The Effects of Nazi Propaganda on People's Minds

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In many places in Germany, Germans were quite anti-Semitic already. In these places, Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was very successful - at least in the sense of being widely accepted and widespread. But it didn't have any effect or even backfired in areas with kind of low anti-Semitism. And more recently, there has been more quantitative studies that have managed to look at whether how effective it had been the Nazi propaganda in different ways.

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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