The cognitive science researcher analyzes the springs of our supposed credulity.
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Explain our ability to believe anything – infox, rumors, superstitions … – by our incorrigible gullibility seems to fall under the meaning. It is even, from Plato to the experiences of a Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, a common place of social analysis to define the people as an informed and naive mass, easy to persuade. Recent developments in “alternative facts” have also made this popular idea that it now spends for a key to understanding our time.
However, it has a size defect, according to Hugo Mercier: based on no fine observation, no in -depth analysis of the real springs of our beliefs, it has little consistency than the phenomena it is supposed to describe. Not born from the last rain, the first solo book of the researcher in cognitive sciences, somehow passes this supposed credulity to the test bench. She does not come out of it. We, more. This is good news, even if it is difficult to follow the author in all his conclusions.
The starting point is clear. Would a kind of dupe prospered as much as the human species, while communication plays a vital role for it, more than for any other? “By dint of being deceived, gullible people would end up paying attention to messages, writes Hugo Mercier. Humans must be vigilant, they have no choice.” The hypothesis of credulity comes up against, in short , to a wall, and it is thick: the very logic of evolution.
Natural vigilance
This is certainly not enough to refute it, but it means that we may take things upside down, neglecting defense mechanisms that we keep using, when we seek to assimilate arguments Before admitting them, assess the competence of an interlocutor or analyze the interests he serves. The author calls “open vigilance” this spontaneous attitude, which he shows convincingly, constantly supported on experimental data, that it governs our concrete relationship to communication.
The challenge is therefore to understand why we can pay absurdity, despite this natural movement. If prudence is the rule, apparent credulity is a paradox, which must be reported as such. Hugo Mercier strives there, and often touches just, through historical examples – a dictator seems to lead his people into his beliefs, when he only arouses a terrorized – or topical follow -up – adherence to conspiracy theories Manifesto less, according to many studies, a real belief than a social interest and therefore a form of rationality.
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