PEOPLE ARE LESS GULLIBLE THAN YOU THINK

WHY IS NOBODY REPLYING TO MY EMAILS?

LOOK AT ALL the gibberish people believe. That the earth is a flat disk surrounded by a 200-foot wall of ice. That high-up Democratic operatives run a pedophile ring out of a pizza joint. That former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could teleport and control the weather. Who could doubt that human beings are gullible, that we accept whatever we read or hear?

Yet these beliefs are the exception rather than the rule. By and large, we don’t credulously accept whatever we’re told. We have evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms to deal with both the benefits and the dangers of communication. If anything, we’re too hard rather than too easy to influence.

One popular, but wrong, way of thinking about those cognitive mechanisms is to imagine them as the result of an arms race: Manipulators evolve increasingly sophisticated means of misleading receivers, and receivers evolve increasingly sophisticated means of rejecting manipulators’ unreliable messages. This is what we get, for instance, with computer viruses and security software.

The arms race model leads to an association between gullibility and lack of mental acuity. When receivers, because they are exhausted or distracted, cannot use properly their most refined cognitive mechanisms, they’re allegedly defenseless against the manipulators’ more advanced cognitive devices—much as a security software system that hasn’t been updated leaves a computer vulnerable to attacks.

That’s the perception. But it isn’t how our minds work at all.

BRAINWASHERS AND HIDDEN PERSUADERS

THOUSANDS OF U.S. soldiers were captured during the Korean War. Those who managed to escape brought back tales of horrible mistreatment and torture, from sleep deprivation to waterboarding. When the war ended and the prisoners of war were repatriated, these mistreatments acquired an even darker meaning. Not simply an example stated at the time, was surely “living proof that Communist brainwashing does work on some persons.”