Subtitled “What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things”
(Harper, September 2023, 311pp, including 21pp of acknowledgements, references, and index.)
Here’s the latest book by Dan Ariely, author of one of the earliest books I read about psychological biases and human irrationality, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, published back in 2008 (review here). Since then he’s become a minor celebrity with a TV show, The Irrational, based on his life and that book. (I’ve only seen it a couple times, despite its just finishing its second season; it’s not on at a convenient time.)
So how is this new book different from the older one? Or the many other books about biases and conspiracy theories? Well, while the older book detailed many examples of ‘irrational behavior’, this one focuses on the process of forming false beliefs, which can include conspiracy theories but which Ariely prefers to call “misbeliefs.”
Two things in particular stand out about this book. First, Ariely wrote it in response to people forming misbeliefs about *him,* accusing him of colluding in the Covid pandemic, base on selective editing of dicey videos, and attacking and threatening him online (much as Anthony Fauci was). Second, he describes the process of a person ‘falls’ for a conspiracy theory, or misbelief, in broader detail than other books, with the key point that it often starts out of feelings of stress and uncertainty.
For this book, I’m not going to summarize it in detail, but expand on these points and couple of others.
Introduction: Demonized.
In July 2020, Ariely discovered people were saying crazy things about him online and accusing him of being part of the “Covid-19 fraud” and something called the Agenda 21 plot. None of it was true of course, but posts about this were getting lots of comments. He decided to contact one of the commenters, Sara, who had said she wanted him put on trial. He calls her and she pounds him with questions and accusations. He hangs up. She posts about their conversation, how his denials seemed suspicious — there must be something going on beneath the surface! Already, she’s twisting his words into something that fits her narrative. Author tries posting videos of his own (on Telegram) defending himself, and is attacked, again by people twisting his words. He gets more attacks, even death threats.
Why him? He realizes that the “evidence” against him came from a video of a talk he gave in 2017 in which he jokingly suggested (in the manner of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”) ways to decrease the population in order to reduce demands on health care. His detractors took his comments out of context to imply evil intentions. Another clip was edited to imply he said something he didn’t. And so on. Who was doing this? Not someone evil; just people who thought they were exposing a fraud. They weren’t “doing their own research,” they were watching heavily edited videos. But was there a deeper explanation? Thus he wrote this book.
Rest of the book.
He develops a framework for how people arrive at misbeliefs, what he calls a ‘funnel’ of misbeliefs, with four basic parts:
1, Emotional elements
2, Cognitive elements
3, Personality elements
4, Social elements
The cognitive elements are the familiar ones from other books: the psychological biases and errors of perception, and especially motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
The emotional elements are what struck me: how, according to Ariely, the trip down the tunnel is triggered by stress and uncertainty — as for example what happened when the pandemic broke out — which in turn creates a need to identify a villain, as a way to regain control, and to reduce a complex, ambiguous world into a simple, comforting story. (Thus, Anthony Fauci, for many; the author, for a few.) Then the cognitive elements kick in — motivated thinking and so on — to interpret all evidence as against the chosen villain.
Certain personality elements are more prone to this kind of thinking. Those prone to misremembering, those who see patterns where none exist, those who over-trust their intuitions.
And then the social elements are what have come up in a couple other recently read books. Those who go down this tunnel may be ostracized by family and friends, but — via social media! — they quickly find a new community to provide a sense of belonging, one that will reinforce their beliefs, and create a loyalty to the group. Loyalty is ‘proved’ by pushing beliefs to the absurd. And fear of losing status and those new relationships makes it hard for people to leave.
Author concludes the book that he’s not confident that things will get better. Trust is necessary for society to run, e.g. belief in money [[ one of Harari’s key points ]], trust in doctors, car mechanics, police. What would happen should all that trust be lost? Buy guns.
Still, he ponders, the deniers are still out there. Over the past 300 years, humanity has gotten much closer to superman, by creating an envelope of technology around us. So we’re taxing our cognitive systems to a greater degree than humans have ever done before. [[ This is essentially Nichols’ key claim. ]] Perhaps we need to invent technologies to help us counteract our mental limitations — like all those safety functions in our card. And so — despite everything — the author is optimistic about the future.
