Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Dan Ariely - Misbelief
Truth has gone sideways and has become as untrustworthy as that one weird uncle's holiday dinnertime war stories.
We're not in a post-truth society lauded by outlets on both sides, but rather a post-trust society, and mistrust cuts deep.
Mistrust leads to uncertainty leads to a need for control leads to fear leads to simplifying complex issues leads to conspiratorial bents.
Conspiracies tend to funnel us into a state of divining malcontent within situations too complex for an easy answer, because in times of uncertainty, those easy answers are exactly what we're after. Not only that, but stressed people want to feel that they understand something that other people don’t. They tell themselves a complex story with lots of nuance containing good and evil.
When looking for an answer that explains why something bad happens, it’s much easier to find and condemn a villain.
To demonstrate how easily conspiracies take flight, Ariely summarizes the "birds aren't real" conspiracy concocted by Peter McIndoe and viralized during a 2017 women's march. Meant as satire, the movement, whereby McIndoe "believed" all birds were replaced with government drones, took off and gained a following of over 100,000 before he came out with a Ted Talk to discuss the danger of blind belief.
Ariely says to counteract the attraction toward complex, villainous stories it's useful to keep “razors” in our cognitive hygiene bag. Razor is what's used to describe certain heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, that can help to shave away complexity and get us more quickly to the truth.
There's the slightly modified Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by human fallibility.” Macco's Razor “The most complex solution involving the most devious intentions and the most hidden elements is almost always the truth.” And Hitchens’ razor, named after the late literary critic staunch atheist Christopher Hitchens: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Together, these mantras can help prevent us from falling into a spiral of misbelief. They invite us to instead ask questions, because belief is as belief does.