Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously false from the outside,

as we see with conspiracy theories?

Is this kind of misbelief a failure of intelligence or something deeper and more universal to human brains? Do conspiracy theories offer a sense of

clarity and belonging when reality feels chaotic and threatening? And what would it take for

you under the right emotional conditions to begin believing something that your past self would

find unbelievable? Today we'll speak with

behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who has thought a lot about misbelief. For him, it's a scientific

question, but also an interest that started very personally. Welcome to Inner Cosmos. With me,

David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand how we see the world, even when it doesn't match the facts. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Today we're diving into one of the most perplexing phenomena about the mind.

When we think about brains or computers, we think about how to gather facts about the world

and put them together into a model.

So one of the most interesting problems in brain science is that of misbelief.

Now, I'm not talking about misinformation here.

If someone hands you the wrong fact and then you repeat it, that's one thing.

I'm talking about the deeper psychological journey by which a person becomes convinced of

something that outsiders find totally detached from reality. So we've got conspiracy theories, medical skepticism,

political fantasies. These are all meaningful forces in our culture. Now, one thing to note right

away, these aren't new. You can see these throughout history dating back at least two and a half

millennia when people had conspiracy theories about,

...