The Costs of Conspiracy Theories in the Modern World

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There's lots of people who believe lots of false things in the modern world. And it really does sound like part of that main problem is our fondness for whatever set of priors or folk beliefs that we start with, I guess. If you want people to accept vaccination more, then pharmaceutical companies can also clean up their act even more and be even more transparent and even more trustworthy. It's not going to solve everything, but if you really look at the aggregate level, the only thing that will meaningfully lower the rates of things such as conspiracy theory is if people have fewer grounds for believing in these things.

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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