Or why are folks so gullible?
If you ever need proof of human gullibility, cast your mind back to the attack of the flesh-eating bananas. In January 2000, a series of chain emails began reporting that imported bananas were infecting people with “necrotizing fasciitis” – a rare disease in which the skin erupts into livid purple boils before disintegrating and peeling away from muscle and bone.
According to the email chain, the FDA was trying to cover up the epidemic to avoid panic. Faced with the threat, readers were encouraged to spread the word to their friends and family.
The threat was pure nonsense, of course. But by 28 January, the concern was great enough for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a statement decrying the rumour.
Did it help? Did it heck. Rather than quelling the rumour, they had only poured fuel on its flames. Within weeks, the CDC was hearing from so many distressed callers it had to set up a banana hotline. The facts became so distorted that people eventually started to quote the CDC as the source of the rumour. Even today, new variants of the myth have occasionally reignited those old fears.
Why are people so incredibly gullible?
One, somewhat humbling, explanation is that we are all “cognitive misers” – to save time and energy, our brains use intuition rather than analysis.
As a simple example, quickly answer the following questions:
“How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”
“Margaret Thatcher was the president of what country?”
Between 10 and 50% of study participants presented with these questions fail to notice that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the Ark, and that Margaret Thatcher was the prime minster, not the president – even when they have been explicitly asked to note inaccuracies.
Known as the “Moses illusion”, this absentmindedness illustrates just how easily we miss the details of a statement, favouring the general gist in place of the specifics. Instead, we normally just judge whether it “feels” right or wrong before accepting or rejecting its message. “Even when we ‘know’ we should be drawing on facts and evidence, we just draw on feelings,” says Eryn Newman at the University of Southern California
Feelings trump facts.
I think most of the time we are left with inadequate information and have to resort to our feelings to make a decision. Perhaps it becomes habit.