Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 134. Oh, Over the last few years I've invited a number of experts on this podcast to discuss why people believe different things and why they hold on to those

beliefs in spite of evidence they might be wrong. Sometimes I think we get lost in that discussion because when we use the word wrong, it can mean that the person we're trying to convince is factually incorrect.

For instance, they might think vaccines cause autism or that the earth is flat.

But also when we use that word wrong, we can mean that they just see the world differently, which is to say we might agree on the facts,

but not their interpretation. And since we think that the way that we make sense of those facts is the right way, sometimes the only way, we think that the way

they make sense of those facts is wrong. After all, if we thought we were wrong, well

we would have to change our minds. In this second sense of wrong, when we argue with people, we don't want to merely correct their misconceptions.

We want to change the way they make sense of the world, and we want to persuade people

to hold the views that we hold so that they

change the way that they think and feel and at the very least change the way they behave.

Persuasion of this second kind which is mostly about attitudes, changing the way people feel about things,

is something that we've been doing since we've been doing anything.

And most of our arguing about that kind of stuff, took place in groups.

You see if an individual solved a problem or discovered valuable information or recognized a danger or related a novel experience or developed an accurate

prediction or created an innovation when one person did that in the group. The

rest of the group could benefit from it and so our brains evolved in sort of information exchange environments, but the problem with these

exchanges was that not every fellow primate was trustworthy. I mean, they could just be wrong right or they could be trying to

mislead us for their own gain. Therefore groups always faced a dilemma and that

dilemma became a selective pressure. something that cognitive scientists call a trust bottleneck.

A particular idea could be harmful but it could also be extremely useful.

And if we reject that idea out of hand,

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