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

Abstract

I have often heard friends and colleagues ask the question “why do people vote against their own interests?” Implicit in this question is a view that people are gullible, easily persuaded not just by political propaganda, but also hucksters, prone to fake news, and any number of scams. That is, that people are too trusting. In his book Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, Hugo Mercier takes the opposite view—the problem is not that humans are too trusting but that we are not trusting enough. Drawing on his own and others’ work, Mercier argues that as a hypersocial species humanity has evolved a suite of cognitive mechanisms to weed out when information from others is unreliable. In the first part of the book, Mercier considers the evidence for the case that people are utterly gullible: the Asch conformity experiments, proliferation of fake news, the phenomenon of flat-earthers, among evidence from other experiments and case studies. The second part of the book is spent on documenting the cognitive mechanisms that enable us to be open to information from others and filter unreliable communication. Mercier argues these mechanisms work well in small scale collectives, but have adapted poorly to our contemporary large-scale, complex societies. He rounds out the book with an argument that rather than gullibility being our utmost concern, it is cynicism that holds societies back from enjoying the benefits of cooperation.