along to get along in what is known as the false consensus phenomenon. If others agree on something in our group, we are more likely to even if it is false. But while there are many benefits to group identity, there are downsides. The strength of belief in your own groups predicts the strength of negative feelings for out-groups. Poles who most strongly felt Poland to be a superior nation were also the most likely to have anti-Semitic feelings. Feeling threatened by an out-group worsens the problem of conspiracy theories, as does general stress or fear. In one study, students facing stressful exams were more likely to accept conspiracy theories than a control group.

Love also makes us stupid. Human life, with its complex social activities that are needed for survival, requires a big brain that uses lots of energy. Babies can be born only with small heads, and so they have to be looked after for a long time so their brains can grow. They are more likely to survive in some sort of unit in which men help bring in food. And so love evolved. Love requires a belief that the person you are going to stick with is way better than is probably the case in reality. Forming strong bonds improves the likelihood that children will survive, and so we engage in metacognitive myopia. We don’t adopt the same standards that we would to mentally test other information.

Those on political extremes, whether left or right, tend to be careful curators of many conspiracy theories. They share a confidence in their political views and a pessimistic view of what they see as an unsettled future. They also seem to be led by men who are the embodiment of what has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the psychological discovery that increasingly seems to explain our world. In its crudest expression, the Dunning-Kruger effect is that some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are. We have a tendency to overestimate our abilities and expertise and therefore reject new information. We are very stable geniuses, at least in our own minds.

A Short Guide to Gullibility

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