Member-only story
Are you being conned by fake news, do you reject real news?
Where I’m going to go here is to talk about a new psychological study that reveals something truly fascinating. However, before we get into it, let’s first start with something rather important.
You can be fooled, I can be fooled, we can all be conned and manipulated.
Why?
Basically because we humans are awash with cognitive biases that can be leveraged.
There have always been deceivers who take full advantage of this reality.
There are also honest liars, professionals who will tell you that they are about to trick you, then proceed to do exactly that. We call them illusionists. They do stuff that appears to be mind blowing and supernatural but it is done for entertainment, and they mostly make it very clear that it is just an illusion. It is not hard to conjure up well-known names such as Penn and Teller. It is the darker side of this that we truly do need to be wary about, those that deliberately manipulate and deceive in a way that works because it taps into the cognitive biases we all have.
When it comes to the concept of Fake News, then were do you stand on that?
Like most, as do I, you also believe that you are smarter than “them”, and have a well-tuned BS detector. In most cases you…