Do we believe what we believe based on evidence or what we want to believe?

The word hoax is supposedly derived from hocus pocus, a common exclamation in magic whose use was documented in 1656 by Thomas Ady in a book, “A Candle in the Dark: Or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches & Witchcraft”, in which he tried to demonstrate the absurdity of the many accusations of witchcraft being made at that time.

Sadly, little seems to have changed much since then. An absurd rumor, the so-called Momo Challenge, has recently stoked collective hysteria, prompting hundreds of parents to check their astonished children’s messages to prevent them from committing suicide on the instructions of a supposed game that forced them to undertake increasingly dangerous dangerous challenges. Reporting on the Momo Challenge, which mirrored the Blue Whale challenge of 2016, was infinitely more alarming than the hoax itself and had simply been driven by WhatsApp groups and the media: needless to say, a simple check established that there had been no documented suicides linked to Momo, that no arrests have been made, and that the whole thing exists only in the mediasphere. I have seen hoaxes of this kind flourish across all layers of society.

Why do these hoaxes come from, why are they so difficult to stop, and how can we avoid them? Quite simply, by using our common sense. In a world in…