The subtitle of this book is The Science Of Who We Trust And What We Believe, and its purpose is to disabuse us of ideas about how we decide, who we can have faith in, and what we should accept as real. Mercier, research director at the CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, is of the opinion that we give far too much credit to most attempts at mass persuasion. He cites study after study to demonstrate that they are not what they’re cracked up to be and unworthy of the fear and attention that many people give to them. When I started this particular Substack, my focus was on a particular area of tests—those that measure some construct of our cognitive ability or non-cognitive features such as conscientiousness, resilience, extroversion. There is a connection between those abilities and the perceived mastery of being able to persuade By those at the upper reaches of the scales. I will admit that I subscribed to some of the myths that Mercier sets out to deflate. After reading this book, the capacity to engage and list a supposedly gullible public in following “demagogues and charlatans” seems less than I thought, but—and this might be good news—Mercier still leaves me with many questions as to how we have ended up with such a significant portion of the population supporting a man for the highest office in the land who is probably the greatest public liar of the last century—and this being the USA that’s quite a distinction.
One of Mercier’s foundational points (as explained in this video) is that “as long as there is a mechanism to exert a sufficient cost on those who send unreliable messages—if only by trusting them less in the future—dealing with costly signaling, and communication can be kept stable.” He ties this belief that as Lincoln said you can fool some of the people some of the time, but eventually they’ll get wise to your DS to an evolutionary standpoint. He maintains that human verbal communication is a costly signal and that those who do not keep their promises will pay eventually. I know. I know. That’s a tough one to swallow right now but let me lay out some more of what is in this book.
Mercier takes on the idea that receivers of communication especially in our current immersive digital environments “because they are exhausted or distracted, cannot use properly their most refined cognitive mechanisms, they would be defenseless against the senders more advanced cognitive devices, in the same way that a security software system that has not been updated leaves the computer vulnerable to attacks.” He refers to an evolutionary explanation in which “openness and vigilance evolved hand in hand as human communication became increasingly broad and powerful.” We might not like the reasons why people decide what to believe or who knows best, but their decision-making process differs from the most popular conceptions in his account.
To make his point, he goes to the behavior of baboons and the theorem of the Marquis de Condorcet. The latter (before he was forced to kill himself to escape the worst measures of the French Revolution) discovered in the late 18th century that the odds of an assembly of people choosing the best of two options was about 98%. Not a typo: Ninety-eight percent. Considering the baboons, their life traveling in “troops of several dozen members” requires constant decision making about finding the best source for food. Mercier reports on a study in which scientists “outfitted the baboons from a troop with a GPS allowing the researchers to closely track their movements.” The researchers could see through the splitting temporarily of the group a physical manifestation of making choices; one subgroup shuffles East, another North. But the whole troop eventually in almost every case followed whatever the larger group was suggesting through its movements. Mercier notes that, “if baboons and other animals living in groups have an intuitive grasp of the power of majority rules, it would be bizarre if humans, who rely much more on social information than baboons, completely neglected this rich source of insight.” It was at this point that I started to understand better the 2024 election. Pundits can postulate all sorts of reasons for that result, but I think what it came down to was this sort of majority bending. What was particularly telling was Mercier’s inclusion of a section on how difficult it is to resist the pull of the majority. One of the examples he gives is from Solomon Asch’s 1950s conformity experiments. In instances where participants followed the crowd many of them afterwards “admitted to having yielded even though they knew the group to be wrong.”
This can sound like an apologia for those people who voted in what many observers label against their own interests, or it can be an explanation that we really don’t understand people’s interests. That we need to test our own assumptions about what we know not only about how others think but about how all of us in general decide and act. I really like this quote from Mercier’s book on this point as he summarizes the findings of all of these research frameworks attempting to see how decisions are made in groups: “across all these experiments, a very small number of people genuinely believed the group to be right, and they relied on a variety of strategies to make sense of the group’s weird answer—…” Thanks to The Daily Show and other comic outlets like Kimmel or Colbert, many on the blue side of our national divide have heard this phenomenon play out hilariously. Jordan Klepper has interviewed so many people relying on ‘a variety of strategies to make sense of the group’s weird answer.’ But less than a year into this Presidential term and with a Supreme Court making sense and law of many weird answers, the laughter has more of an edge.
The other areas of Not Born Yesterday that intrigued me concerned whether gullibility might be maladaptive and the ways in which polarization emerges in any society. In a chapter entitled’ demagogues, prophets, and preachers’ he states that “evolution makes gullibility maladaptive. So as not to be abused by senders of unreliable messages, we are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that help us decide how much weight to put on what we hear or read.” But he then qualifies that statement by pointing out that the larger the audience the less chance that those cues will scale up sufficiently: “Argumentation is most efficient in the context of a small group discussion, with its back and forth of arguments and counter arguments. When aiming a speech at millions, speakers have to resort to common denominators, and they cannot anticipate the many objections that are certain to arise. Demonstrating competence to a wide audience is difficult: with limited knowledge and attention span, how are listeners supposed to know who is the most competent politician or economist?”
What did they look for in that demonstrated competence? You may not like it — I certainly don’t—but for many people in this country male automatically equals more competence than female in political positions. It ain’t true by a long shot — lots of examples suggest that the opposite may be accurate—but it’s out there. That the definition of misogyny stretches to include “Hatred or dislike of, or (my emphasis) prejudice against women” bothers me though. Lumping those together steers us in the wrong direction when trying to understand what is really going on in those situations.
Another sign of demonstrated competence might be establishing at least a perceived affinity for millenarian tendencies that Mercier cites from other historians: “Felt or experienced crisis — of oppression by a more powerful group, of extreme economic hardship, of fundamental social changes that leave particular social strata feeling threatened.” Intelligence officer Captain Jennifer Henderson in a paper held that “Millenarians view the world in dualistic and monistic terms. It is dualistic in that it sees the world as two diametrically opposite and competitive ideologies: the holy vs. the profane, the oppressed vs. the oppressor” She was talking about Islamic extremists, but the description seems to fit many white MAGA supporters as well. Telling someone with those views that we are all in this together is more likely to come across as a signal of insanity than one of competence.
The issue of polarization is one where Mercier does admit to the dangers of misinformation “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 closed parentheses justifications for these views, leading them to develop stronger or more confident views. Still, if people have access to a biased sample of information the outcome can be dire.” [Emphasis added]
With that in mind, Mercier makes a convincing case that our categories are wrong in looking at the political landscape. It’s not left right or progressive versus conservative. It’s extreme versus non extreme. There are groups of people who coagulate at the extreme ends of beliefs and desires for us politically and they both want everyone to conform to their views. They are the ones in the echo chamber. Mercier found that, “on most issues only a minority of respondents hold extreme views: for instance, little more than 10% of Americans polled said that there should be no restrictions on gun ownership, or that only law enforcement officers should have guns (in extreme opinion in the United states).” The fact that it’s a small group is borne out by other research that he cites that “only about 8% of the online adults… are at risk of being trapped in an echo chamber.” By and large people on social media mostly look at traditional, middle of the road news outlets; When they are exposed to extreme views, these views tend to come from both sides of the political spectrum.
The conclusion of the book provided a valuable consideration for me in looking at how we move forward, “we aren’t gullible: by default we veer on the side of being resistant to new ideas. In the absence of the right cues, we reject messages that don’t fit with our preconceived views or pre-existing plans. To persuade us otherwise takes long established carefully maintained trust, clearly demonstrated expertise, and sound arguments. Science, the media, and other institutions that spread accurate but often counterintuitive messages face an uphill battle, as they must transmit these messages and keep them credible along great chains of trust and argumentation.” That’s the movement I’m interested in joining and supporting, the one that tests our existing assumptions about our fellow citizens, rejects the extremes, and starts pushing those counterintuitive messages uphill in part by living them.