In The Fake News Era, Are We Too Gullible? No, Says Cognitive Scientist
One of the oddest political hoaxes of recent times was Pizzagate, in which conspiracy theorists claimed that Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign chief ran a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, pizzeria.
To fight disinformation more effectively, he suggests, humans need to stop believing in one thing above all: our own gullibility.
Millions of believers spread the rumor on social media, abetted by Russian bots; one outraged netizen stormed the restaurant with an assault rifle and shot open what he took to be the dungeon door. (It actually led to a computer closet.) Pundits cited the imbroglio as evidence that Americans had lost the ability to tell fake news from the real thing, putting our democracy in peril.
Such fears, however, are nothing new. "For most of history, the concept of widespread credulity has been fundamental to our understanding of society," observes Hugo Mercier in Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (Princeton University Press, 2020). In the fourth century BCE, he points out, the historian Thucydides blamed Athens' defeat by Sparta on a demagogue who hoodwinked the public into supporting idiotic military strategies; Plato extended that argument to condemn democracy itself. Today, atheists and fundamentalists decry one another's gullibility, as do climate-change accepters and deniers. Leftists bemoan the masses' blind acceptance of the "dominant ideology," while conservatives accuse those who do revolt of being duped by cunning agitators.
What's changed, all sides agree, is the speed at which bamboozlement can propagate. In the digital age, it seems, a sucker is born every nanosecond.
The Case Against Credulity
Yet Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, thinks we've got the problem backward. To fight disinformation more effectively, he suggests, humans need to stop believing in one thing above all: our own gullibility. "We don't credulously accept whatever we're told—even when those views are supported by the majority of the population, or by prestigious, charismatic individuals," he writes. "On the contrary, we are skilled at figuring out who to trust and what to believe, and, if anything, we're too hard rather than too easy to influence."
He bases those contentions on a growing body of research in neuropsychiatry, evolutionary psychology, and other fields. Humans, Mercier argues, are hardwired to balance openness with vigilance when assessing communicated information. To gauge a statement's accuracy, we instinctively test it from many angles, including: Does it jibe with what I already believe? Does the speaker share my interests? Has she demonstrated competence in this area? What's her reputation for trustworthiness? And, with more complex assertions: Does the argument make sense?
This process, Mercier says, enables us to learn much more from one another than do other animals, and to communicate in a far more complex way—key to our unparalleled adaptability. But it doesn't always save us from trusting liars or embracing demonstrably false beliefs. To better understand why, leapsmag spoke with the author.
How did you come to write Not Born Yesterday?
In 2010, I collaborated with the cognitive scientist Dan Sperber and some other colleagues on a paper called "Epistemic Vigilance," which laid out the argument that evolutionarily, it would make no sense for humans to be gullible. If you can be easily manipulated and influenced, you're going to be in major trouble. But as I talked to people, I kept encountering resistance. They'd tell me, "No, no, people are influenced by advertising, by political campaigns, by religious leaders." I started doing more research to see if I was wrong, and eventually I had enough to write a book.
With all the talk about "fake news" these days, the topic has gotten a lot more timely.
Yes. But on the whole, I'm skeptical that fake news matters very much. And all the energy we spend fighting it is energy not spent on other pursuits that may be better ways of improving our informational environment. The real challenge, I think, is not how to shut up people who say stupid things on the internet, but how to make it easier for people who say correct things to convince people.
"History shows that the audience's state of mind and material conditions matter more than the leader's powers of persuasion."
You start the book with an anecdote about your encounter with a con artist several years ago, who scammed you out of 20 euros. Why did you choose that anecdote?
Although I'm arguing that people aren't generally gullible, I'm not saying we're completely impervious to attempts at tricking us. It's just that we're much better than we think at resisting manipulation. And while there's a risk of trusting someone who doesn't deserve to be trusted, there's also a risk of not trusting someone who could have been trusted. You miss out on someone who could help you, or from whom you might have learned something—including figuring out who to trust.
You argue that in humans, vigilance and open-mindedness evolved hand-in-hand, leading to a set of cognitive mechanisms you call "open vigilance."
There's a common view that people start from a state of being gullible and easy to influence, and get better at rejecting information as they become smarter and more sophisticated. But that's not what really happens. It's much harder to get apes than humans to do anything they don't want to do, for example. And research suggests that over evolutionary time, the better our species became at telling what we should and shouldn't listen to, the more open to influence we became. Even small children have ways to evaluate what people tell them.
The most basic is what I call "plausibility checking": if you tell them you're 200 years old, they're going to find that highly suspicious. Kids pay attention to competence; if someone is an expert in the relevant field, they'll trust her more. They're likelier to trust someone who's nice to them. My colleagues and I have found that by age 2 ½, children can distinguish between very strong and very weak arguments. Obviously, these skills keep developing throughout your life.
But you've found that even the most forceful leaders—and their propaganda machines—have a hard time changing people's minds.
Throughout history, there's been this fear of demagogues leading whole countries into terrible decisions. In reality, these leaders are mostly good at feeling the crowd and figuring out what people want to hear. They're not really influencing [the masses]; they're surfing on pre-existing public opinion. We know from a recent study, for instance, that if you match cities in which Hitler gave campaign speeches in the late '20s through early '30s with similar cities in which he didn't give campaign speeches, there was no difference in vote share for the Nazis. Nazi propaganda managed to make Germans who were already anti-Semitic more likely to express their anti-Semitism or act on it. But Germans who were not already anti-Semitic were completely inured to the propaganda.
So why, in totalitarian regimes, do people seem so devoted to the ruler?
It's not a very complex psychology. In these regimes, the slightest show of discontent can be punished by death, or by you and your whole family being sent to a labor camp. That doesn't mean propaganda has no effect, but you can explain people's obedience without it.
What about cult leaders and religious extremists? Their followers seem willing to believe anything.
Prophets and preachers can inspire the kind of fervor that leads people to suicidal acts or doomed crusades. But history shows that the audience's state of mind and material conditions matter more than the leader's powers of persuasion. Only when people are ready for extreme actions can a charismatic figure provide the spark that lights the fire.
Once a religion becomes ubiquitous, the limits of its persuasive powers become clear. Every anthropologist knows that in societies that are nominally dominated by orthodox belief systems—whether Christian or Muslim or anything else—most people share a view of God, or the spirit, that's closer to what you find in societies that lack such religions. In the Middle Ages, for instance, you have records of priests complaining of how unruly the people are—how they spend the whole Mass chatting or gossiping, or go on pilgrimages mostly because of all the prostitutes and wine-drinking. They continue pagan practices. They resist attempts to make them pay tithes. It's very far from our image of how much people really bought the dominant religion.
"The mainstream media is extremely reliable. The scientific consensus is extremely reliable."
And what about all those wild rumors and conspiracy theories on social media? Don't those demonstrate widespread gullibility?
I think not, for two reasons. One is that most of these false beliefs tend to be held in a way that's not very deep. People may say Pizzagate is true, yet that belief doesn't really interact with the rest of their cognition or their behavior. If you really believe that children are being abused, then trying to free them is the moral and rational thing to do. But the only person who did that was the guy who took his assault weapon to the pizzeria. Most people just left one-star reviews of the restaurant.
The other reason is that most of these beliefs actually play some useful role for people. Before any ethnic massacre, for example, rumors circulate about atrocities having been committed by the targeted minority. But those beliefs aren't what's really driving the phenomenon. In the horrendous pogrom of Kishinev, Moldova, 100 years ago, you had these stories of blood libel—a child disappeared, typical stuff. And then what did the Christian inhabitants do? They raped the [Jewish] women, they pillaged the wine stores, they stole everything they could. They clearly wanted to get that stuff, and they made up something to justify it.
Where do skeptics like climate-change deniers and anti-vaxxers fit into the picture?
Most people in most countries accept that vaccination is good and that climate change is real and man-made. These ideas are deeply counter-intuitive, so the fact that scientists were able to get them across is quite fascinating. But the environment in which we live is vastly different from the one in which we evolved. There's a lot more information, which makes it harder to figure out who we can trust. The main effect is that we don't trust enough; we don't accept enough information. We also rely on shortcuts and heuristics—coarse cues of trustworthiness. There are people who abuse these cues. They may have a PhD or an MD, and they use those credentials to help them spread messages that are not true and not good. Mostly, they're affirming what people want to believe, but they may also be changing minds at the margins.
How can we improve people's ability to resist that kind of exploitation?
I wish I could tell you! That's literally my next project. Generally speaking, though, my advice is very vanilla. The mainstream media is extremely reliable. The scientific consensus is extremely reliable. If you trust those sources, you'll go wrong in a very few cases, but on the whole, they'll probably give you good results. Yet a lot of the problems that we attribute to people being stupid and irrational are not entirely their fault. If governments were less corrupt, if the pharmaceutical companies were irreproachable, these problems might not go away—but they would certainly be minimized.
Niklas Anzinger is the founder of Infinita VC based in the charter city of Prospera in Honduras. Infinita focuses on a new trend of charter cities and other forms of alternative jurisdictions. Healso hosts a podcast about how to accelerate the future by unblocking “stranded technologies”.This spring he was a part of the network city experiment Zuzalu spearheaded by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin where a few hundred invited guests from the spheres of longevity, biotechnology, crypto, artificial intelligence and investment came together to form a two-monthlong community. It has been described as the world’s first pop-up city. Every morning Vitalians would descend on a long breakfast—the menu had been carefully designed by famed radical longevity self-experimenter Bryan Johnson—and there is where I first met Anzinger who told me about Prospera. Intrigued to say the least, I caught up with him later the same week and the following is a record of our conversation.
Q. We are sitting here in the so-called pop-up network state Zuzalu temporarily realized in the village of Lusticia Bay by the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. To me this is an entirely new concept: What is a network state?
A. A network state is a highly aligned online community that has a level of in-person civility; it crowd-funds territory, and it eventually seeks diplomatic recognition. In a way it's about starting a new country. The term was coined by the crypto influencer and former CTO of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan in a book by the same title last year [2022]. What many people don't know is that it is a more recent addition or innovation in a space called competitive governance. The idea is that you have multiple jurisdictions competing to provide you services as a customer. When you have competition among governments or government service providers, these entities are forced to provide you with a better service instead of the often worse service at higher prices or higher taxes that we're currently getting. The idea went from seasteading, which was hardly feasible because of costs, to charter cities getting public/private partnerships with existing governments and a level of legal autonomy, to special economic zones, to now network states.
Q. How do network states compare to charter cities and similar jurisdictions?
A. Charter cities and special economic zones were legal forks from other existing states. Dubai, Shenzhen in China, to some degree Hong Kong, to some degree Singapore are some examples. There's a host of other charter cities, one of which I'm based in myself, which is Prospera located in Honduras on the island Roatán. Charter cities provide the full stack of governance; they provide new laws and regulations, business registration, tax codes and governance services, Estonia style: you log on to the government platform and you get services as a citizen.
When conceptualizing network states, Balagi Srinivasan turns the idea of a charter city a bit on its head: he doesn't want to start with this full stack because it's still very hard to get these kinds of partnerships with government. It's very expensive and requires lots of experience and lots of social capital. He is saying that network states could instead start as an online community. They could have a level of alignment where they trade with each other; they have their own economy; they meet in person in regular gatherings like we're doing here in Zuzulu for two months, and then they negotiate with existing governments or host cities to get a certain degree of legal autonomy that is centered around a moral innovation. So, his idea is: don't focus on building a completely new country or city; focus on a moral innovation.
Q. What would be an example of such a moral innovation?
A. An example would be longevity—life is good; death is bad—let's see what we can do to foster progress around that moral innovation and see how we can get legal forks from the existing system that allow us to accelerate progress in that area. There is an increasing realization in the science that there are hallmarks of aging and that aging is a cause of other diseases like cancer, ALS or Alzheimer's. But aging is not recognized as a disease by the FDA in the United States and in most countries around the world, so it's very hard to get scientific funding for biotechnology that would attack the hallmarks of aging and allow us potentially to reverse aging and extend life. This is a significant shortcoming of existing government systems that groups such as the ones that have come together here in Montenegro are now seeking alternatives too. Charter cities and now network states are such alternatives.
Q. Would it not be better to work within the current systems, and try to improve them, rather than abandon them for new experimental jurisdictions?
A. There are numerous failures of public policies. These failures are hard, if not impossible, to reverse, because as soon as you have these policies, you have entrenched interests who benefit from the regulations. The only way to disrupt incumbent industries is with start-ups, but the way the system is set up makes it excessively hard for such start-ups to become big companies. In fact, larger companies are weaponizing the legal system against small companies, because they can afford the lawyers and the fixed cost of compliance.
I don't believe that our institutions in many developed countries are beyond hope. I just think it's easier to change them if you could point at successful examples. ‘Hey, this country or this zone is already doing it very successfully’; if they can extend people’s lifespan by 10 years, if they can reduce maternal mortality, and if they have a massive medical tourism where people come back healthier, then that is just very embarrassing for the FDA.
Q. Perhaps a comparison here would be the relationship between Hong Kong and China?
A. Correct, so having Hong Kong right in front of your door … ‘Hey, this capitalism thing seems to work, why don't we try it here?’ It was due to the very bold leadership by Deng Xiaoping that they experimented with it in the development zone of Shenzhen. It worked really well and then they expanded with more special economic zones that also worked.
Próspera is a private city and special economic zone on the island of Roatán in the Central American state of Honduras.
Q. Tell us about Prospera, the charter city in Honduras, that you are intimately connected with.
A. Honduras is a very poor country. It has a lot of crime, never had a single VC investment, and has a GDP per capita of 2,000 per year. Honduras has suffered tremendously. The goal of these special economic zones is to bring in economic development. That's their sole purpose. It's a homegrown innovation from Honduras that started in 2009 with a very forward-thinking statesman, Octavio Sanchez, who was the chief of staff to the president of Honduras, and then president. He had his own ideas about making Honduras a more decentralized system, where more of the power lies in the municipalities.
Inspired by the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer, who gave a famous Ted Talk in 2009 about charter cities, Sanchez initiated a process that lasted for years and eventually led to the creation of a special economic zone legal regime that’s anchored in the Hunduran constitution that provides the highest legal autonomy in the world to these zones. There are today three special economic zones approved by the Honduran government: Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea.
Q. How did you become interested and then involved in Prospera?
A. I read about it first in an article by Scott Alexander, a famous rationalist blogger, who wrote a very long article about Prospera, and I thought, this is amazing! Then I came to Prospera and I found it to be one of the most if not the most exciting project in the world going on right now and that it also opened my heart to the country and its people. Most of my friends there are Honduran, they have been working on this for 10 or more years. They want to remake Honduras and put it on the map as the place in the world where this legal and governance innovation started.
Q. To what extent is Prospera autonomous relative to the Honduran government?
A. What's interesting about the Honduran model is that it's anchored within the Honduran constitution, and it has a very clear framework for what's possible and what's not possible, and what's possible ensures the highest degree of legal autonomy anywhere seen in the world. Prospera has really pushed the model furthest in creating a common law-based polycentric legal system. The idea is that you don't have a legislature, instead you have common law and it's based on the best practice common law principles that a legal scholar named Tom W. Bell created.
One of the core ideas is that as a business you're not obligated to follow one regulatory monopoly like the FDA. You have regulatory flexibility so you can choose what you're regulated under. So, you can say: ‘if I do a medical clinic, I do it under Norwegian law here’. And you even have the possibility to amend it a bit. You're still required to have liability insurance, and have to agree to binding arbitration in case there's a legal dispute. And your insurance has to approve you. So, under that model the insurance becomes the regulator and they regulate through prices. The limiting factor is criminal law; Honduran criminal law fully applies. So does immigration law. And we pay taxes.
Q. Is there also an idea of creating a kind of healthy living there, and encourage medical tourism?
A. Yes, we specifically look for legal advantages in autonomy around creating new drugs, doing clinical trials, doing self-medication and experimentation. There is a stem cell clinic here and they're doing clinical trials. The island of Roatán is very easily accessible for American tourists. It's a beautiful island, and it's for regulatory reasons hard to do stem cell therapies in the United States, so they're flying in patients from the United States. Most of them are very savvy and often have PhDs in biotech and are able to assess the risk for themselves of taking drugs and doing clinical trials. We're also going to get a wellness center, and there have been ideas around establishing a peptide clinic and a compound pharmacy and things like that. We are developing a healthcare ecosystem.
Q. This kind of experimental tourism raises some ethical issues. What happens if patients are harmed? And what are the moral implications for society of these new treatments?
A. As a moral principle we believe in medical freedom: people have rights over their bodies, even at the (informed) risk of harm to themselves if no unconsenting third-parties are harmed; this is a fundamental right currently not protected effectively.
What we do differently is not changing ethical norms around safety and efficacy, we’re just changing the institutional setup. Instead of one centralized bureaucracy, like the FDA, we have regulatory pluralism that allows different providers of safety and efficacy to compete under market rules. Like under any legal system, common law in Prospera punishes malpractice, fraud, murder etc. This system will still produce safe and effective drugs, and it will still work with common sense legal notions like informed consent and liability for harm. There are regulations for medical practice, there is liability insurance and things like that. It will just do so more efficiently than the current way of doing things (unless it won’t, in which case it will change and evolve – or fail).
A direct moral benefit ´to what we do is that we increase accessibility. Typical gene therapies on the market cost $1 million dollars in the US. The gene therapy developed in Prospera costs $25,000. As to concern about whether such treatments are problematic, we do not share this perspective. We are for advancing science responsibly and we believe that both individuals and society stand to gain from improving the resiliency of the human body through advanced biotechnology.
Q. How does Prospera relate to the local Honduran population?
A. I think it's very important that our projects deliver local benefits and that they're well anchored in local communities. Because when you go to a new place, you're seen as a foreigner, and you're seen as potentially a danger or a threat. The most important thing for Prospera and Ciudad Morazan is to show we're creating jobs; we're creating employment; we're improving people's lives on the ground. Prospera is directly and indirectly employing 1,100 people. More than 2/3 of the people who are working for Prospera are Honduran. It has a lot of local service workers from the island, and it has educated Hondurans from the mainland for whom it's an alternative to going to the United States.
Q. What makes a good Prosperian citizen?
A. People in Prospera are very entrepreneurial. They're opening companies on a small scale. For example, Vehinia, who is the cook in the kitchen at Prospera, she's from the neighboring village and she started an NGO that is now funding a school where children from the local village can go to instead of a school that's 45 minutes away. There's very much a spirit of ‘let's exchange and trade with each other’. Some people might see that as a bit too commercial, but that's something about the culture that people accept and that people see as a good thing.
Q. Five years from now, if everything goes well, what do we see in Prospera?
A. I think Prospera will have at least 10,000 residents and I think Honduras hopefully will have more zones. There could be zones with a thriving industrial sector and sort of a labor-intensive economy and some that are very strong in pharmaceuticals, there could also be other zones for synthetic biology, and other zones focused on agriculture. The zones of Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea are already showing the results we want to see, the results that we will eventually be measured by, and I'm tremendously excited about Honduras.
How to Measure Your Stress, with Dr. Rosalind Picard
Today’s podcast guest is Rosalind Picard, a researcher, inventor named on over 100 patents, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer. When it comes to the science related to endowing computer software with emotional intelligence, she wrote the book. It’s published by MIT Press and called Affective Computing.
Dr. Picard is founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group. Her research and engineering contributions have been recognized internationally. For example, she received the 2022 International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research, considered by many to be the Nobel prize in computer science.
Through her research and companies, Dr. Picard has developed wearable sensors, algorithms and systems for sensing, recognizing and responding to information about human emotion. Her products are focused on using fitness trackers to advance clinical quality treatments for a range of conditions.
Meanwhile, in just the past few years, numerous fitness tracking companies have released products with their own stress sensors and systems. You may have heard about Fitbit’s Stress Management Score, or Whoop’s Stress Monitor – these features and apps measure things like your heart rhythm and a certain type of invisible sweat to identify stress. They’re designed to raise awareness about forms of stress such as anxieties and anger, and suggest strategies like meditation to relax in real time when stress occurs.
But how well do these off-the-shelf gadgets work? There’s no one more knowledgeable and experienced than Rosalind Picard to explain the science behind these stress features, what they do exactly, how they might be able to help us, and their current shortcomings.
Dr. Picard is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a popular speaker who’s given over a hundred invited keynote talks and a TED talk with over 2 million views. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband, where they’ve raised three sons.
In our conversation, we discuss stress scores on fitness trackers to improve well-being. She describes the difference between commercial products that might help people become more mindful of their health and products that are FDA approved and really capable of advancing the science. We also talk about several fascinating findings and concepts discovered in Dr. Picard’s lab including the multiple arousal theory, a phenomenon you’ll want to hear about. And we explore the complexity of stress, one reason it’s so tough to measure. For example, many forms of stress are actually good for us. Can fitness trackers tell the difference between stress that’s healthy and unhealthy?
Show links:
- Dr. Picard’s book, Affective Computing
- Dr. Picard’s bio
- Dr. Picard on Twitter
- Dr. Picard’s company, Empatica - https://www.empatica.com/ - The FDA-cleared Empatica Health Monitoring Platform provides accurate, continuous health insights for researchers and clinicians, collected in the real world
- Empatica Twitter
- Dr. Picard and her team have published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles across AI, Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Digital Health, and Human-computer interaction.
- Dr. Picard’s TED talk
Rosalind Picard