The Effects of Propaganda on Persuasion

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Propaganda can have many insidious effects even if it doesn't persuade anybody. It also creates these kind of coordination points in which people realize that actually, wow, I'm surrounded by a lot of people who don't like Jewish people either. So that gives you more strength and that allows you to take more actions. All of these things are horrible, but they're not persuasion in the basic sense.

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.

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Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.

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