Potential source of gullibility is the near-universal tendency for humans to accept rather than reject incoming information. Following philosophical reasoning, there is now strong evidence to suggest that the human being is born a natural “believer”. Information received tends to first be coded as “true,” and subsequent negation requires further time and effort. There are several ways that this overwhelming bias can be interpreted. In one sense, this can be due to the adaptive value of trusting others in closely integrated ancestral societies.
If comprehending a claim and believing it initially amount to the same thing, then the human being indeed approaches the world with a gullible mindset.
Research shows that even if a claim is coded as potentially false, there are powerful internal motivational mechanisms designed to restore coherence not by revising our pre-existing system of mental representation, but by actively discrediting the offending claim, an important mechanism of gullibility maintenance. The acceptance bias shows how gullibility occurs when people are distracted by other information, emotion, or time pressure.
Disbelief is a second step, following the first step in which understanding is simultaneous with believing. If people do not get to the second step, they will be more likely to believe whatever they were told in the first step. The Power of Heuristics Human beings are more prone to believe interesting, captivating stories and narratives that are salient and easy to imagine.
When we are exposed to salient, frequent, and thus easily remembered information, due to a strange “mental bug” in our information processing system, such information will also be seen as more true, reliable, and valid .
These mental shortcuts exacerbate the human inability to see the world as it really is. 10 Joseph P. Forgas and Roy F. Baumeister Typically, what is familiar, readily available, salient, focal, representative, and colorful captures our imagination and attention, and is given far more credence than it deserves. When information is easily accessible and fluid, it is more likely to be seen as true. Reliance on heuristics can also be promoted by such ephemeral factors as the mood we happen to be .
However, as Krueger et al note, the emphasis on heuristics as a source of gullibility only offers, at best, a partial understanding. Heuristics can account for many “false-positive” errors, but tell us little about false negatives – not believing something that is true Overbelief in the Self Self-serving biases and distortions can be a particularly powerful motivational source of misjudgments and gullibility.
We are always more willing to believe flattering rather than unflattering information about ourselves, even when the manipulative intent is transparently obvious. Overconfidence in the self may have some adaptive evolutionary functions, but the very same egoboosting mechanisms could also promote gullibility and produce distorted judgments and perceptions. Considerable evidence now shows that people often hold their beliefs with far greater certainty than is justified, believe that their judgments are more accurate than is the case, and overvalue their expertise compared to others.
It seems that people are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck. Social Mechanisms of Gullibility Humans are thoroughly social creatures, and our views of the world are fundamentally shaped by what others think and do. In a profound sense, all symbolic knowledge is socially constructed and shared. Comparing our views and ideas with the views and ideas of others is the way all symbolic reality is constructed.
Social psychology offers countless examples of how such “social epistemology” processes work. In an inherently ambiguous and uncertain environment, humans will spontaneously construct shared norms and standards that, however arbitrary, will impose a semblance of consensual order and predictability on their view of reality. Further, such consensual norms, once established, turn out to be very resilient and difficult to change almost as if human minds abhor ambiguity, disorder, and unpredictability. What others think and do continues to have a powerful normative influence on human behavior, even if those norms are not internalized, and indeed, disbelieved.
It turns out that the very process of openly discussing divergent views about reality can be a mechanism that promotes the acceptance of more extreme and biased views, as the voluminous research on group polarization phenomena shows. It seems that human social evolution shaped human brains in such a way that we have become creatures who spontaneously monitor each other, and often construct and maintain a consensual rather than “true” representation of reality. Indeed, abundant research, dating back to the Asch conformity studies in the 1950s, has shown that people often favor getting consensus rather than pursuing the truth