Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-fxdwj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-11T11:31:54.847Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Good Are We At Evaluating Communicated Information?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2021

Hugo Mercier
Hugo Mercier*
Affiliation:
Institut Jean Nicod Ecole Normale Supérieure
*
hugo.mercier@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 89: How Do We Know? The Social Dimension of Knowledge , May 2021 , pp. 257 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abercrombie, N., Hill, S., & Turner, B. S. (1980). The dominant ideology thesis. Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Altay, S., de Araujo, E., & Mercier, H. (2020). ‘If this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful’: Interestingness-if-true and the sharing of true and false news.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altay, S., & Mercier, H., Happy Thoughts: The Role of Communion in Accepting and Sharing Epistemically Suspect Beliefs (2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asch, S. E., ‘Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority’, Psychological Monographs, 70 (1956), 1–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaine, T. & Boyer, P., ‘Origins of sinister rumors: A preference for threat-related material in the supply and demand of information’, Evolution and Human Behavior, 39 (2018), 67–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyer, P. & Parren, N., ‘Threat-related information suggests competence: A possible factor in the spread of rumors’, PloS One, 10 (2015), e0128421.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brennan, J., The ethics of voting, (Princeton University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Caro, T. M., ‘The functions of stotting: A review of the hypotheses’, Animal Behaviour, 34 (1986), 649–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, S. L., Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, (University of California Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clément, F., ‘To Trust or not to trust? Children's social epistemology’, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1 (2010), 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clément, F., Koenig, M.A., & Harris, P., ‘The ontogeny of trust’, Mind and Language, 19 (2004), 360–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Araujo, E., Altay, S., Bor, A., & Mercier, H., Dominant Jerks: Sharing Offensive Statements can be Used to Demonstrate Dominance (2020).Google Scholar
Delumeau, J., Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire (Westminster Press, 1977).Google Scholar
DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K. & Cooper, H. ‘Cues to deception’, Psychological Bulletin, 129 (2003), 74–118.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, A. & King, G., ‘Why are American presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable?’, British Journal of Political Science, 23 (1993), 409–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, D. T., ‘How mental systems believe’, American Psychologist, 46 (1991), 107–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haig, D., ‘Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy’, Quarterly Review of Biology, (1993) 495–532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, P. L., Koenig, M. A., Corriveau, K. H., Jaswal, V.K., ‘Cognitive foundations of learning from testimony’, Annual Review of Psychology, 69 (2018).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartwig, M., & Bond, C.H., ‘Why do lie-catchers fail? A lens model meta-analysis of human lie judgments’. Psychological Bulletin, 137 (2011), 643.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, J., The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter, (Princeton University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, G.A., Lewis, R.A., Nubbemeyer, E.I., ‘Ghost ads: Improving the economics of measuring online ad effectiveness’, Journal of Marketing Research, 54 (2017), 867–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D., Thinking, fast and slow, (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2011).Google Scholar
Kalla, J. L. & Broockman, D.E., ‘The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments’, American Political Science Review, 112 (2018), 148–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keil, F. C., Stein, C., Webb, L., Billings, V.D., & Rozenblit, L., ‘Discerning the division of cognitive labor: An emerging understanding of how knowledge is clustered in other minds’, Cognitive Science, 32 (2008), 259–300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kershaw, I., ‘How effective was Nazi propaganda’. In Welch, D. (Ed.), Nazi propaganda: The power and the limitations (Croom Helm, 1983) 180–205.Google Scholar
Kershaw, I., The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, (Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Koenig, M. A., ‘Beyond semantic accuracy: Preschoolers evaluate a speaker's reasons’, Child Development, 83 (2012), 1051–1063.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Laughlin, P. R., Group problem solving, (Princeton University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Le Bras, G., Etudes de sociologie religieuse (Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).Google Scholar
Lutz, D. J. & Keil, F.C., ‘Early understanding of the division of cognitive labor’, Child Development (2002), 1073–1084.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mascaro, O. & Sperber, D., ‘The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children's vigilance towards deception’, Cognition, 112 (2009), 367–380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maynard Smith, J. & Harper, D., Animal signals, (Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
McKay, R.T., & Dennett, D.C., ‘The evolution of misbelief’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32 (2009), 493–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mercier, H., ‘The argumentative theory: Predictions and empirical evidence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 689–700.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mercier, H., Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who we Trust and What we Believe, (Princeton University Press, 2020).Google Scholar
Mercier, H., Bernard, S., & Clément, F., ‘Early sensitivity to arguments: How preschoolers weight circular arguments’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 125 (2014), 102–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mercier, H. & Miton, H., ‘Utilizing simple cues to informational dependency’, Evolution and Human Behavior, 40 (2019), 301–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H. & Morin, O., ‘Majority rules: How good are we at aggregating convergent opinions?’ Evolutionary Human Sciences, 1 (2019), e6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. The Enigma of Reason, (Harvard University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milgram, S., ‘Behavioral study of obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 (1963), 371–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mills, C. M., Keil, F.C., ‘The Development of Cynicism’, Psychological Science, 16 (2005), 385–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mills, C.M., & Keil, F.C., ‘Children's developing notions of (im)partiality’, Cognition, 107 (2008), 528.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miton, H., Claidière, N., & Mercier, H., ‘Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting’, Evolution and Human Behavior, 36 (2015), 303–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, T. J. H., Laland, K.N., & Harris, P.L., ‘The development of adaptive conformity in young children: Effects of uncertainty and consensus’, Developmental Science, 18 (2015), 511–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morgan, T. J. H., Rendell, L.E., Ehn, M., Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K.N., ‘The evolutionary basis of human social learning’. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 279 (2012), 653–62.Google ScholarPubMed
Murray, A., ‘Religion among the poor in thirteenth-century France: The testimony of Humbert de Romans’. Traditio, (1974) 285–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richerson, P.J. & Boyd, R., Not by genes alone, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Roberts, M. E., Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside Chinas Great Firewall, (Princeton University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Robinson, E.J., Champion, H., & Mitchell, P., ‘Children's ability to infer uterrance veracity from speaker informedness’, Developmental Psychology, 35 (1999), 535–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scott-Phillips, T.C., ‘Defining biological communication’, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 21 (2008), 387–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Selb, P. & Munzert, S., ‘Examining a Most Likely Case for Strong Campaign Effects: Hitler's Speeches and the Rise of the Nazi Party, 1927–1933’, American Political Science Review, 112 (2018), 1050–1066.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, B., Hitsch, G.J., & Tuchman, A., ‘Generalizable and robust TV advertising effects’ (2019), Available at SSRN 3273476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D., ‘Intuitive and reflective beliefs’, Mind and Language, 12 (1997), 67–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, R., ‘The rise of a new world faith’, Review of Religious Research, (1984) 18–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, R., The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, (Princeton University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).Google Scholar
Trappey, C., ‘A meta-analysis of consumer choice and subliminal advertising’, Psychology & Marketing, 13 (1996), 517–30.3.0.CO;2-C>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
VanderBorght, M. & Jaswal, V.K., ‘Who knows best? Preschoolers sometimes prefer child informants over adult informants’, Infant and Child Development: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 18 (2009), 61–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Voigtländer, N. & Voth, H.J., ‘Nazi indoctrination and anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (2015), 7931–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vrij, A., Detecting lies and deceit: The psychology of lying and the implications for professional practice, (Wiley, 2000).Google Scholar