Misbelief: What makes rational people believe irrational things

My top 20 points:

1. Misinformation affects all of us on a daily basis—from social media to larger political challenges, from casual conversations in supermarkets, to even our closest relationships. While we recognize the dangers that misinformation poses, the problem is complex—far beyond what policing social media alone can achieve—and too often our limited solutions are shaped by partisan politics and individual interpretations of truth.
2. There are key elements—emotional, cognitive, personality, and social—that drive people down the funnel of false information and mistrust, showing how under the right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
3. Largely unintentionally, western society has created a devastating psychological machinery that I call “the funnel of misbelief.” This does an excellent job of attacking almost all our human weaknesses on several fronts starting with emotions and stress; moving to multiple cognitive biases; taking advantage of certain personality traits; and ending by hijacking the social forces that control much of our physical and digital life.
4. The Funnel of Misbelief can explain our society’s loss of trust. the more people that go down the funnel of misbelief, the less trust we have, the less cohesion we have. What makes up this path called the Funnel of Misbelief? There are basically four big psychological elements at play.
5. Stress makes us feel a deep need for understanding and control.  It’s not just any stress. It’s not, for example, busy-at-work kind of stress. It’s a stress in which we don’t understand how the world is operating. When this happens there’s a deep psychological need to come up with a story that explains things.
6. Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification.
7. The other main insight is that it is easy to think that we are protected from misbelief while other people are the ones at risk of accepting false narratives.  Not so!  Once we understand that the breeding ground of misbelief is stress, it means that anyone experiencing a high degree of stress (financial, loss of a job, illness, etc.) is susceptible to the funnel of misbelief.
8. Cognitively, we fall victim to the Funnel of Misbelief through search bias and motivated reasoning.  Search bias means when we look online, we look at things that would show us that we are correct. Motivated reasoning means that we not only just look in a biased way, but we can actually bend reality. We find the answers that we want to find.
9. Personality can determine our likelihood of going down the Funnel of Misbelief.  Those with faulty memory, who believe more in their intuitions, in magical ideation and in reverse causality, and have a tendency towards narcissism are more likely to fall into misbelief.
10. Social cohesion has a powerful influence on our ability to trust. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.
11. The main thing about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is that it is not the Jewish Banking Conspiracy or the Gray Aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is far more frightening: Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
12. There are a couple of other things that are interesting in the conspiracy theory complex. It’s harder to disprove and it creates an ongoing interest. Because I can tell you more things and there are more nuances and complexity, we can create this.
13. To build social credibility, you have to say something extreme. That’s one of the things that’s happening. People say things that are extreme and then they get attention. They have to say more extreme things and more extreme.
14. How to counteract conspiracy theories? First of all, we need to understand it. It’s easier to stop in the beginning and harder to stop at the end. By the time we notice it in full bloom and people have already whole social support and it’s an alternative social support, it’s very hard to change. If somebody is going down the funnel, do the right thing early.
15. Misbeliefs are about believing something that is not correct. That’s one element. The second element is that misbelief is a central belief in people’s lives, and they view everything else through that. Let’s take the belief that the world is flat. For the people who hold this belief, it’s not that they say the world is flat. They think NASA is lying to them, and they think that every pilot knows the truth and is not sharing them, and every government knows about it.
16. If you ask the question, “What would change their mind?” and they say nothing, then it’s like religion. The moment people say nothing, they also recognize that it’s not based on facts. If I say, “What would it take to change your mind that the elections were not stolen?” and you say nothing, it’s an admission that it’s not data-driven.
17. One approach to dismantling conspiracy theories is to say “I’m not arguing with you. I’m on your side. Just help me understand your side in a better way.” The other version of this, which is even better, is based on the notion of something called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. I said to people, “Do you understand how a flush toilet works?” They said, “Yes.”. Luckily for you, I have all the pieces of a flush toilet. Can you please assemble them?” Nobody can assemble them. We then say, “How much do you understand it?” People said, “Not so much.”
18. We don’t need people to switch completely. We need people to be less confident. The moment you are less confident in something, you move your confidence from 100% to 95%, that’s a lot. Now, you will not protest. You will not spread information about that. You will be a bit more critical.
19. The workplace is the place where you get to potentially get exposed to lots of things. Many workplaces say, “Don’t talk about politics. Don’t talk about touchy topics.” Where are people going to get that? We need to create a respectful environment in which people hear other opinions. If I hear nothing that contradicts me, and then I go online and again, I hear nothing that contradicts me, this is a bad journey.
20. Combating misbelief requires a strategy rooted not in conflict, but in empathy. The sooner we recognize that misbelief is above all else a human problem, the sooner we can become the solution ourselves.