The Science of Mental Immunity

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Right wing fear mongers have been whipping stories about, i don't know, binary people or homosexual marriage into a threat to the traditional ituation of marriage. I think there's a whole lot of scaremongering going on there. In one way, you cane propagandists and and idiologs have known for decades that you can basically hack a mind's immune system with fear, with disdain. When when trump a describes his liberal opponents with disdain in his voice, turns out that's a very powerful way to inoculate republican minds against what democrats want to teach. And this goes back to one of the early pieces of research underlying the science of mental immunity. A is the

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?