You and Betty and the nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome back to Inquiring Minds.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

There's more than what we see.

Hey, this is producer Adam. I'm doing the intro this week. Don't worry about it.

The show this week is about being deceived or getting fooled.

And I've been thinking about such things lately, not just because of the massive disinformation

in which we exist, but also because after going down a Wikipedia hole, I ended up reading about the Greek historian

Thucydides. Thucydides lived around 2400 years ago, and in 431 BCE, he started writing

what would eventually be called the history of the Peloponnesian War, a hugely important

text.

But at the beginning, he has this little aside to say that he's going to try to tell the story as accurately as possible, but that it's tricky because it requires trusting what other

people believe to be true, because he has to interview them.

So he writes, all men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them.

This shows how little trouble most people take in their search for the truth. They

happily resort to ready-made opinions. And he moves on from there. And I know it's not

revelatory to suggest that we can learn from history,

but it's interesting to be reminded that being scammed, being fooled, being convinced of something

that is not true is not new. And being invested in why such things happen has been worthwhile for a very long time.

Scammers and misinformation peddlers love a crisis, and right now the world is full of them.

So with all of that in mind, this week Indre talked to psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher

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