Speaker 1: Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously
Speaker 1: falls from the outside, as we see with conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: Is this kind of misbelief a failure of intelligence or
Speaker 1: something deeper and more universal to human brains? Do conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories offer a sense of clarity and belonging when reality
Speaker 1: feels chaotic and threatening? And what would it take for you,
Speaker 1: under the right emotional conditions, to begin believing something that
Speaker 1: your past self would find unbelievable. Today we'll speak with
Speaker 1: behavioral economist Dan Arieli, who has thought a lot about misbelief.
Speaker 1: For him, it's a scientific question, but also an interest
Speaker 1: that started very personally. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and
Speaker 1: in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pounds
Speaker 1: universe to understand how we see the world even when
Speaker 1: it doesn't match the facts. Today we're diving into one
Speaker 1: of the most perplexing phenomena about the mind. When we
Speaker 1: think about brains or computers, we think about how to
Speaker 1: gather facts about the world and put them together into
Speaker 1: a model. So one of the most interesting problems in
Speaker 1: brain science is that of misbelief. Now, I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about misinformation here. If someone hands you the wrong fact
Speaker 1: and then you repeat it, that's one thing. I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: the deeper psychological journey by which a person becomes convinced
Speaker 1: of something that outsiders find totally detached from reality. So
Speaker 1: we've got conspiracy theories, medical skepticism, political fan These are
Speaker 1: all meaningful forces in our culture. Now, one thing to
Speaker 1: note right away, these aren't new. You can see these
Speaker 1: throughout history, dating back at least two and a half millennia,
Speaker 1: when people had conspiracy theories about, for example, Socrates's execution
Speaker 1: and who is really behind it? Or the same thing
Speaker 1: happened later with the death of Alexander the Great and
Speaker 1: then with the assassination of Julius Caesar. Now, if this
Speaker 1: reaction to a national tragedy sounds familiar, it's because it
Speaker 1: is throughout history. Every time there's a significant event, people
Speaker 1: jump in with their hypotheses, and these live in a
Speaker 1: spectrum from reasonable to outlandish. I'm not sure if there's
Speaker 1: really an upper limit to how wild the hypotheses are
Speaker 1: likely to get. Now, this all would be nothing but
Speaker 1: an academic interest, except that often crazy ideas are capable
Speaker 1: of tilting elections or fracturing political alliances, or influencing things from.
Speaker 2: Public health to wars.
Speaker 1: Okay, so whenever we look at historical features that are
Speaker 1: present in every generation like this, it tells us we're
Speaker 1: not looking at some local cultural phenomenon or some consequence
Speaker 1: of social media. Instead, we're looking at some issue about
Speaker 1: how brains naturally work and what their failure modes are.
Speaker 2: The general story.
Speaker 1: Is that the brain's job is to make good predictions
Speaker 1: about the world, to reduce uncertainty, to create coherence from chaos,
Speaker 1: and to generate frameworks that make us feel safe and oriented.
Speaker 1: But under stress, those systems can shift, emotions can become
Speaker 1: louder than evidence, threat detection ramps up, Identity becomes a filter,
Speaker 1: and into this vacuum come narratives that promise clarity. You
Speaker 1: find communities that promise belonging or stories that give you
Speaker 1: a clean explanation for why everything feels wrong. These narratives
Speaker 1: are structured to be sticky. Once you take the first step,
Speaker 1: the next one is easier, and before long, someone who
Speaker 1: once trusted the people around them or the institutions around
Speaker 1: them might find themselves trapped in a self reinforcing ecosystem
Speaker 1: of mistrust. Now, I have my own take on conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: which you can hear in episode sixty six from last year.
Speaker 1: But recently, my friend and colleague Dan Arieli wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Misbelief Now. Dan is a behavioral economist at
Speaker 1: Duke University who has spent his career studying how humans
Speaker 1: make decisions, why we often get things wrong and predictable ways,
Speaker 1: and the ways in which our circumstances shape our judgment.
Speaker 1: You may know him from his book Predictably Irrational or
Speaker 1: his other excellent books, and you might also know him
Speaker 1: from his enormous body of research over the years. Nan
Speaker 1: is an expert in rationality and trust and incentives, and
Speaker 1: this gives him a rare vantage point into why people
Speaker 1: fall into conspiracy thinking. His book Misbelief goes further. It's
Speaker 1: a scientific deep dive, but it's also a personal story
Speaker 1: as well. Here in a minute. It starts with his
Speaker 1: experience of getting targeted with crazy COVID era conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: where some people accused him online of collaborating with pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: companies to destroy humanity with COVID. Now, it goes without
Speaker 1: saying that Dan's research hopes to save humanity, not destroy it.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, because he's a super thoughtful person,
Speaker 1: one of the results of being on the barrel end
Speaker 1: of this was a fascination with the process by which
Speaker 1: people take on beliefs, beliefs about other people or the
Speaker 1: news media or whatever. He became entranced with the ways
Speaker 1: that people go down a funnel of beliefs to arrive
Speaker 1: in a place that's unrecognizable. So here's my interview with
Speaker 1: Dan Rilly. So, Dan, you've spent in your career studying rationality,
Speaker 1: but misbelief is more personal. So what you started down
Speaker 1: this road of trying to understand why people have conspiracy theories?
Speaker 3: So first of all, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 4: And usually when I write books, I finished the research
Speaker 4: and then I write about it.
Speaker 3: This was a very, very different story.
Speaker 4: So COVID started and I dropped everything and I was
Speaker 4: just doing COVID related things.
Speaker 3: And COVID of courses is.
Speaker 4: A problem with biology, but it's also a problem of
Speaker 4: social science. Domestic violence increased by about nine hundred percent.
Speaker 4: What do you do with remote work, What do you
Speaker 4: do with kids studying remotely? What do you do with
Speaker 4: furlough with firing people, What do you do with government subsidies?
Speaker 4: Lots and lots of big questions. Do you give people
Speaker 4: finds for not putting masks?
Speaker 3: And so on?
Speaker 4: And I dropped everything and I just did COVID and
Speaker 4: I was just trying to do research, trying to understand,
Speaker 4: trying to give advice whatever I could. And about five
Speaker 4: months into it, I get an email from a woman
Speaker 4: I once helped with the presentation she was doing for
Speaker 4: her company, and.
Speaker 3: She said, Dan, what's wrong? Would you what happened? How
Speaker 3: did you become that person?
Speaker 4: You know? I don't think very much about this email.
Speaker 4: We get lots of emails, let's send back what do
Speaker 4: you mean? And I get back an email with lists
Speaker 4: of links that tell me that I'm an awful person.
Speaker 4: For example, there was one link that showed a video
Speaker 4: of me in the burn department saying that I was
Speaker 4: burned when I was eighteen, through seventy percent of my
Speaker 4: body through almost three years in hospital. True, but then
Speaker 4: the video went to say that because of that, I
Speaker 4: started hating healthy people and that's why I joined the
Speaker 4: cabal to try and kill as many people possible. First
Speaker 4: with COVID and then with the vaccine there was no
Speaker 4: vaccine yet there were videos of me in Nazi uniform
Speaker 4: concentration care.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 4: The amount of things were incredible, and my first reaction
Speaker 4: was to set them straight, like this must be some misunderstanding.
Speaker 3: How can that be?
Speaker 4: I wake up every day trying to do the best
Speaker 4: I can for the world with this very very difficult pandemic,
Speaker 4: and these people think I'm evil, Like, how can that be?
Speaker 4: But I thought better of it, and I said, let
Speaker 4: me call two PR experts and asked what would they do.
Speaker 4: People are experts in this, and they said, don't touch it.
Speaker 4: And I was very proud that I called them, but
Speaker 4: they couldn't follow their advice. You know, imagine, imagine somebody
Speaker 4: came to you and said, David, I know that you're
Speaker 4: just an awful person, and here's all the things you've done.
Speaker 4: It like feels Anyway, I spend a month trying to
Speaker 4: convince people.
Speaker 3: It was awful. It was awful because I showed people
Speaker 3: my calendar. People thought I had the contract with Pfizer.
Speaker 3: I said, look, I'll show you a way tax with hers.
Speaker 3: It was incredible. These people are so convinced.
Speaker 4: Anyway, I spent a month trying to convince them, and
Speaker 4: I failed terribly felt but in the meantime, the anger
Speaker 4: against me increased further and I started getting death threats.
Speaker 4: And then I said, okay, I'm not convincing anybody.
Speaker 3: Let me stop that. But I truly think that there's
Speaker 3: a big topic here that I need to understand. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm a social.
Speaker 4: Scientist for a reason, and you know there's something people say, Okay,
Speaker 4: I believe the earth is flat. Okay, but when somebody
Speaker 4: comes to you and say I know something about you,
Speaker 4: and he said, no, no, no, I don't have a contract
Speaker 4: with Pfiser. How can you say that I have one?
Speaker 4: I had to study this. So the next two years
Speaker 4: I spent. I started by talking to the same people
Speaker 4: who are my accusers, and I called them up and
Speaker 4: I said, look, forget about me. I want to understand
Speaker 4: your journey. Tell me what happened, like like, you started
Speaker 4: with something, At what point did you become somebody with
Speaker 4: very very different beliefs?
Speaker 3: What was the trigger? What happened?
Speaker 4: And I try to understand the journey that people move
Speaker 4: from being, you know, believing the normal things that people
Speaker 4: believe in society to become I call the misbelievers, people
Speaker 4: who view the world not just believe in something that
Speaker 4: is not correct, but view the world from that lens.
Speaker 4: Because the people who who believed that did not just
Speaker 4: believe that there was a cabalance so on, they looked at.
Speaker 3: Everything through that through that lens.
Speaker 4: And psychologically I divided into four parts emotion, stress, cognition, personality,
Speaker 4: and social And the stress part is the first thing
Speaker 4: where you ask yourself, why would somebody wake up in
Speaker 4: the morning and they have a choice. They can believe
Speaker 4: in the benevolent God that is taking care of us
Speaker 4: and helps us, and you.
Speaker 3: Don't need to worry and everything has a purpose.
Speaker 4: Versus believing that there's a cabau there's a hugely powerful
Speaker 4: group of people who are trying to hurt them, poison them,
Speaker 4: getting their kids not to have kids so they don't
Speaker 4: have grandchildren, trying to all kinds of control. Why would
Speaker 4: somebody want to believe that? It is a very very
Speaker 4: strange set of belief. And what I found is that
Speaker 4: stress is the answer. So that when people are saying,
Speaker 4: I don't understand the world. I thought things were supposed
Speaker 4: to go this way. Why am I hurting? Why am
Speaker 4: I hurting more than other people? Why am I not
Speaker 4: getting my share of.
Speaker 3: Things like that?
Speaker 4: We want an answer, and the answer better has a
Speaker 4: villain and a story, and I'll give you kind of
Speaker 4: a kind of My two favorite studies of this. One
Speaker 4: is a very old study in anthropology where they looked
Speaker 4: at tribes and they look at tribes that fish in
Speaker 4: the ocean versus tribe that fish in lakes. And of
Speaker 4: course the tribe that fish in the lake have much
Speaker 4: more predictable life. The lake is basically the same every day.
Speaker 4: The ocean has huge fluctuations. Which tribes have more superstitions
Speaker 4: or the ocean?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 4: Because it gives you a feeling of control, feeling of control.
Speaker 4: Or I'll give you another example. And you know these
Speaker 4: studies about white noise, not not hearing, but sight. So
Speaker 4: you have a picture with black and white thoughts randomly organized.
Speaker 2: Like an all television screening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you show them, You say do you see
Speaker 4: an image? And people say yes, no, yes, and no.
Speaker 4: It turns out that as you increase stress, for example,
Speaker 4: you go skydiving, the more stress you have, the more
Speaker 4: patterns you see. Now, why does this happen? Imagine you're
Speaker 4: an animal in the jungle and you think there's a predator.
Speaker 4: What is your mind doing? It goes into hyper drives, saying, well,
Speaker 4: these two leaves are moving, maybe there's a tiger there.
Speaker 4: You overinterpret patterns because you want to make sense of
Speaker 4: the work. So the first thing to understand is that
Speaker 4: when people feel stressed, like kind of learned helplessness, kind
Speaker 4: of stressed, I don't understand the world. Things are not
Speaker 4: going my way, there's a temptation to solve that problem
Speaker 4: by creating a belief that says, I now understand what's
Speaker 4: going on. It's the bad entities creating this bad outcome.
Speaker 4: You can't say, oh, something bad happen and to be
Speaker 4: I believe this is a benevolent God because you're trying
Speaker 4: to explain the bad thing. And then from there are
Speaker 4: things a theory we can talk about this, but that
Speaker 4: that's the starting point.
Speaker 3: We say, why would people start believing that?
Speaker 1: And so walk us through the funnel that people go
Speaker 1: through as they go from having some idea all the
Speaker 1: way to full blown belief.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you start with this beginning, I'm stressed, things
Speaker 4: are not going well. What is going on? You start,
Speaker 4: you go YouTube, you try to understand, you find some
Speaker 4: beginning of a journey, and that gives you comfort. Shorten,
Speaker 4: it gives you comfort because you say, oh, now I
Speaker 4: understand it's not my fault, it's these people and so on,
Speaker 4: and then things can't keepe. So they continue through cognitive processes,
Speaker 4: and there's a few of them, but let's talk about one.
Speaker 4: And so you know, first of all, we all know
Speaker 4: that we don't view all the information.
Speaker 3: We view the information that agrees.
Speaker 4: With us, right We what we like from the media
Speaker 4: is to tell us, oh, you're really smart, you know
Speaker 4: all this, you know everything, but here's something extra new,
Speaker 4: but you're very genuinely correct. We don't want to be
Speaker 4: confronted with things that would say you're an idiot, you
Speaker 4: have no idea what you're talking about the world is
Speaker 4: very different than what you think. So we look for
Speaker 4: things that as our confirmation pots. So that's the beginning.
Speaker 4: But one of the interesting version of the cognitive part
Speaker 4: is what is called the illusion of explanatory depth. And
Speaker 4: the way I kind of tested it in one experiment
Speaker 4: was with flash toilets. So I show people a flash toilet.
Speaker 4: Do you understand how a flash toilet works? Absolutely? On
Speaker 4: the scale from one to seven, almost seven. That's wonderful.
Speaker 4: Here all the pieces for a perfectly brand new flash toilet,
Speaker 4: please assemble it. What do you think is the percentage
Speaker 4: of people who manage to assemble it? Zero? And then
Speaker 4: I asked them, and how well do you understand flash toilet?
Speaker 4: And say, you know what, not so much. Now, think
Speaker 4: about it. In a regular conversation, we go at people,
Speaker 4: we argue, they argue, We argue, they argue at the
Speaker 4: end of those so they we think about you, all
Speaker 4: your debate in the last three years, how many of
Speaker 4: them ended when the other person is saying, you know what.
Speaker 3: I've never heard such good arguments. I'm changing my opinion completely.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely correct.
Speaker 2: Right, zero small number?
Speaker 4: And how many ended the other way when you said
Speaker 4: to somebody, you know what.
Speaker 3: I'm being good. It's a really interesting thing because when
Speaker 3: we discuss things with people, the mechanism is that we
Speaker 3: counter argue when we say things. We say things, and
Speaker 3: when they see things we already counter argue. I think
Speaker 3: that's kind of.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it was always the case like this,
Speaker 4: but we're not working toward joint new understand ending. We're
Speaker 4: really kind of protecting our position. And what the illusion
Speaker 4: of explanatory depth says is, don't worry about the facts initially,
Speaker 4: worry about overconfidence. So with the flash dollar, don't worry
Speaker 4: about the facts, worry about crush people's overconfidence first, and
Speaker 4: then we can talk later. So the strategy is to
Speaker 4: say people are resisting facts because of their overconfidence, and
Speaker 4: what we need to do for persuasion is to first
Speaker 4: think about them the overconfryt.
Speaker 1: So a lot of listeners are probably familiar with the
Speaker 1: Dunning Kruger effect, which is the less you know about
Speaker 1: a topic, the more confident you are that you know It's.
Speaker 3: It's not the less, it's it's.
Speaker 4: A function where it's like when you know something, you're
Speaker 4: the most dangerous. It's when you know nothing, you know
Speaker 4: you know nothing, When you know a lot, you know
Speaker 4: you know a lot.
Speaker 3: The danger then in Kruger effect is when you know
Speaker 3: a little.
Speaker 4: Like the metaphor is like first year undergrad, you finished
Speaker 4: right the introductory to biology textbook, Okay, I know biologic
Speaker 4: yes exactly.
Speaker 1: And by the way, with the illusion of explanatory depth,
Speaker 1: and one I always uses the electoral college, I asked people, hey,
Speaker 1: do you.
Speaker 2: Know how that works. They say, yeah, now that works.
Speaker 2: I said, great, can you explain it to me?
Speaker 1: Nobody is nobody so far has been able to really
Speaker 1: tell me all the way down.
Speaker 4: And by the way we used it with the Trump elections,
Speaker 4: some people thought that he that you won. And we
Speaker 4: came to people and we said, you think the Trump
Speaker 4: on the election, Yes, you think the elections were stolen. Yes,
Speaker 4: explain to us how, but walk us through the details.
Speaker 4: People go into the booth what happens. And people did
Speaker 4: not say, oh, you know, he really lost the election,
Speaker 4: but they said, you know what, I don't know how
Speaker 4: it really happened. So the illusional it's a very important
Speaker 4: issue to go into the mechanism and get people to
Speaker 4: be more modest about their beliefs.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: Does that actually change anybody's mind? Now, let's say you
Speaker 1: felt the election was stolen and you don't know how
Speaker 1: because you feel like, look, it's a big world, hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of people doing things in the United States.
Speaker 1: I can't know all the details, and yet I have
Speaker 1: reasona believe that's true. Would increase intellectual humility do anything
Speaker 1: in that situation, or would a person still say, look,
Speaker 1: there's no way for me to know the answer to that,
Speaker 1: But I have other reasons to believe this, So.
Speaker 4: Let me say that you're right. So intellectual humility is
Speaker 4: the is the key. And of course we teach our
Speaker 4: students to say not knowing is great and not knowing
Speaker 4: is a very good thing.
Speaker 3: So I would say that I believe it very strongly.
Speaker 4: I believe that if you think about misbelief and you say,
Speaker 4: there's the belief in something that is not true, and
Speaker 4: there's adopting it as a perspective on life. So I
Speaker 4: think the earth is flat, and I'm looking at everything
Speaker 4: from the perspective that the earth is flat. I think
Speaker 4: that the illusion of explanatory depth of intellectual humility would
Speaker 4: reduce the second part first, So I would not look
Speaker 4: at the world from that lens initially because I'm not
Speaker 4: the moment, you know, one hundred percent sure it's not
Speaker 4: a lens from which you view things. But this is
Speaker 4: kind of a general argument. I'll tell you what I
Speaker 4: have data about. So I have now a site where
Speaker 4: I invite Antisemites to talk to me Solemn Israeli and
Speaker 4: Jewish I. October seventh was terrible in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 4: But when October seven happened, I decided to come to
Speaker 4: Israel as quickly as possible, and the flight I could
Speaker 4: take came through London, and I was in London during
Speaker 4: the first prop Palestinian demonstration, and this was before Israel
Speaker 4: went to Gaza, and there were already a lot of
Speaker 4: anger told Israel. Even though Israel just suffered a huge
Speaker 4: attack and didn't do anything. My daughter, who was in
Speaker 4: high school, almost got canceled. Her mother, my ex wife,
Speaker 4: is Indian, so my daughter is, you know, half Jewish Israeli,
Speaker 4: half Indian and Hindu, both my kids. But she was
Speaker 4: at the risk of being canceled just just by having
Speaker 4: this affiliation. And she didn't vote for she doesn't have
Speaker 4: a citizenship in Israel. She didn't vote for the Antennao government,
Speaker 4: and nobody in her family did. But she felt unbelievably attacked,
Speaker 4: and the antisemitism part.
Speaker 3: Was very, very surprising.
Speaker 4: So anyway, so I opened this website that I'm trying
Speaker 4: to understand antisemitism, and I invite people to nominate antisemites
Speaker 4: that I should talk to, and then once or twice
Speaker 4: a week I have discussions with anti Semites, and I
Speaker 4: don't talk to anti Zionists. I don't talk to people
Speaker 4: who just have complains about the Nathaniel government, which I.
Speaker 3: Do as well.
Speaker 4: I talk to people who define themselves as antisemite, and
Speaker 4: I do with them this exercise we just talked about.
Speaker 3: I say, I'm not trying to convince you.
Speaker 4: Just tell me, like, when was the first time you
Speaker 4: heard negative things about Jewish people? In most cases it
Speaker 4: comes from early childhood and how did it develop and
Speaker 4: what else did you learn and who did you meet?
Speaker 4: And I we basically talk about the evolution of the idea.
Speaker 4: And I would say that almost everybody at the end
Speaker 4: of the conversation says, I still am antisemite, but I
Speaker 4: know that not all Jewish people are like this, So
Speaker 4: there is And by the way, one of the triggers
Speaker 4: that I think is very interesting is when people recognize
Speaker 4: that they got this idea very early on at home.
Speaker 4: When somebody says I heard it when I was, you know,
Speaker 4: before Elmntory school for my father, who said a few things,
Speaker 4: and I said, okay, so did I really come to
Speaker 4: that conclusion or was I given it? So for me,
Speaker 4: kind of this exercise of where did you get this idea?
Speaker 4: When did you test it? When did you test reality?
Speaker 4: And so on?
Speaker 3: Seems to be very good for.
Speaker 4: People not to change your opinion, but say, you know what,
Speaker 4: I know it's more nuanced than that. And that's really
Speaker 4: all I can hope for in a discussion, to say
Speaker 4: I'm more nuanced in that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so many people imagine that conspiracy theorists are uneducated,
Speaker 1: but in fact your research shows they can be perfectly
Speaker 1: smart people.
Speaker 2: So what's your take on that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, first of all, I don't like the term conspiracy theorists,
Speaker 4: and it's derogatory by now, so I adopt the term
Speaker 4: misbelievers and again, and the other thing about it is
Speaker 4: that it's not just believing in something that is wrong.
Speaker 4: It's about adopting that as a perspective. I think it's
Speaker 4: very important. So, you know, when I ask people what
Speaker 4: is the least harmful wrong belief, people say the Earth
Speaker 4: is flat, because if you don't believe in COVID, you
Speaker 4: might in fact other people, you might do all kinds
Speaker 4: of things. If you believe that the Earth is flat,
Speaker 4: you're not going to change the curvature of the Earth.
Speaker 4: But it turns out that people who believe the Earth
Speaker 4: is flat that belief expands because they believe that the
Speaker 4: US government is lying and NASA is lying, and every
Speaker 4: airplane pilot knows the truth, and they're lying, and every
Speaker 4: government knows the truth, they're lying.
Speaker 3: And then no satellites.
Speaker 4: And and they look at everything through what else are
Speaker 4: they doing to So it's it's a really for me.
Speaker 4: The issue is not just I don't believe in x is.
Speaker 4: There's a sense of perspective in everything. One of the
Speaker 4: women we talked to for the book who really hated
Speaker 4: me the beginning and decided to hate me a little
Speaker 4: less after COVID she called me up.
Speaker 3: She had cancer.
Speaker 4: She had cancer, and she thought she would consult me
Speaker 4: about taking and not taking treatment. I was very much
Speaker 4: in favor of treatment, and she decided not to take it,
Speaker 4: and she passed away about a year later. But she
Speaker 4: expanded her view to the whole medical system. Everything was corrupt,
Speaker 4: everything was wrong, everything was poison.
Speaker 3: And so on.
Speaker 4: Now, the thing about your question was it's us versus there.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's very easy to say, oh, us
Speaker 4: the reasonable people, smart, intelligent, understand truth from not and
Speaker 4: they're them and so but the reality is that we
Speaker 4: have not had the stress some of them had we
Speaker 4: had not had the initial conditions for it, and we
Speaker 4: can't judge. We can't judge what would have happened to us,
Speaker 4: like what like what sort of initial conditions. So somebody
Speaker 4: who lost their job when other people don't. Some people
Speaker 4: who had a terrible personal tragedy and they say why
Speaker 4: why me? Some people who invest in the market like
Speaker 4: they were supposed to and stock goes down and they.
Speaker 3: Lose, They lose a lot of things.
Speaker 4: So when you think about this initial condition of what
Speaker 4: gets people to start looking at something else. So almost
Speaker 4: everybody has in their close circuit somebody that five years ago,
Speaker 4: ten years ago, you would say, me and this other
Speaker 4: person understand the world in the same way. And now
Speaker 4: they look at that person and say, I just don't
Speaker 4: understand how.
Speaker 3: We do this.
Speaker 4: Now go back to that person when they started their journey.
Speaker 4: Most likely there was some stressful event that a person
Speaker 4: wanted to deflect play and then and then they start,
Speaker 4: and then they start the journey. And the journey also
Speaker 4: has a lot of frandomness. What do you encounter on YouTube?
Speaker 4: Who do you talk to?
Speaker 3: So you know, when we.
Speaker 4: Let's say you're in a workplace and there's lots of
Speaker 4: people you respect and they have different opinions. You have
Speaker 4: to be exposed to very different opinions. Move to COVID
Speaker 4: your home. You don't talk about chit chat, you don't
Speaker 4: talk about other things. Everything you talk at work is
Speaker 4: just over zoom about the work. You don't get exposed
Speaker 4: to other people. You join social media, you meet only people. Okay,
Speaker 4: now we're moving to the last part.
Speaker 3: The part that.
Speaker 4: Consolidates those beliefs, and that's very important whether you move
Speaker 4: there or not, is the part in which you leave
Speaker 4: your friends.
Speaker 3: And you join a different group.
Speaker 2: The social aspect to it.
Speaker 4: The social aspect very hard to if you get into
Speaker 4: that part, very hard to escape. So you feel ostracized
Speaker 4: from your friends, you go into another group that accepts you.
Speaker 4: Then you become more extreme, and then things move from there.
Speaker 4: And by the time, like if you think about the
Speaker 4: range of opinions, it kind of keeps intellectual humility. Okay,
Speaker 4: I think this, but you think this, and I respect you,
Speaker 4: so I'm not going to be one hundred percent sure.
Speaker 4: The moment you moved into a group that just has
Speaker 4: that and uses extreme opinions and signaling, now it becomes
Speaker 4: very very tough, very very tough. So I would say,
Speaker 4: if you have somebody in your life that is a misbeliever,
Speaker 4: what you really want to do is stop them early
Speaker 4: before they change their social circle to include just people
Speaker 4: who believe those thicks. There's one very interesting element in
Speaker 4: all of this called she Bullet. So the story of
Speaker 4: she Bullet is that there were this war in the
Speaker 4: Bible between two tribes. After the war, they settled on
Speaker 4: two sides of the river. But you know, the river
Speaker 4: is small, you can move from side to another. So
Speaker 4: you walk around and you meet people, and you want
Speaker 4: to know if they're your tribe or the other tribe.
Speaker 4: And it just so happened that these two tribes pronounce
Speaker 4: the name of the plant she bollet slightly differently. One
Speaker 4: of them said she Bollet. One of them said sea Bollet.
Speaker 3: So I meet you.
Speaker 4: I said, hey, you, how do you this plant? If
Speaker 4: you say the way I'd say it, you're from my tribe.
Speaker 4: If you say the way the other tribe is saying it,
Speaker 4: I have to chase your way or try to injury.
Speaker 4: And we now use these terms she bullet for a
Speaker 4: discussion that looks like it's about the facts, but It's
Speaker 4: really about identity. Because when I show you the plant
Speaker 4: and I ask you what any of this plant? Do
Speaker 4: I care about the anair of the plant?
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: Now, think about how much of the discussion in our
Speaker 4: world are she Bullet are really like President Trump in
Speaker 4: the election saying the immigrants are eating cats and dogs.
Speaker 4: Is it a statement that he's indicating as truth or
Speaker 4: is she Bollet saying, look at my identity, I'm willing
Speaker 4: to say such extreme things against immigrants as a signaling
Speaker 4: from my identity. So the social element, especially in social media,
Speaker 4: and especially when you want to be seen above the fault,
Speaker 4: basically creates this pressure to become more and more extremely
Speaker 4: what you say.
Speaker 3: It's a very confusing kind of discussion.
Speaker 4: Imagine you look today at the news and you try
Speaker 4: to figure out what people are saying that it's real,
Speaker 4: and what people are saying that is she Bullet that
Speaker 4: is just singing from.
Speaker 3: The river to the sea.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's the people who say from the river
Speaker 4: to the sea really mean let's kill everybody in Israel,
Speaker 4: get them get I don't think so some people do,
Speaker 4: but I think for most people it's not a statement
Speaker 4: that is real. By the way, the same thing is true.
Speaker 4: Lots of lots of Israel's saying statement that are that
Speaker 4: are shep bullet and our are not taken like this.
Speaker 4: So but but the thing about she bullet is that
Speaker 4: once you get into that speech, it is very confusing,
Speaker 4: and it's also gets things to go into a downward
Speaker 4: spiral of what was what was outrageous a year ago
Speaker 4: and next year you might need something during it. So
Speaker 4: that's kind of the final start with stress, cognition, some
Speaker 4: personality within touch on, and then the social element is
Speaker 4: kind of what seals the deal. And maybe the last
Speaker 4: thing to say about all of this is that for me,
Speaker 4: the whole thing is that it kills trust.
Speaker 3: Imagine that was COVID twenty six January.
Speaker 4: We're going to get new COVID. How prepared are we
Speaker 4: for that? And I think we're less prepared for that
Speaker 4: because we can't work together. Everything is political. They're like,
Speaker 4: there's so many things. COVID is an example, but there's
Speaker 4: so many things that we have to work together. Like
Speaker 4: imagine ten years ago they asked us what are the
Speaker 4: big problems of the world. We would say poverty, We
Speaker 4: say a list of things. I think now misinformation and
Speaker 4: polarization is at the top, because how can we agree
Speaker 4: on any action If we can't agree, we have to
Speaker 4: we have to get the shared understanding, caring, seeing each
Speaker 4: other with mutual interest moving forward, and we don't have
Speaker 4: any of those, you know.
Speaker 1: I just want to come back to this social aspect
Speaker 1: because I think there are a couple of other social
Speaker 1: aspects that are.
Speaker 2: That are important but are rarely talked about.
Speaker 1: One is, if you're a conspiracy theorist or a misbeliever,
Speaker 1: you can get to show up at the cocktail party
Speaker 1: and say something and other people think you're pretty smart.
Speaker 2: Possibly at least you believe that.
Speaker 1: People think that because you're the guy with the answers
Speaker 1: and you get to explain something that everyone else has
Speaker 1: been confused about.
Speaker 4: So so we started with stress and we say you
Speaker 4: feel hard done by the moment, you feel you have
Speaker 4: more knowledge than other people. You basically reverse that. So
Speaker 4: the misbelievers caught us sheep for example, They're saying, you
Speaker 4: think that I'm not doing well, but really what's happening
Speaker 4: is you don't understand what's going on, and I'm the
Speaker 4: one who understand it, So I absolutely agree with you.
Speaker 4: The stories people look for are stories that allow them
Speaker 4: to feel more in control but also more knowledgeable, superior
Speaker 4: rather than inferior.
Speaker 1: Yes, And actually this is consistent with what the second thing.
Speaker 1: I talked to some kid who had gone pretty far
Speaker 1: down the rabbit hole where he felt that everything he.
Speaker 2: Saw on the news and the papers and so on
Speaker 2: was lying to him.
Speaker 1: And he explained to me that he felt a sense
Speaker 1: of success at coming to understand, to see through the
Speaker 1: veil to learn the truth. He felt really empowered by
Speaker 1: that was the sense of you know, okay, everyone's lying
Speaker 1: to me, and I solve the puzzle.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: QAnon QAnon has been an unbelievable like like somebody like
Speaker 4: somebody compared it to a game. It's really it's really
Speaker 4: a game. There were there's a Q and there were
Speaker 4: people who are interpreting, and there were drops, and there
Speaker 4: was and a You got to feel to be one
Speaker 4: of the elite group that understands how the world works
Speaker 4: compared to everybody else. It's a very very satisfying feeling.
Speaker 4: You know, you and I when we do an experiment
Speaker 4: and we find out something new, we feel at the
Speaker 4: top of the world in this world. And and by
Speaker 4: the way you want a misbelief about something that updates,
Speaker 4: like there's more news, there's more information that there's a
Speaker 4: keeping keeping on top of that. But yes, but it's
Speaker 4: a very it's a very good feeling of superiority, control, understanding,
Speaker 4: being unique, very very important.
Speaker 1: So if you could design one or two features in
Speaker 1: our information environment and social media or the way we
Speaker 1: get our news to lessen the degree of misbelief, what
Speaker 1: would you implement?
Speaker 4: So there's all kinds of simple things to implement, And
Speaker 4: let's take Facebook as an example, but it doesn't it
Speaker 4: doesn't have to be Facebook. I would ask people to
Speaker 4: separate between facts and opinions. So when you generate something
Speaker 4: or so, just tell me fact and opinion. That's one.
Speaker 4: And the second thing I would do is I would
Speaker 4: when people like something, I would pop up a window
Speaker 4: and say, are you sure this is the truth? Because
Speaker 4: liking something it's a very ambiguous statement. Are you saying
Speaker 4: it's ridiculous? Are you saying it's true? Are you saying
Speaker 4: it's interesting? I was saying it might be true. What
Speaker 4: exactly are you say? So I think that I would
Speaker 4: I would solve those two ambiguities if I could do
Speaker 4: something else. So I had a lot of discussion with
Speaker 4: the social media networks when I was I started really
Speaker 4: bothering when I started getting death threats.
Speaker 3: I got death threats almost every day for two years.
Speaker 3: Duke where I teach, they got some very frightening letters
Speaker 3: and that they had to refer to the authorities. It
Speaker 3: was a complex periit and I talked to lots of
Speaker 3: those people.
Speaker 4: By the way it terms that I could convince that
Speaker 4: it's against against just policy standards to threaten someone.
Speaker 3: And one of the interesting thing.
Speaker 4: That is happening is that people don't understand this reputation.
Speaker 4: So imagine again Facebook, and imagine it. You start posting
Speaker 4: things that people appose, people say, this is this is fair.
Speaker 4: What happen is your reputation goes down. So imagine you
Speaker 4: have one hundred thousand followers and when you post something,
Speaker 4: ten percent of them get it, and then people start
Speaker 4: complaining about you. So your reputation goes down. It doesn't
Speaker 4: go to ten percent, it goes to nine percent or
Speaker 4: eight percent. What do you see as an information generating engine?
Speaker 4: You see less likes, so you said to yourself, let
Speaker 4: me get more aggressive. So ironically, the solution that they
Speaker 4: have is actually doing the opposite. But I think the
Speaker 4: easiest thing to do is not allow bots. Think about
Speaker 4: X versus LinkedIn, Like if you came from out of space,
Speaker 4: you would say, these are not the same universe. I
Speaker 4: think what's happening here sin is what's happening here. One
Speaker 4: is allowing bots and anonymity. One doesn't allow bots and anonymity.
Speaker 4: Things change very very quickly. So anyway, I think there's
Speaker 4: lots of little things we can do. And and when
Speaker 4: I started writing this book, I promised the publisher a
Speaker 4: chapter on solutions. I don't have a chapter on solutions.
Speaker 4: I have a chapter on you know, hopefully helpful. I
Speaker 4: think there are solutions, but they are at the regulator level.
Speaker 4: So all the all the media company can get together
Speaker 4: and self regulate. The regulate can regulate them. But I
Speaker 4: think there are lots of things that we could do.
Speaker 4: We as the people need to decide we care enough
Speaker 4: and it's important enough to act it. I don't think
Speaker 4: I don't think it's impossible, but we need to suffer
Speaker 4: enough from that to make it a priority, and I
Speaker 4: think we getting there.
Speaker 1: So I have a quick tangential question here, which is
Speaker 1: sometimes on social media we see people who pedal conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if they actually believe it. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's a misbelief or if it's something
Speaker 1: that works for them. This is consistent with what you
Speaker 1: said about the likes and the algorithms and so.
Speaker 2: On, So how do you classify them.
Speaker 1: They're not exactly misbelievers, they're just taking advantage of other people.
Speaker 4: So there are lots of actors with bad intentions. So
Speaker 4: there are states that are meddling in our life, and
Speaker 4: there are bad actors that do things either financially or
Speaker 4: for a social reason. Just for example, a real battle
Speaker 4: happening in Wikipedia. People are trying to rewrite the world's history.
Speaker 4: I think what I read is that in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 4: the item that was most edited and re edited on
Speaker 4: Wikipedia as Hitler. It has been dead for a while.
Speaker 4: The fact that the debates are still going on tells
Speaker 4: you something about So there are groups that are fighting
Speaker 4: about reframing the truth, and there are groups that are
Speaker 4: trying to create havoc. And yes, there are lots of
Speaker 4: bad actors. So I focused on the psychology of not
Speaker 4: people with bad intentions, but the people with good intentions
Speaker 4: who get get dragged into it. But you're absolutely right
Speaker 4: that there's lots of bad intentions. Like if you look
Speaker 4: at COVID, there was one chiropractor in Florida that produced,
Speaker 4: like I don't know exactly, but about ten percent of
Speaker 4: the misinformation on COVID came, okay, came from him. At
Speaker 4: some point it was ten percent. But there's lots of
Speaker 4: very strange incentive in this in this world.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So now you've said in your book that under the
Speaker 1: right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
Speaker 2: And presumably there are small.
Speaker 1: Things that you and I have misbeliefs about. So what
Speaker 1: do we do about that? How do we put checks
Speaker 1: on ourselves?
Speaker 4: I don't think we can fix wrong beliefs. That's really hard.
Speaker 4: We need to trust lots of things. I ask my
Speaker 4: friends usually, I said, what do you believe in global warming?
Speaker 4: All of my friends I believe it's a real problem.
Speaker 4: And then I said, what if you read and they
Speaker 4: said the UN report? And they said, did you really
Speaker 4: read the UN report? And they said the summary? And
Speaker 4: there's a lot of our beliefs that are based on trusts,
Speaker 4: are based on partial information and there's just too much
Speaker 4: to know. There's too much. No, I don't think we
Speaker 4: can fix that. I think the real key is intellectual humility.
Speaker 4: I think the real key is to recognize that we
Speaker 4: know something, we believe something, but to be open to
Speaker 4: the fact that we're wrong. And I think that's what
Speaker 4: we try to do in scientific training for ourselves and
Speaker 4: for students, is to embrace uncertainty. So if you ask
Speaker 4: me what to do for ourselves and what I would do,
Speaker 4: like if I could include a new course at the
Speaker 4: University of high school, it wouldn't be media literacy because
Speaker 4: that I think changes too quickly. It would be intellectual humility.
Speaker 4: I think that's that's kind of a key. The key
Speaker 4: for ourselves, and the other thing is is when we
Speaker 4: talk to people, adopt the perspective of I'm trying to
Speaker 4: learn here together. What's the point of fighting like it
Speaker 4: doesn't work? Like it's an unbelievable thing. Right, people have
Speaker 4: zero success Right, that's what you want to spend your
Speaker 4: time on something you has zero success rate.
Speaker 3: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 4: So I think I think figuring out discussions of how
Speaker 4: to get to a new shirt understanding and intellectual humility
Speaker 4: are tightly linked, and that's what we need to do
Speaker 4: for ourselves.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with behavioral economists Dan Arili, and
Speaker 1: to me, what surfaces is that misbelief is not just
Speaker 1: something we can write off to a few misguided people,
Speaker 1: but instead it's a feature of the human mind under
Speaker 1: the right conditions. Our brains are prediction engines, and they're
Speaker 1: constantly trying to weave data into a coherent picture of
Speaker 1: the world, and they usually do a reasonable job, but
Speaker 1: that same machinery can lead us astray when stress rises,
Speaker 1: or when trust e roads, or when someone does something
Speaker 1: mean to us, or when our social circles shift. In
Speaker 1: these moments, the brain reaches for the explanations that are
Speaker 1: comforting and coherent enough, and ones that feel like they
Speaker 1: restore agency. It's of course tempting to imagine that we
Speaker 1: are immune. In other words, that misbelief is something that
Speaker 1: happens to other people. But with enough pressure or uncertainty
Speaker 1: or emotional vulnerability, presumably every one of us has the
Speaker 1: cognitive ingredients to slide into narratives that distort reality. And
Speaker 1: understanding how this all happens matters for our communities, for
Speaker 1: our scientific institutions, for keeping a healthy democracy, because when
Speaker 1: misbelief takes root, it can reduce trust and create.
Speaker 2: Entire parallel worlds of meaning.
Speaker 1: So the challenge is not to correct bad facts, because
Speaker 1: that's often a fool's errand what we should be doing
Speaker 1: is always working to understand the emotional terrain beneath the stories.
Speaker 1: If we approach misbelief with humility and understanding, we can
Speaker 1: do better not only at helping others, but recognizing the
Speaker 1: subtle ways that our own beliefs are shaped by our communities,
Speaker 1: our identity, these and our emotions. Go to eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
Speaker 1: and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
Speaker 1: each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.