Is Everyone But You a Dupe?
Review of Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
Public discourse is shot through with the assumption that humans are just intractably gullible. People are susceptible for various reasons to various kinds of harmful viral “memes” that, like real-world viruses, use them to propagate themselves. Many political commentators think the 2016 election was won by a few million rubles in Facebook advertisements, by an “authoritarian personality” that leads some voters to blindly trust the worst people around, or by some sort of gestalt protective apparatus linked to “whiteness” or “patriarchy.”
In the humanities, it is standard to assume that even the smallest signals of various kinds of ideals are immediately taken up in the “social imaginary,” whether seen in advertisements or transmitted via bizarre genealogies from 17th-century thinkers. Opponents of postmodern thought often take it for granted that college students thoughtlessly believe every page of Foucault or Derrida they read and every hashtagged slogan they encounter on social media. Philosophical positions like dualism, moral realism, or a belief in free will are similarly explained away by pop scientists as kinds of illusions. Of course, we — the ones doing this explaining — are not similarly afflicted: we’re…
