Is There a Science of Mental Immunity?

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To what extent humans are by nature kind of gullable and suckers for occults and crazy beliefs in conspiracy theories? Or are we naturally kind of sceptical, and it's really hard to convince people to join a cult or believe in some kind of crazy conspiracy theory? A the essay that got me was essay written by richard dawkins called viruses of the mind. He likens a four year old child to an immune compromised adult. I think minds really do have immune systems. They really can fail to function properly - either because we're born gullible, or because they get compromised by saf fearmongering e. We need a science of mental immunity so we understand how mental

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?