Mercier, H. (2020)

Mercier, H. (2020). ''Not born yesterday. The science of Who we trust and What we believe.'' Princeton University Press

(14) "The multiple mass persuasion attempts witnessed since the dawn of history - from demagogues to advertisers - are no proof of human gullibility. On the contrary, the recurrent failures of these attempts attest to the difficulties of influencing people en masse. ... the cultural success of some misconceptions, isn't well explained by a tendency to be credulous. By and large, misconceptions do not spread because they are pushed by prestigious or charismatic individuals - the supply side. Instead, they owe their success to demand, as people look for beliefs that fit with their preexisting views and serve some of their goals. Reassuringly, most popular misconceptions remain largely cut off from the rest of our minds and have few practical consequences, explaining why we can be relatively lax when accepting them.

(28) "... I will argue that human communication is kept (mostly) reliable by a whole suite of cognitive processes - mechanisms of open vigilance - that minimize our exposure to unreliable signals and, by keeping track of who said what, inflict costs on unreliable senders."

(30) "Without communication, we would have a hard time figuring out what we can safely eat, how to avoid danger, who to trust, and so forth."

(31) "... the stakes are so high that it would be puzzling if we hadn't evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms to deal not only with the potential but also with the danger of communication." - open vigilance

(31) "Many commentators throughout history have suggested that some humans - from women to slaves - have stringent intellectual limitations, limitations that would make these people gullible ..."

(34) "This association between lack of intellectual sophistication and gullibility is historically pervasive."

(35) "In contemporary literature, the link between unsophistication and credulity mostly takes two forms. The first is in children, whose lack of cognitive maturity is often associated with gullibility." Second: System 1.

(42) "If more recent and sophisticated mechanisms are disrupted, we revert to our conservative core, becoming more stubborn rather than more gullible."

(43) Brainwashing, enhanced interrogation techniques. "... these techniques have been shown to be muss less effective than softer methods that make full use of the suspects' higher cognition - methods in which the interrogator builds trust and engages the subjects in discussion."

(44) "System 1 is, if anything, biased to reject any message incompatible with our background belief, but also ambiguous messages or messages coming from untrustworthy sources."

(45) "... an overreliance on System 2 can also lead to the acceptance of questionable beliefs that stem from seemingly strong, but in fact flawed, arguments."

(47) "Evaluating messages in light of our preexisting beliefs is the task of the most basic open vigilance mechanism: plausibility checking.

(49/50) "As a rule, when people are presented with messages from credible sources that challenge their views, they move / some of the way to incorporating this new information into their worldviews."

(53/54) "Reasoning is vigilant because it prompts us to / accept challenging conclusions only when the arguments resonate with our preexisting inferential mechanisms."

(54) "When people are provided with a chance to discuss the issue together, to exchange arguments in support of their views, they become much better at discriminating between opinions they should reject and those they should accept - including opinions they would never have accepted without arguments."

(60) "After a lull in the early twentieth century ... fears about vaccination have rebounded in the West. These fears create a demand for anti-vaccination rhetoric, demand that is rapidly met."

(66) "From an evolutionary point of view, what makes past performance a great cue is that it is hard or impossible to fake."

(71) "The power of aggregating information from many sources is increasingly recognized. A century after Condorcet, Francis Galton showed how averaging across many opinions is nearly guaranteed to lower the resulting error: the error of the average is generally lower, and never worse than the average error. Much more recently, journalist James Surowiecki brilliantly popularized the "miracle of aggregation" in The Wisdom of Crowds."

(76/77) "Preschoolers are open to changing their minds when they think others know better, yet they remain vigilant. Far from blindly following prestigious but incompetent individuals or the majority opinion, they weigh cues of competence and conformity against their prior beliefs, so that even in the face of experts or a strong consensus, they do not automatically change their / minds - neither do adults ..."

(84) "Stressing diligence - the effort people make in sending us useful information - over intent to deceive shifts the perspective. Instead of looking for cues to deception, that is, reasons to reject a message, we should be looking for cues to diligence, that is, reasons to accept a message."

(84) "When are our interlocutors likely to have done due diligence ... Simply, when their interests are aligned with ours: when they're better off if we're better off."

(90) "Adjusting how much we take into account what people say as a function of their level of commitment is sensible, but only if two conditions are met: not everybody's commitments should be treated equally, and we should adjust our future trust in light of past commitment violations."

(93) "One of the organizing principles of open vigilance mechanisms is that, in the absence of positive cues, we reject communicated information: by default people are conservative."

(102) "... when reacting to emotional signals, the following three factors should be relevant across all emotions: what our prior beliefs and plans are, in what context the signals are produced, and whether the sender is trustworthy."

(105) "Lanzetta and English had shown that participants automatically mimic the smile or frown expressed by a confederate, but only when the participants expected to cooperate with the confederate later on. When the participants expected to compete with him instead, they tended to show opposite reactions ..." - counterempathy

(107) "Whether or not an individual starts displaying bizarre behaviors is a function of their existing relationship with those who already exhibit the symptoms, but also of their prior mental states."

(112) "Instead of indiscriminately catching whatever emotion we happen to witness, we exert emotional vigilance - even when we are in the middle of a crowd. For us to react to emotional signals in a way intended by their sender, the reaction has to suit our current plans and mental states, and the sender has to be someone we like, who has not proven unreliable in the past, and whose emotion seems justified. Otherwise, we might not react at all, or we might react in a way opposite to that intended ..."

(113) "Argumentation is most efficient in the context of small group discussion, with its back-and-forth of arguments and counterarguments."

(116) "... demagogues ... have relied on the same strategy, gaining political power not by manipulating crowds but by championing opinions that were already popular but not well represented by political leaders."

(121) "The market for prophecies of doom is driven by the demands of discontented crowds rather than by the supply of sly prophets."

(133/134) "By and large, government propaganda fails to convince the public. It can even backfire, leading to widespread distrust of the regime. At most, propaganda surfs on preexisting opinions and / frees people to express what might otherwise be seen as socially objectionable views."

(136) "Summing up years of research, Joseph Klapper stated in 1960 that political communication "functions more frequently as an agent of reinforcement than as an agent of change".

(137) "By far the most important moderator of whether campaigns or the media influence public opinion is the strength of people's prior opinions."

(137/138) "Following party cues reflects the (largely) sound working of trust mechanisms: if you have come to trust a party over many years, it makes sense to follow its lead on issues about which you have / little knowledge."

(130) "When it comes to the big prize - voting on congressional or presidential elections - the overall effect of th campaign efforts studied was nil."

(144/145) "any message that clashes with our prior beliefs, any injunction to do something we aren't happy to do anyway, is / overwhelmingly likely to fall on deaf ears."

(144) "Mass persuasion fails when it encounters resistance. An audience needs to have positive reasons to believe a message if the message is to have any effect."

(150) ""When we find out, eventually, whether the rumors were true or not, our ability to track who said what helps us create networks of reliable informants."

(152) "For reflective beliefs - beliefs that tend to have fewer personal consequences - we shouldn't expect open vigilance mechanisms to make as much of an effort: Why bother if the belief doesn't make much of a difference?"

(164) "When we find a rumor appealing we should pause before spreading it further - by gossiping to a friend or hitting retweet. What would we do if we had to make a practical decision based on this rumor? Would we engage in vigilante justice to stop the sexual abuse of children? Thinking of a rumor in practical terms should motivate us to check it further."

(166) "One of the major factors that distinguishes accurate and inaccurate rumors ... is the quality of sourcing. By sourcing I mean providing our interlocutors with a description of how we got a piece of information."

(167) "Paying close attention to sources might seem to be the remit of professionals. Since Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War, historians have reflected on which sources their work should be based on, distinguishing primary from seconary sources, debating the reliability and independence of their sources - engaging in historiography. More recently, journalists have also learned to practice source criticism, not relying on a single source, finding independent means of evaluating their sources' credibility, double-checking everything."

(170) "in many cases we don't think them [our interlocutors] competent or diligent enough to warrant changing our minds only on the basis of their opinion. It is in these situations that providing sources makes statements more convincing."

(170) By default, statements are attributed to the speaker's ability to draw inferences, which becomes the main locus for estimations of competence ... By providing sources we outsource ... competences to other cognitive mechanisms ... or to other people."

(191) "Flattery to these Dear Leaders was not "a way of expressing deeply held emotions," but "a code to be mastered" if one wanted to survive in ruthless regimes." [Onno: // Havel's essay, Zinovyev seeing power as a gravity]

(195) "It is only after many rounds of flattery inflation have led to a group of people who agree that Kim Jong-il can control the weather that claiming he can teleport makes some kind of sense".

(196) "It is difficult to belief that people would publicly and confidently profess absurd or repugnant views. But stating our views publicly and confidently is precisely what is required to become unclubbable [unacceptable for other groups]. The groups we want to burn bridges with must know we hold unpopular or offensive views, and the groups we want to join must know that the other groups know. ... By contrast, if people came to hold these extreme views through other means - personal inference or persuasion - they would recognize going public might reflect poorly on them, and would be more discreet."

(198) "... if we want them to abandon their silly or offensive views, attempting to convince them of these views' logical, empirical, or moral failings is unlikely to work. Instead, we have to consider how to deal with people who feel their best chance of thriving is to integrate into groups that have been rejected by most of society."

(202) "By and large, it is not because the population hold false beliefs that they make misguided or evil decisions, but because the population seek to justify making misguided or evil decisions that they hold false beliefs."

(206) "We not only spontaneously justify ourselves when our behavior is questioned but also learn to anticipate when justifications might be needed, before we have to actually offer them. This creates a market for justifications. But such a market arises only when we anticipate that some decisions are likely to be perceived as problematic."

(209) "Experiments that look at the content of the discussions taking place in likeminded groups show that it is chiefly the accumulation of arguments on the same side that leads people to polarize." [Onno: grandstanding]

(209) "When we evaluate justifications for our own views, or views we agree with, our standards are low ... In search for our justifications ... we can ... stumble on good reasons, and when we do, we should recognize them as such. ... a good reason is a good reason, and it makes sense to change our minds accordingly."

(210) "Polarization does not stem from people being ready to accept bad justifications for views they already hold but from being exposed to too many good (enough) justifications for these views."

(212) "The impression of increased polarization is not due to people developing more extreme views but rather to people being more likely to sort themselves consistently as Democrat or Republican on a range of issues."

(212) "The only increase in polarization is in affective polarization: as a result of Americans more sorting themselves into Democrats and Republicans, each side has come to dislike the other even more."

(212) "... the idea that we are locked into echo chambers is even more of a myth than the idea of increased polarization. If anything, social media have boosted exposure to different points of view."

(221) "Argumentation is unlikely to play a significant role in the wide distribution of incomprehensible ideas or counterintuitive concepts. Argumentation works because we find some arguments intuitively compelling."

(225) "... counterintuitive ideas, even when they are held confidently, have no or very limited impact on the functioning of the intuitive systems with which they are at loggerheads. To some extend, counterintuitive ideas are processed like incomprehensible ideas: even though, in theory, they should constantly clash with our intuitions, in practice they simply pass them by. Like many of ... misconceptions ... they remain reflective, detached from the rest of our cognition."

(237) "On the whole, people are pretty good at figuring out who knows best. But there are exceptions."

(237) "The first mechanism relies on the granting of reputation on credit: thinking people competent when they things that appear useful, but that will never be properly checked ..."

(237) "A second way of becoming unduly deferential is to rely on coarse cues to estimate how scientific a piece of information is ..."

(238) "... gurus who rely on the obscurity of their pronouncements to hide the vacuity of their thoughts".

(241) "... on the whole we are more likely to err by not trusting when we should, rather than by trusting when we shouldn't."

(243) "Agents, such as hosts o cable news networks, who rely on the taking-side strategy to gain audiences, benefit if they portray the world as divided and polarized."

(244) "... social media don't push their users to develop stronger views but, through increased perceived polarization, they might contribute to increased affective polarization, as each side comes to dislike the other more."

(254) "The main issue with using coarse cues isn't that we trust people we shouldn't ..., but that we don't trust people we should ..."

(265) "Many of the products we buy exist in virtually identical versions ... In these conditions, it is only normal that our minds should respond to minor nudges ..."

(269) "It is also important to properly engage with anti-vaxxers. Unfortunately, most people have only limited argumentative tools to do so. Those who find the right arguments, such as experts who take the time to engage vaccine doubters in conversation, are more likely to be convincing."

(270) "We aren't gullible: by default we veer on the side of being resistant to new ideas. In absence o the right cues, we reject messages that don't fit with our preconceived views or preexisting plans. To persuade us otherwise takes long-established, carefully maintained trust, clearly demonstrated expertise, and sound arguments."