December 8, 2025 • 46 mins
Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously false from the outside, as with conspiracy theories? Is this kind of misbelief a universal feature of human brains? Does it offer clarity and belonging when reality feels chaotic and threatening? 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously
falls 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
(00:26):
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 Arieli, who has thought a lot about misbelief.
For him, it's a scientific question, but also an interest
(00:47):
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 pounds
universe to understand how we see the world even when
it doesn't match the facts. Today we're diving into one
(01:22):
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
(01:43):
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 fan These are
all meaningful forces in our culture. Now, one thing to
(02:05):
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, for example, Socrates's execution
and who is really behind it? Or the same thing
happened later with the death of Alexander the Great and
then with the assassination of Julius Caesar. Now, if this
(02:26):
reaction to a national tragedy sounds familiar, it's because it
is throughout history. Every time there's a significant event, people
jump in with their hypotheses, and these live in a
spectrum from reasonable to outlandish. I'm not sure if there's
really an upper limit to how wild the hypotheses are
likely to get. Now, this all would be nothing but
(02:46):
an academic interest, except that often crazy ideas are capable
of tilting elections or fracturing political alliances, or influencing things from.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Public health to wars.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay, so whenever we look at historical features that are
present in every generation like this, it tells us we're
not looking at some local cultural phenomenon or some consequence
of social media. Instead, we're looking at some issue about
how brains naturally work and what their failure modes are.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
The general story.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Is that the brain's job is to make good predictions
about the world, to reduce uncertainty, to create coherence from chaos,
and to generate frameworks that make us feel safe and oriented.
But under stress, those systems can shift, emotions can become
louder than evidence, threat detection ramps up, Identity becomes a filter,
(03:43):
and into this vacuum come narratives that promise clarity. You
find communities that promise belonging or stories that give you
a clean explanation for why everything feels wrong. These narratives
are structured to be sticky. Once you take the first step,
the next one is easier, and before long, someone who
(04:04):
once trusted the people around them or the institutions around
them might find themselves trapped in a self reinforcing ecosystem
of mistrust. Now, I have my own take on conspiracy theories,
which you can hear in episode sixty six from last year.
But recently, my friend and colleague Dan Arieli wrote a
book called Misbelief Now. Dan is a behavioral economist at
(04:28):
Duke University who has spent his career studying how humans
make decisions, why we often get things wrong and predictable ways,
and the ways in which our circumstances shape our judgment.
You may know him from his book Predictably Irrational or
his other excellent books, and you might also know him
from his enormous body of research over the years. Nan
(04:50):
is an expert in rationality and trust and incentives, and
this gives him a rare vantage point into why people
fall into conspiracy thinking. His book Misbelief goes further. It's
a scientific deep dive, but it's also a personal story
as well. Here in a minute. It starts with his
experience of getting targeted with crazy COVID era conspiracy theories,
(05:14):
where some people accused him online of collaborating with pharmaceutical
companies to destroy humanity with COVID. Now, it goes without
saying that Dan's research hopes to save humanity, not destroy it.
But here's the thing, because he's a super thoughtful person,
one of the results of being on the barrel end
of this was a fascination with the process by which
(05:37):
people take on beliefs, beliefs about other people or the
news media or whatever. He became entranced with the ways
that people go down a funnel of beliefs to arrive
in a place that's unrecognizable. So here's my interview with
Dan Rilly. So, Dan, you've spent in your career studying rationality,
(06:01):
but misbelief is more personal. So what you started down
this road of trying to understand why people have conspiracy theories?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So first of all, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
And usually when I write books, I finished the research
and then I write about it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
This was a very, very different story.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
So COVID started and I dropped everything and I was
just doing COVID related things.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And COVID of courses is.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
A problem with biology, but it's also a problem of
social science. Domestic violence increased by about nine hundred percent.
What do you do with remote work, What do you
do with kids studying remotely? What do you do with
furlough with firing people, What do you do with government subsidies?
Lots and lots of big questions. Do you give people
finds for not putting masks?
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And so on?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
And I dropped everything and I just did COVID and
I was just trying to do research, trying to understand,
trying to give advice whatever I could. And about five
months into it, I get an email from a woman
I once helped with the presentation she was doing for
her company, and.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
She said, Dan, what's wrong? Would you what happened? How
did you become that person?
Speaker 4 (07:23):
You know? I don't think very much about this email.
We get lots of emails, let's send back what do
you mean? And I get back an email with lists
of links that tell me that I'm an awful person.
For example, there was one link that showed a video
of me in the burn department saying that I was
burned when I was eighteen, through seventy percent of my
(07:44):
body through almost three years in hospital. True, but then
the video went to say that because of that, I
started hating healthy people and that's why I joined the
cabal to try and kill as many people possible. First
with COVID and then with the vaccine there was no
vaccine yet there were videos of me in Nazi uniform
concentration care.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Like.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
The amount of things were incredible, and my first reaction
was to set them straight, like this must be some misunderstanding.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
How can that be?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I wake up every day trying to do the best
I can for the world with this very very difficult pandemic,
and these people think I'm evil, Like, how can that be?
But I thought better of it, and I said, let
me call two PR experts and asked what would they do.
People are experts in this, and they said, don't touch it.
(08:38):
And I was very proud that I called them, but
they couldn't follow their advice. You know, imagine, imagine somebody
came to you and said, David, I know that you're
just an awful person, and here's all the things you've done.
It like feels Anyway, I spend a month trying to
convince people.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
It was awful. It was awful because I showed people
my calendar. People thought I had the contract with Pfizer.
I said, look, I'll show you a way tax with hers.
It was incredible. These people are so convinced.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
Anyway, I spent a month trying to convince them, and
I failed terribly felt but in the meantime, the anger
against me increased further and I started getting death threats.
And then I said, okay, I'm not convincing anybody.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Let me stop that. But I truly think that there's
a big topic here that I need to understand. You know,
I'm a social.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Scientist for a reason, and you know there's something people say, Okay,
I believe the earth is flat. Okay, but when somebody
comes to you and say I know something about you,
and he said, no, no, no, I don't have a contract
with Pfiser. How can you say that I have one?
I had to study this. So the next two years
I spent. I started by talking to the same people
(10:02):
who are my accusers, and I called them up and
I said, look, forget about me. I want to understand
your journey. Tell me what happened, like like, you started
with something, At what point did you become somebody with
very very different beliefs?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
What was the trigger? What happened?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
And I try to understand the journey that people move
from being, you know, believing the normal things that people
believe in society to become I call the misbelievers, people
who view the world not just believe in something that
is not correct, but view the world from that lens.
Because the people who who believed that did not just
(10:43):
believe that there was a cabalance so on, they looked at.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Everything through that through that lens.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
And psychologically I divided into four parts emotion, stress, cognition, personality,
and social And the stress part is the first thing
where you ask yourself, why would somebody wake up in
the morning and they have a choice. They can believe
(11:14):
in the benevolent God that is taking care of us
and helps us, and you.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Don't need to worry and everything has a purpose.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Versus believing that there's a cabau there's a hugely powerful
group of people who are trying to hurt them, poison them,
getting their kids not to have kids so they don't
have grandchildren, trying to all kinds of control. Why would
somebody want to believe that? It is a very very
strange set of belief. And what I found is that
(11:43):
stress is the answer. So that when people are saying,
I don't understand the world. I thought things were supposed
to go this way. Why am I hurting? Why am
I hurting more than other people? Why am I not
getting my share of.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Things like that?
Speaker 4 (12:01):
We want an answer, and the answer better has a
villain and a story, and I'll give you kind of
a kind of My two favorite studies of this. One
is a very old study in anthropology where they looked
at tribes and they look at tribes that fish in
the ocean versus tribe that fish in lakes. And of
(12:25):
course the tribe that fish in the lake have much
more predictable life. The lake is basically the same every day.
The ocean has huge fluctuations. Which tribes have more superstitions
or the ocean?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Why?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Because it gives you a feeling of control, feeling of control.
Or I'll give you another example. And you know these
studies about white noise, not not hearing, but sight. So
you have a picture with black and white thoughts randomly organized.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Like an all television screening.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Yeah, and you show them, You say do you see
an image? And people say yes, no, yes, and no.
It turns out that as you increase stress, for example,
you go skydiving, the more stress you have, the more
patterns you see. Now, why does this happen? Imagine you're
an animal in the jungle and you think there's a predator.
(13:20):
What is your mind doing? It goes into hyper drives, saying, well,
these two leaves are moving, maybe there's a tiger there.
You overinterpret patterns because you want to make sense of
the work. So the first thing to understand is that
when people feel stressed, like kind of learned helplessness, kind
(13:41):
of stressed, I don't understand the world. Things are not
going my way, there's a temptation to solve that problem
by creating a belief that says, I now understand what's
going on. It's the bad entities creating this bad outcome.
You can't say, oh, something bad happen and to be
I believe this is a benevolent God because you're trying
(14:03):
to explain the bad thing. And then from there are
things a theory we can talk about this, but that
that's the starting point.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We say, why would people start believing that?
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And so walk us through the funnel that people go
through as they go from having some idea all the
way to full blown belief.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Yeah, so you start with this beginning, I'm stressed, things
are not going well. What is going on? You start,
you go YouTube, you try to understand, you find some
beginning of a journey, and that gives you comfort. Shorten,
it gives you comfort because you say, oh, now I
understand it's not my fault, it's these people and so on,
and then things can't keepe. So they continue through cognitive processes,
(14:46):
and there's a few of them, but let's talk about one.
And so you know, first of all, we all know
that we don't view all the information.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We view the information that agrees.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
With us, right We what we like from the media
is to tell us, oh, you're really smart, you know
all this, you know everything, but here's something extra new,
but you're very genuinely correct. We don't want to be
confronted with things that would say you're an idiot, you
have no idea what you're talking about the world is
very different than what you think. So we look for
things that as our confirmation pots. So that's the beginning.
(15:20):
But one of the interesting version of the cognitive part
is what is called the illusion of explanatory depth. And
the way I kind of tested it in one experiment
was with flash toilets. So I show people a flash toilet.
Do you understand how a flash toilet works? Absolutely? On
(15:41):
the scale from one to seven, almost seven. That's wonderful.
Here all the pieces for a perfectly brand new flash toilet,
please assemble it. What do you think is the percentage
of people who manage to assemble it? Zero? And then
I asked them, and how well do you understand flash toilet?
And say, you know what, not so much. Now, think
(16:03):
about it. In a regular conversation, we go at people,
we argue, they argue, We argue, they argue at the
end of those so they we think about you, all
your debate in the last three years, how many of
them ended when the other person is saying, you know what.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
I've never heard such good arguments. I'm changing my opinion completely.
You're absolutely correct.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Right, zero small number?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And how many ended the other way when you said
to somebody, you know what.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I'm being good. It's a really interesting thing because when
we discuss things with people, the mechanism is that we
counter argue when we say things. We say things, and
when they see things we already counter argue. I think
that's kind of.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I don't know if it was always the case like this,
but we're not working toward joint new understand ending. We're
really kind of protecting our position. And what the illusion
of explanatory depth says is, don't worry about the facts initially,
worry about overconfidence. So with the flash dollar, don't worry
(17:15):
about the facts, worry about crush people's overconfidence first, and
then we can talk later. So the strategy is to
say people are resisting facts because of their overconfidence, and
what we need to do for persuasion is to first
think about them the overconfryt.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So a lot of listeners are probably familiar with the
Dunning Kruger effect, which is the less you know about
a topic, the more confident you are that you know It's.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
It's not the less, it's it's.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
A function where it's like when you know something, you're
the most dangerous. It's when you know nothing, you know
you know nothing, When you know a lot, you know
you know a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
The danger then in Kruger effect is when you know
a little.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Like the metaphor is like first year undergrad, you finished
right the introductory to biology textbook, Okay, I know biologic
yes exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And by the way, with the illusion of explanatory depth,
and one I always uses the electoral college, I asked people, hey,
do you.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Know how that works. They say, yeah, now that works.
I said, great, can you explain it to me?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Nobody is nobody so far has been able to really
tell me all the way down.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
And by the way we used it with the Trump elections,
some people thought that he that you won. And we
came to people and we said, you think the Trump
on the election, Yes, you think the elections were stolen. Yes,
explain to us how, but walk us through the details.
People go into the booth what happens. And people did
not say, oh, you know, he really lost the election,
(18:46):
but they said, you know what, I don't know how
it really happened. So the illusional it's a very important
issue to go into the mechanism and get people to
be more modest about their beliefs.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Does that actually change anybody's mind? Now, let's say you
felt the election was stolen and you don't know how
because you feel like, look, it's a big world, hundreds
of millions of people doing things in the United States.
I can't know all the details, and yet I have
reasona believe that's true. Would increase intellectual humility do anything
in that situation, or would a person still say, look,
(19:19):
there's no way for me to know the answer to that,
But I have other reasons to believe this, So.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Let me say that you're right. So intellectual humility is
the is the key. And of course we teach our
students to say not knowing is great and not knowing
is a very good thing.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
So I would say that I believe it very strongly.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
I believe that if you think about misbelief and you say,
there's the belief in something that is not true, and
there's adopting it as a perspective on life. So I
think the earth is flat, and I'm looking at everything
from the perspective that the earth is flat. I think
that the illusion of explanatory depth of intellectual humility would
(20:05):
reduce the second part first, So I would not look
at the world from that lens initially because I'm not
the moment, you know, one hundred percent sure it's not
a lens from which you view things. But this is
kind of a general argument. I'll tell you what I
have data about. So I have now a site where
(20:27):
I invite Antisemites to talk to me Solemn Israeli and
Jewish I. October seventh was terrible in all kinds of ways.
But when October seven happened, I decided to come to
Israel as quickly as possible, and the flight I could
(20:47):
take came through London, and I was in London during
the first prop Palestinian demonstration, and this was before Israel
went to Gaza, and there were already a lot of
anger told Israel. Even though Israel just suffered a huge
attack and didn't do anything. My daughter, who was in
(21:09):
high school, almost got canceled. Her mother, my ex wife,
is Indian, so my daughter is, you know, half Jewish Israeli,
half Indian and Hindu, both my kids. But she was
at the risk of being canceled just just by having
this affiliation. And she didn't vote for she doesn't have
(21:32):
a citizenship in Israel. She didn't vote for the Antennao government,
and nobody in her family did. But she felt unbelievably attacked,
and the antisemitism part.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Was very, very surprising.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
So anyway, so I opened this website that I'm trying
to understand antisemitism, and I invite people to nominate antisemites
that I should talk to, and then once or twice
a week I have discussions with anti Semites, and I
don't talk to anti Zionists. I don't talk to people
who just have complains about the Nathaniel government, which I.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Do as well.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
I talk to people who define themselves as antisemite, and
I do with them this exercise we just talked about.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I say, I'm not trying to convince you.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
Just tell me, like, when was the first time you
heard negative things about Jewish people? In most cases it
comes from early childhood and how did it develop and
what else did you learn and who did you meet?
And I we basically talk about the evolution of the idea.
And I would say that almost everybody at the end
(22:36):
of the conversation says, I still am antisemite, but I
know that not all Jewish people are like this, So
there is And by the way, one of the triggers
that I think is very interesting is when people recognize
that they got this idea very early on at home.
When somebody says I heard it when I was, you know,
(22:59):
before Elmntory school for my father, who said a few things,
and I said, okay, so did I really come to
that conclusion or was I given it? So for me,
kind of this exercise of where did you get this idea?
When did you test it? When did you test reality?
And so on?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Seems to be very good for.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
People not to change your opinion, but say, you know what,
I know it's more nuanced than that. And that's really
all I can hope for in a discussion, to say
I'm more nuanced in that.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Okay, so many people imagine that conspiracy theorists are uneducated,
but in fact your research shows they can be perfectly
smart people.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
So what's your take on that.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Yeah, first of all, I don't like the term conspiracy theorists,
and it's derogatory by now, so I adopt the term
misbelievers and again, and the other thing about it is
that it's not just believing in something that is wrong.
It's about adopting that as a perspective. I think it's
(24:16):
very important. So, you know, when I ask people what
is the least harmful wrong belief, people say the Earth
is flat, because if you don't believe in COVID, you
might in fact other people, you might do all kinds
of things. If you believe that the Earth is flat,
you're not going to change the curvature of the Earth.
(24:36):
But it turns out that people who believe the Earth
is flat that belief expands because they believe that the
US government is lying and NASA is lying, and every
airplane pilot knows the truth, and they're lying, and every
government knows the truth, they're lying.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And then no satellites.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
And and they look at everything through what else are
they doing to So it's it's a really for me.
The issue is not just I don't believe in x is.
There's a sense of perspective in everything. One of the
women we talked to for the book who really hated
(25:12):
me the beginning and decided to hate me a little
less after COVID she called me up.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
She had cancer.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
She had cancer, and she thought she would consult me
about taking and not taking treatment. I was very much
in favor of treatment, and she decided not to take it,
and she passed away about a year later. But she
expanded her view to the whole medical system. Everything was corrupt,
(25:46):
everything was wrong, everything was poison.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
And so on.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Now, the thing about your question was it's us versus there.
And you know, it's very easy to say, oh, us
the reasonable people, smart, intelligent, understand truth from not and
they're them and so but the reality is that we
(26:11):
have not had the stress some of them had we
had not had the initial conditions for it, and we
can't judge. We can't judge what would have happened to us,
like what like what sort of initial conditions. So somebody
who lost their job when other people don't. Some people
(26:33):
who had a terrible personal tragedy and they say why
why me? Some people who invest in the market like
they were supposed to and stock goes down and they.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Lose, They lose a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So when you think about this initial condition of what
gets people to start looking at something else. So almost
everybody has in their close circuit somebody that five years ago,
ten years ago, you would say, me and this other
person understand the world in the same way. And now
they look at that person and say, I just don't
understand how.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
We do this.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Now go back to that person when they started their journey.
Most likely there was some stressful event that a person
wanted to deflect play and then and then they start,
and then they start the journey. And the journey also
has a lot of frandomness. What do you encounter on YouTube?
(27:33):
Who do you talk to?
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So you know, when we.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Let's say you're in a workplace and there's lots of
people you respect and they have different opinions. You have
to be exposed to very different opinions. Move to COVID
your home. You don't talk about chit chat, you don't
talk about other things. Everything you talk at work is
just over zoom about the work. You don't get exposed
to other people. You join social media, you meet only people. Okay,
(28:02):
now we're moving to the last part.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
The part that.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Consolidates those beliefs, and that's very important whether you move
there or not, is the part in which you leave
your friends.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
And you join a different group.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
The social aspect to it.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
The social aspect very hard to if you get into
that part, very hard to escape. So you feel ostracized
from your friends, you go into another group that accepts you.
Then you become more extreme, and then things move from there.
And by the time, like if you think about the
(28:43):
range of opinions, it kind of keeps intellectual humility. Okay,
I think this, but you think this, and I respect you,
so I'm not going to be one hundred percent sure.
The moment you moved into a group that just has
that and uses extreme opinions and signaling, now it becomes
very very tough, very very tough. So I would say,
(29:05):
if you have somebody in your life that is a misbeliever,
what you really want to do is stop them early
before they change their social circle to include just people
who believe those thicks. There's one very interesting element in
all of this called she Bullet. So the story of
(29:29):
she Bullet is that there were this war in the
Bible between two tribes. After the war, they settled on
two sides of the river. But you know, the river
is small, you can move from side to another. So
you walk around and you meet people, and you want
to know if they're your tribe or the other tribe.
And it just so happened that these two tribes pronounce
the name of the plant she bollet slightly differently. One
(29:52):
of them said she Bollet. One of them said sea Bollet.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So I meet you.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I said, hey, you, how do you this plant? If
you say the way I'd say it, you're from my tribe.
If you say the way the other tribe is saying it,
I have to chase your way or try to injury.
And we now use these terms she bullet for a
discussion that looks like it's about the facts, but It's
really about identity. Because when I show you the plant
(30:20):
and I ask you what any of this plant? Do
I care about the anair of the plant?
Speaker 3 (30:23):
No.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Now, think about how much of the discussion in our
world are she Bullet are really like President Trump in
the election saying the immigrants are eating cats and dogs.
Is it a statement that he's indicating as truth or
is she Bollet saying, look at my identity, I'm willing
(30:45):
to say such extreme things against immigrants as a signaling
from my identity. So the social element, especially in social media,
and especially when you want to be seen above the fault,
basically creates this pressure to become more and more extremely
what you say.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
It's a very confusing kind of discussion.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
Imagine you look today at the news and you try
to figure out what people are saying that it's real,
and what people are saying that is she Bullet that
is just singing from.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
The river to the sea.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
I mean, it's the people who say from the river
to the sea really mean let's kill everybody in Israel,
get them get I don't think so some people do,
but I think for most people it's not a statement
that is real. By the way, the same thing is true.
Lots of lots of Israel's saying statement that are that
(31:47):
are shep bullet and our are not taken like this.
So but but the thing about she bullet is that
once you get into that speech, it is very confusing,
and it's also gets things to go into a downward
spiral of what was what was outrageous a year ago
and next year you might need something during it. So
(32:10):
that's kind of the final start with stress, cognition, some
personality within touch on, and then the social element is
kind of what seals the deal. And maybe the last
thing to say about all of this is that for me,
the whole thing is that it kills trust.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
Imagine that was COVID twenty six January.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
We're going to get new COVID. How prepared are we
for that? And I think we're less prepared for that
because we can't work together. Everything is political. They're like,
there's so many things. COVID is an example, but there's
so many things that we have to work together. Like
imagine ten years ago they asked us what are the
(32:57):
big problems of the world. We would say poverty, We
say a list of things. I think now misinformation and
polarization is at the top, because how can we agree
on any action If we can't agree, we have to
we have to get the shared understanding, caring, seeing each
(33:20):
other with mutual interest moving forward, and we don't have
any of those, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I just want to come back to this social aspect
because I think there are a couple of other social
aspects that are.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That are important but are rarely talked about.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
One is, if you're a conspiracy theorist or a misbeliever,
you can get to show up at the cocktail party
and say something and other people think you're pretty smart.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Possibly at least you believe that.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
People think that because you're the guy with the answers
and you get to explain something that everyone else has
been confused about.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
So so we started with stress and we say you
feel hard done by the moment, you feel you have
more knowledge than other people. You basically reverse that. So
the misbelievers caught us sheep for example, They're saying, you
think that I'm not doing well, but really what's happening
(34:18):
is you don't understand what's going on, and I'm the
one who understand it, So I absolutely agree with you.
The stories people look for are stories that allow them
to feel more in control but also more knowledgeable, superior
rather than inferior.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yes, And actually this is consistent with what the second thing.
I talked to some kid who had gone pretty far
down the rabbit hole where he felt that everything he.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Saw on the news and the papers and so on
was lying to him.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
And he explained to me that he felt a sense
of success at coming to understand, to see through the
veil to learn the truth. He felt really empowered by
that was the sense of you know, okay, everyone's lying
to me, and I solve the puzzle.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
QAnon QAnon has been an unbelievable like like somebody like
somebody compared it to a game. It's really it's really
a game. There were there's a Q and there were
people who are interpreting, and there were drops, and there
was and a You got to feel to be one
of the elite group that understands how the world works
(35:28):
compared to everybody else. It's a very very satisfying feeling.
You know, you and I when we do an experiment
and we find out something new, we feel at the
top of the world in this world. And and by
the way you want a misbelief about something that updates,
like there's more news, there's more information that there's a
keeping keeping on top of that. But yes, but it's
(35:49):
a very it's a very good feeling of superiority, control, understanding,
being unique, very very important.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
So if you could design one or two features in
our information environment and social media or the way we
get our news to lessen the degree of misbelief, what
would you implement?
Speaker 4 (36:27):
So there's all kinds of simple things to implement, And
let's take Facebook as an example, but it doesn't it
doesn't have to be Facebook. I would ask people to
separate between facts and opinions. So when you generate something
or so, just tell me fact and opinion. That's one.
(36:49):
And the second thing I would do is I would
when people like something, I would pop up a window
and say, are you sure this is the truth? Because
liking something it's a very ambiguous statement. Are you saying
it's ridiculous? Are you saying it's true? Are you saying
it's interesting? I was saying it might be true. What
(37:11):
exactly are you say? So I think that I would
I would solve those two ambiguities if I could do
something else. So I had a lot of discussion with
the social media networks when I was I started really
bothering when I started getting death threats.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I got death threats almost every day for two years.
Duke where I teach, they got some very frightening letters
and that they had to refer to the authorities. It
was a complex periit and I talked to lots of
those people.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
By the way it terms that I could convince that
it's against against just policy standards to threaten someone.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
And one of the interesting thing.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
That is happening is that people don't understand this reputation.
So imagine again Facebook, and imagine it. You start posting
things that people appose, people say, this is this is fair.
What happen is your reputation goes down. So imagine you
have one hundred thousand followers and when you post something,
(38:18):
ten percent of them get it, and then people start
complaining about you. So your reputation goes down. It doesn't
go to ten percent, it goes to nine percent or
eight percent. What do you see as an information generating engine?
You see less likes, so you said to yourself, let
me get more aggressive. So ironically, the solution that they
(38:42):
have is actually doing the opposite. But I think the
easiest thing to do is not allow bots. Think about
X versus LinkedIn, Like if you came from out of space,
you would say, these are not the same universe. I
(39:04):
think what's happening here sin is what's happening here. One
is allowing bots and anonymity. One doesn't allow bots and anonymity.
Things change very very quickly. So anyway, I think there's
lots of little things we can do. And and when
I started writing this book, I promised the publisher a
(39:24):
chapter on solutions. I don't have a chapter on solutions.
I have a chapter on you know, hopefully helpful. I
think there are solutions, but they are at the regulator level.
So all the all the media company can get together
and self regulate. The regulate can regulate them. But I
think there are lots of things that we could do.
(39:46):
We as the people need to decide we care enough
and it's important enough to act it. I don't think
I don't think it's impossible, but we need to suffer
enough from that to make it a priority, and I
think we getting there.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So I have a quick tangential question here, which is
sometimes on social media we see people who pedal conspiracy theories,
and I don't know if they actually believe it. I
don't know if it's a misbelief or if it's something
that works for them. This is consistent with what you
said about the likes and the algorithms and so.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
On, So how do you classify them.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
They're not exactly misbelievers, they're just taking advantage of other people.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
So there are lots of actors with bad intentions. So
there are states that are meddling in our life, and
there are bad actors that do things either financially or
for a social reason. Just for example, a real battle
(40:48):
happening in Wikipedia. People are trying to rewrite the world's history.
I think what I read is that in twenty twenty four,
the item that was most edited and re edited on
Wikipedia as Hitler. It has been dead for a while.
The fact that the debates are still going on tells
(41:09):
you something about So there are groups that are fighting
about reframing the truth, and there are groups that are
trying to create havoc. And yes, there are lots of
bad actors. So I focused on the psychology of not
people with bad intentions, but the people with good intentions
(41:31):
who get get dragged into it. But you're absolutely right
that there's lots of bad intentions. Like if you look
at COVID, there was one chiropractor in Florida that produced,
like I don't know exactly, but about ten percent of
the misinformation on COVID came, okay, came from him. At
(41:52):
some point it was ten percent. But there's lots of
very strange incentive in this in this world.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
So now you've said in your book that under the
right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
And presumably there are small.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Things that you and I have misbeliefs about. So what
do we do about that? How do we put checks
on ourselves?
Speaker 4 (42:15):
I don't think we can fix wrong beliefs. That's really hard.
We need to trust lots of things. I ask my
friends usually, I said, what do you believe in global warming?
All of my friends I believe it's a real problem.
And then I said, what if you read and they
(42:37):
said the UN report? And they said, did you really
read the UN report? And they said the summary? And
there's a lot of our beliefs that are based on trusts,
are based on partial information and there's just too much
to know. There's too much. No, I don't think we
can fix that. I think the real key is intellectual humility.
(42:57):
I think the real key is to recognize that we
know something, we believe something, but to be open to
the fact that we're wrong. And I think that's what
we try to do in scientific training for ourselves and
for students, is to embrace uncertainty. So if you ask
(43:18):
me what to do for ourselves and what I would do,
like if I could include a new course at the
University of high school, it wouldn't be media literacy because
that I think changes too quickly. It would be intellectual humility.
I think that's that's kind of a key. The key
for ourselves, and the other thing is is when we
(43:39):
talk to people, adopt the perspective of I'm trying to
learn here together. What's the point of fighting like it
doesn't work? Like it's an unbelievable thing. Right, people have
zero success Right, that's what you want to spend your
time on something you has zero success rate.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
It's unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (43:57):
So I think I think figuring out discussions of how
to get to a new shirt understanding and intellectual humility
are tightly linked, and that's what we need to do
for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
That was my interview with behavioral economists Dan Arili, and
to me, what surfaces is that misbelief is not just
something we can write off to a few misguided people,
but instead it's a feature of the human mind under
the right conditions. Our brains are prediction engines, and they're
constantly trying to weave data into a coherent picture of
(44:35):
the world, and they usually do a reasonable job, but
that same machinery can lead us astray when stress rises,
or when trust e roads, or when someone does something
mean to us, or when our social circles shift. In
these moments, the brain reaches for the explanations that are
comforting and coherent enough, and ones that feel like they
(44:58):
restore agency. It's of course tempting to imagine that we
are immune. In other words, that misbelief is something that
happens to other people. But with enough pressure or uncertainty
or emotional vulnerability, presumably every one of us has the
cognitive ingredients to slide into narratives that distort reality. And
understanding how this all happens matters for our communities, for
(45:22):
our scientific institutions, for keeping a healthy democracy, because when
misbelief takes root, it can reduce trust and create.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Entire parallel worlds of meaning.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
So the challenge is not to correct bad facts, because
that's often a fool's errand what we should be doing
is always working to understand the emotional terrain beneath the stories.
If we approach misbelief with humility and understanding, we can
do better not only at helping others, but recognizing the
subtle ways that our own beliefs are shaped by our communities,
(45:59):
our identity, these and our emotions. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
(46:20):
David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously
falls 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
(00:26):
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 Arieli, who has thought a lot about misbelief.
For him, it's a scientific question, but also an interest
(00:47):
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 pounds
universe to understand how we see the world even when
it doesn't match the facts. Today we're diving into one
(01:22):
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
(01:43):
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 fan These are
all meaningful forces in our culture. Now, one thing to
(02:05):
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, for example, Socrates's execution
and who is really behind it? Or the same thing
happened later with the death of Alexander the Great and
then with the assassination of Julius Caesar. Now, if this
(02:26):
reaction to a national tragedy sounds familiar, it's because it
is throughout history. Every time there's a significant event, people
jump in with their hypotheses, and these live in a
spectrum from reasonable to outlandish. I'm not sure if there's
really an upper limit to how wild the hypotheses are
likely to get. Now, this all would be nothing but
(02:46):
an academic interest, except that often crazy ideas are capable
of tilting elections or fracturing political alliances, or influencing things from.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Public health to wars.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Okay, so whenever we look at historical features that are
present in every generation like this, it tells us we're
not looking at some local cultural phenomenon or some consequence
of social media. Instead, we're looking at some issue about
how brains naturally work and what their failure modes are.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
The general story.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Is that the brain's job is to make good predictions
about the world, to reduce uncertainty, to create coherence from chaos,
and to generate frameworks that make us feel safe and oriented.
But under stress, those systems can shift, emotions can become
louder than evidence, threat detection ramps up, Identity becomes a filter,
(03:43):
and into this vacuum come narratives that promise clarity. You
find communities that promise belonging or stories that give you
a clean explanation for why everything feels wrong. These narratives
are structured to be sticky. Once you take the first step,
the next one is easier, and before long, someone who
(04:04):
once trusted the people around them or the institutions around
them might find themselves trapped in a self reinforcing ecosystem
of mistrust. Now, I have my own take on conspiracy theories,
which you can hear in episode sixty six from last year.
But recently, my friend and colleague Dan Arieli wrote a
book called Misbelief Now. Dan is a behavioral economist at
(04:28):
Duke University who has spent his career studying how humans
make decisions, why we often get things wrong and predictable ways,
and the ways in which our circumstances shape our judgment.
You may know him from his book Predictably Irrational or
his other excellent books, and you might also know him
from his enormous body of research over the years. Nan
(04:50):
is an expert in rationality and trust and incentives, and
this gives him a rare vantage point into why people
fall into conspiracy thinking. His book Misbelief goes further. It's
a scientific deep dive, but it's also a personal story
as well. Here in a minute. It starts with his
experience of getting targeted with crazy COVID era conspiracy theories,
(05:14):
where some people accused him online of collaborating with pharmaceutical
companies to destroy humanity with COVID. Now, it goes without
saying that Dan's research hopes to save humanity, not destroy it.
But here's the thing, because he's a super thoughtful person,
one of the results of being on the barrel end
of this was a fascination with the process by which
(05:37):
people take on beliefs, beliefs about other people or the
news media or whatever. He became entranced with the ways
that people go down a funnel of beliefs to arrive
in a place that's unrecognizable. So here's my interview with
Dan Rilly. So, Dan, you've spent in your career studying rationality,
(06:01):
but misbelief is more personal. So what you started down
this road of trying to understand why people have conspiracy theories?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So first of all, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
And usually when I write books, I finished the research
and then I write about it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
This was a very, very different story.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
So COVID started and I dropped everything and I was
just doing COVID related things.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And COVID of courses is.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
A problem with biology, but it's also a problem of
social science. Domestic violence increased by about nine hundred percent.
What do you do with remote work, What do you
do with kids studying remotely? What do you do with
furlough with firing people, What do you do with government subsidies?
Lots and lots of big questions. Do you give people
finds for not putting masks?
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And so on?
Speaker 4 (06:57):
And I dropped everything and I just did COVID and
I was just trying to do research, trying to understand,
trying to give advice whatever I could. And about five
months into it, I get an email from a woman
I once helped with the presentation she was doing for
her company, and.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
She said, Dan, what's wrong? Would you what happened? How
did you become that person?
Speaker 4 (07:23):
You know? I don't think very much about this email.
We get lots of emails, let's send back what do
you mean? And I get back an email with lists
of links that tell me that I'm an awful person.
For example, there was one link that showed a video
of me in the burn department saying that I was
burned when I was eighteen, through seventy percent of my
(07:44):
body through almost three years in hospital. True, but then
the video went to say that because of that, I
started hating healthy people and that's why I joined the
cabal to try and kill as many people possible. First
with COVID and then with the vaccine there was no
vaccine yet there were videos of me in Nazi uniform
concentration care.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Like.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
The amount of things were incredible, and my first reaction
was to set them straight, like this must be some misunderstanding.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
How can that be?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I wake up every day trying to do the best
I can for the world with this very very difficult pandemic,
and these people think I'm evil, Like, how can that be?
But I thought better of it, and I said, let
me call two PR experts and asked what would they do.
People are experts in this, and they said, don't touch it.
(08:38):
And I was very proud that I called them, but
they couldn't follow their advice. You know, imagine, imagine somebody
came to you and said, David, I know that you're
just an awful person, and here's all the things you've done.
It like feels Anyway, I spend a month trying to
convince people.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
It was awful. It was awful because I showed people
my calendar. People thought I had the contract with Pfizer.
I said, look, I'll show you a way tax with hers.
It was incredible. These people are so convinced.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
Anyway, I spent a month trying to convince them, and
I failed terribly felt but in the meantime, the anger
against me increased further and I started getting death threats.
And then I said, okay, I'm not convincing anybody.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Let me stop that. But I truly think that there's
a big topic here that I need to understand. You know,
I'm a social.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Scientist for a reason, and you know there's something people say, Okay,
I believe the earth is flat. Okay, but when somebody
comes to you and say I know something about you,
and he said, no, no, no, I don't have a contract
with Pfiser. How can you say that I have one?
I had to study this. So the next two years
I spent. I started by talking to the same people
(10:02):
who are my accusers, and I called them up and
I said, look, forget about me. I want to understand
your journey. Tell me what happened, like like, you started
with something, At what point did you become somebody with
very very different beliefs?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
What was the trigger? What happened?
Speaker 4 (10:19):
And I try to understand the journey that people move
from being, you know, believing the normal things that people
believe in society to become I call the misbelievers, people
who view the world not just believe in something that
is not correct, but view the world from that lens.
Because the people who who believed that did not just
(10:43):
believe that there was a cabalance so on, they looked at.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Everything through that through that lens.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
And psychologically I divided into four parts emotion, stress, cognition, personality,
and social And the stress part is the first thing
where you ask yourself, why would somebody wake up in
the morning and they have a choice. They can believe
(11:14):
in the benevolent God that is taking care of us
and helps us, and you.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Don't need to worry and everything has a purpose.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Versus believing that there's a cabau there's a hugely powerful
group of people who are trying to hurt them, poison them,
getting their kids not to have kids so they don't
have grandchildren, trying to all kinds of control. Why would
somebody want to believe that? It is a very very
strange set of belief. And what I found is that
(11:43):
stress is the answer. So that when people are saying,
I don't understand the world. I thought things were supposed
to go this way. Why am I hurting? Why am
I hurting more than other people? Why am I not
getting my share of.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Things like that?
Speaker 4 (12:01):
We want an answer, and the answer better has a
villain and a story, and I'll give you kind of
a kind of My two favorite studies of this. One
is a very old study in anthropology where they looked
at tribes and they look at tribes that fish in
the ocean versus tribe that fish in lakes. And of
(12:25):
course the tribe that fish in the lake have much
more predictable life. The lake is basically the same every day.
The ocean has huge fluctuations. Which tribes have more superstitions
or the ocean?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Why?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Because it gives you a feeling of control, feeling of control.
Or I'll give you another example. And you know these
studies about white noise, not not hearing, but sight. So
you have a picture with black and white thoughts randomly organized.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Like an all television screening.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
Yeah, and you show them, You say do you see
an image? And people say yes, no, yes, and no.
It turns out that as you increase stress, for example,
you go skydiving, the more stress you have, the more
patterns you see. Now, why does this happen? Imagine you're
an animal in the jungle and you think there's a predator.
(13:20):
What is your mind doing? It goes into hyper drives, saying, well,
these two leaves are moving, maybe there's a tiger there.
You overinterpret patterns because you want to make sense of
the work. So the first thing to understand is that
when people feel stressed, like kind of learned helplessness, kind
(13:41):
of stressed, I don't understand the world. Things are not
going my way, there's a temptation to solve that problem
by creating a belief that says, I now understand what's
going on. It's the bad entities creating this bad outcome.
You can't say, oh, something bad happen and to be
I believe this is a benevolent God because you're trying
(14:03):
to explain the bad thing. And then from there are
things a theory we can talk about this, but that
that's the starting point.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We say, why would people start believing that?
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And so walk us through the funnel that people go
through as they go from having some idea all the
way to full blown belief.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Yeah, so you start with this beginning, I'm stressed, things
are not going well. What is going on? You start,
you go YouTube, you try to understand, you find some
beginning of a journey, and that gives you comfort. Shorten,
it gives you comfort because you say, oh, now I
understand it's not my fault, it's these people and so on,
and then things can't keepe. So they continue through cognitive processes,
(14:46):
and there's a few of them, but let's talk about one.
And so you know, first of all, we all know
that we don't view all the information.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We view the information that agrees.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
With us, right We what we like from the media
is to tell us, oh, you're really smart, you know
all this, you know everything, but here's something extra new,
but you're very genuinely correct. We don't want to be
confronted with things that would say you're an idiot, you
have no idea what you're talking about the world is
very different than what you think. So we look for
things that as our confirmation pots. So that's the beginning.
(15:20):
But one of the interesting version of the cognitive part
is what is called the illusion of explanatory depth. And
the way I kind of tested it in one experiment
was with flash toilets. So I show people a flash toilet.
Do you understand how a flash toilet works? Absolutely? On
(15:41):
the scale from one to seven, almost seven. That's wonderful.
Here all the pieces for a perfectly brand new flash toilet,
please assemble it. What do you think is the percentage
of people who manage to assemble it? Zero? And then
I asked them, and how well do you understand flash toilet?
And say, you know what, not so much. Now, think
(16:03):
about it. In a regular conversation, we go at people,
we argue, they argue, We argue, they argue at the
end of those so they we think about you, all
your debate in the last three years, how many of
them ended when the other person is saying, you know what.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
I've never heard such good arguments. I'm changing my opinion completely.
You're absolutely correct.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Right, zero small number?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
And how many ended the other way when you said
to somebody, you know what.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I'm being good. It's a really interesting thing because when
we discuss things with people, the mechanism is that we
counter argue when we say things. We say things, and
when they see things we already counter argue. I think
that's kind of.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I don't know if it was always the case like this,
but we're not working toward joint new understand ending. We're
really kind of protecting our position. And what the illusion
of explanatory depth says is, don't worry about the facts initially,
worry about overconfidence. So with the flash dollar, don't worry
(17:15):
about the facts, worry about crush people's overconfidence first, and
then we can talk later. So the strategy is to
say people are resisting facts because of their overconfidence, and
what we need to do for persuasion is to first
think about them the overconfryt.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So a lot of listeners are probably familiar with the
Dunning Kruger effect, which is the less you know about
a topic, the more confident you are that you know It's.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
It's not the less, it's it's.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
A function where it's like when you know something, you're
the most dangerous. It's when you know nothing, you know
you know nothing, When you know a lot, you know
you know a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
The danger then in Kruger effect is when you know
a little.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Like the metaphor is like first year undergrad, you finished
right the introductory to biology textbook, Okay, I know biologic
yes exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
And by the way, with the illusion of explanatory depth,
and one I always uses the electoral college, I asked people, hey,
do you.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Know how that works. They say, yeah, now that works.
I said, great, can you explain it to me?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Nobody is nobody so far has been able to really
tell me all the way down.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
And by the way we used it with the Trump elections,
some people thought that he that you won. And we
came to people and we said, you think the Trump
on the election, Yes, you think the elections were stolen. Yes,
explain to us how, but walk us through the details.
People go into the booth what happens. And people did
not say, oh, you know, he really lost the election,
(18:46):
but they said, you know what, I don't know how
it really happened. So the illusional it's a very important
issue to go into the mechanism and get people to
be more modest about their beliefs.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Does that actually change anybody's mind? Now, let's say you
felt the election was stolen and you don't know how
because you feel like, look, it's a big world, hundreds
of millions of people doing things in the United States.
I can't know all the details, and yet I have
reasona believe that's true. Would increase intellectual humility do anything
in that situation, or would a person still say, look,
(19:19):
there's no way for me to know the answer to that,
But I have other reasons to believe this, So.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Let me say that you're right. So intellectual humility is
the is the key. And of course we teach our
students to say not knowing is great and not knowing
is a very good thing.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
So I would say that I believe it very strongly.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
I believe that if you think about misbelief and you say,
there's the belief in something that is not true, and
there's adopting it as a perspective on life. So I
think the earth is flat, and I'm looking at everything
from the perspective that the earth is flat. I think
that the illusion of explanatory depth of intellectual humility would
(20:05):
reduce the second part first, So I would not look
at the world from that lens initially because I'm not
the moment, you know, one hundred percent sure it's not
a lens from which you view things. But this is
kind of a general argument. I'll tell you what I
have data about. So I have now a site where
(20:27):
I invite Antisemites to talk to me Solemn Israeli and
Jewish I. October seventh was terrible in all kinds of ways.
But when October seven happened, I decided to come to
Israel as quickly as possible, and the flight I could
(20:47):
take came through London, and I was in London during
the first prop Palestinian demonstration, and this was before Israel
went to Gaza, and there were already a lot of
anger told Israel. Even though Israel just suffered a huge
attack and didn't do anything. My daughter, who was in
(21:09):
high school, almost got canceled. Her mother, my ex wife,
is Indian, so my daughter is, you know, half Jewish Israeli,
half Indian and Hindu, both my kids. But she was
at the risk of being canceled just just by having
this affiliation. And she didn't vote for she doesn't have
(21:32):
a citizenship in Israel. She didn't vote for the Antennao government,
and nobody in her family did. But she felt unbelievably attacked,
and the antisemitism part.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
Was very, very surprising.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
So anyway, so I opened this website that I'm trying
to understand antisemitism, and I invite people to nominate antisemites
that I should talk to, and then once or twice
a week I have discussions with anti Semites, and I
don't talk to anti Zionists. I don't talk to people
who just have complains about the Nathaniel government, which I.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Do as well.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
I talk to people who define themselves as antisemite, and
I do with them this exercise we just talked about.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I say, I'm not trying to convince you.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
Just tell me, like, when was the first time you
heard negative things about Jewish people? In most cases it
comes from early childhood and how did it develop and
what else did you learn and who did you meet?
And I we basically talk about the evolution of the idea.
And I would say that almost everybody at the end
(22:36):
of the conversation says, I still am antisemite, but I
know that not all Jewish people are like this, So
there is And by the way, one of the triggers
that I think is very interesting is when people recognize
that they got this idea very early on at home.
When somebody says I heard it when I was, you know,
(22:59):
before Elmntory school for my father, who said a few things,
and I said, okay, so did I really come to
that conclusion or was I given it? So for me,
kind of this exercise of where did you get this idea?
When did you test it? When did you test reality?
And so on?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Seems to be very good for.
Speaker 4 (23:21):
People not to change your opinion, but say, you know what,
I know it's more nuanced than that. And that's really
all I can hope for in a discussion, to say
I'm more nuanced in that.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Okay, so many people imagine that conspiracy theorists are uneducated,
but in fact your research shows they can be perfectly
smart people.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
So what's your take on that.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Yeah, first of all, I don't like the term conspiracy theorists,
and it's derogatory by now, so I adopt the term
misbelievers and again, and the other thing about it is
that it's not just believing in something that is wrong.
It's about adopting that as a perspective. I think it's
(24:16):
very important. So, you know, when I ask people what
is the least harmful wrong belief, people say the Earth
is flat, because if you don't believe in COVID, you
might in fact other people, you might do all kinds
of things. If you believe that the Earth is flat,
you're not going to change the curvature of the Earth.
(24:36):
But it turns out that people who believe the Earth
is flat that belief expands because they believe that the
US government is lying and NASA is lying, and every
airplane pilot knows the truth, and they're lying, and every
government knows the truth, they're lying.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And then no satellites.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
And and they look at everything through what else are
they doing to So it's it's a really for me.
The issue is not just I don't believe in x is.
There's a sense of perspective in everything. One of the
women we talked to for the book who really hated
(25:12):
me the beginning and decided to hate me a little
less after COVID she called me up.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
She had cancer.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
She had cancer, and she thought she would consult me
about taking and not taking treatment. I was very much
in favor of treatment, and she decided not to take it,
and she passed away about a year later. But she
expanded her view to the whole medical system. Everything was corrupt,
(25:46):
everything was wrong, everything was poison.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
And so on.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Now, the thing about your question was it's us versus there.
And you know, it's very easy to say, oh, us
the reasonable people, smart, intelligent, understand truth from not and
they're them and so but the reality is that we
(26:11):
have not had the stress some of them had we
had not had the initial conditions for it, and we
can't judge. We can't judge what would have happened to us,
like what like what sort of initial conditions. So somebody
who lost their job when other people don't. Some people
(26:33):
who had a terrible personal tragedy and they say why
why me? Some people who invest in the market like
they were supposed to and stock goes down and they.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Lose, They lose a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So when you think about this initial condition of what
gets people to start looking at something else. So almost
everybody has in their close circuit somebody that five years ago,
ten years ago, you would say, me and this other
person understand the world in the same way. And now
they look at that person and say, I just don't
understand how.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
We do this.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Now go back to that person when they started their journey.
Most likely there was some stressful event that a person
wanted to deflect play and then and then they start,
and then they start the journey. And the journey also
has a lot of frandomness. What do you encounter on YouTube?
(27:33):
Who do you talk to?
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So you know, when we.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Let's say you're in a workplace and there's lots of
people you respect and they have different opinions. You have
to be exposed to very different opinions. Move to COVID
your home. You don't talk about chit chat, you don't
talk about other things. Everything you talk at work is
just over zoom about the work. You don't get exposed
to other people. You join social media, you meet only people. Okay,
(28:02):
now we're moving to the last part.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
The part that.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Consolidates those beliefs, and that's very important whether you move
there or not, is the part in which you leave
your friends.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
And you join a different group.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
The social aspect to it.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
The social aspect very hard to if you get into
that part, very hard to escape. So you feel ostracized
from your friends, you go into another group that accepts you.
Then you become more extreme, and then things move from there.
And by the time, like if you think about the
(28:43):
range of opinions, it kind of keeps intellectual humility. Okay,
I think this, but you think this, and I respect you,
so I'm not going to be one hundred percent sure.
The moment you moved into a group that just has
that and uses extreme opinions and signaling, now it becomes
very very tough, very very tough. So I would say,
(29:05):
if you have somebody in your life that is a misbeliever,
what you really want to do is stop them early
before they change their social circle to include just people
who believe those thicks. There's one very interesting element in
all of this called she Bullet. So the story of
(29:29):
she Bullet is that there were this war in the
Bible between two tribes. After the war, they settled on
two sides of the river. But you know, the river
is small, you can move from side to another. So
you walk around and you meet people, and you want
to know if they're your tribe or the other tribe.
And it just so happened that these two tribes pronounce
the name of the plant she bollet slightly differently. One
(29:52):
of them said she Bollet. One of them said sea Bollet.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So I meet you.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
I said, hey, you, how do you this plant? If
you say the way I'd say it, you're from my tribe.
If you say the way the other tribe is saying it,
I have to chase your way or try to injury.
And we now use these terms she bullet for a
discussion that looks like it's about the facts, but It's
really about identity. Because when I show you the plant
(30:20):
and I ask you what any of this plant? Do
I care about the anair of the plant?
Speaker 3 (30:23):
No.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Now, think about how much of the discussion in our
world are she Bullet are really like President Trump in
the election saying the immigrants are eating cats and dogs.
Is it a statement that he's indicating as truth or
is she Bollet saying, look at my identity, I'm willing
(30:45):
to say such extreme things against immigrants as a signaling
from my identity. So the social element, especially in social media,
and especially when you want to be seen above the fault,
basically creates this pressure to become more and more extremely
what you say.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
It's a very confusing kind of discussion.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
Imagine you look today at the news and you try
to figure out what people are saying that it's real,
and what people are saying that is she Bullet that
is just singing from.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
The river to the sea.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
I mean, it's the people who say from the river
to the sea really mean let's kill everybody in Israel,
get them get I don't think so some people do,
but I think for most people it's not a statement
that is real. By the way, the same thing is true.
Lots of lots of Israel's saying statement that are that
(31:47):
are shep bullet and our are not taken like this.
So but but the thing about she bullet is that
once you get into that speech, it is very confusing,
and it's also gets things to go into a downward
spiral of what was what was outrageous a year ago
and next year you might need something during it. So
(32:10):
that's kind of the final start with stress, cognition, some
personality within touch on, and then the social element is
kind of what seals the deal. And maybe the last
thing to say about all of this is that for me,
the whole thing is that it kills trust.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
Imagine that was COVID twenty six January.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
We're going to get new COVID. How prepared are we
for that? And I think we're less prepared for that
because we can't work together. Everything is political. They're like,
there's so many things. COVID is an example, but there's
so many things that we have to work together. Like
imagine ten years ago they asked us what are the
(32:57):
big problems of the world. We would say poverty, We
say a list of things. I think now misinformation and
polarization is at the top, because how can we agree
on any action If we can't agree, we have to
we have to get the shared understanding, caring, seeing each
(33:20):
other with mutual interest moving forward, and we don't have
any of those, you know.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I just want to come back to this social aspect
because I think there are a couple of other social
aspects that are.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That are important but are rarely talked about.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
One is, if you're a conspiracy theorist or a misbeliever,
you can get to show up at the cocktail party
and say something and other people think you're pretty smart.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Possibly at least you believe that.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
People think that because you're the guy with the answers
and you get to explain something that everyone else has
been confused about.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
So so we started with stress and we say you
feel hard done by the moment, you feel you have
more knowledge than other people. You basically reverse that. So
the misbelievers caught us sheep for example, They're saying, you
think that I'm not doing well, but really what's happening
(34:18):
is you don't understand what's going on, and I'm the
one who understand it, So I absolutely agree with you.
The stories people look for are stories that allow them
to feel more in control but also more knowledgeable, superior
rather than inferior.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yes, And actually this is consistent with what the second thing.
I talked to some kid who had gone pretty far
down the rabbit hole where he felt that everything he.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Saw on the news and the papers and so on
was lying to him.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
And he explained to me that he felt a sense
of success at coming to understand, to see through the
veil to learn the truth. He felt really empowered by
that was the sense of you know, okay, everyone's lying
to me, and I solve the puzzle.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
QAnon QAnon has been an unbelievable like like somebody like
somebody compared it to a game. It's really it's really
a game. There were there's a Q and there were
people who are interpreting, and there were drops, and there
was and a You got to feel to be one
of the elite group that understands how the world works
(35:28):
compared to everybody else. It's a very very satisfying feeling.
You know, you and I when we do an experiment
and we find out something new, we feel at the
top of the world in this world. And and by
the way you want a misbelief about something that updates,
like there's more news, there's more information that there's a
keeping keeping on top of that. But yes, but it's
(35:49):
a very it's a very good feeling of superiority, control, understanding,
being unique, very very important.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
So if you could design one or two features in
our information environment and social media or the way we
get our news to lessen the degree of misbelief, what
would you implement?
Speaker 4 (36:27):
So there's all kinds of simple things to implement, And
let's take Facebook as an example, but it doesn't it
doesn't have to be Facebook. I would ask people to
separate between facts and opinions. So when you generate something
or so, just tell me fact and opinion. That's one.
(36:49):
And the second thing I would do is I would
when people like something, I would pop up a window
and say, are you sure this is the truth? Because
liking something it's a very ambiguous statement. Are you saying
it's ridiculous? Are you saying it's true? Are you saying
it's interesting? I was saying it might be true. What
(37:11):
exactly are you say? So I think that I would
I would solve those two ambiguities if I could do
something else. So I had a lot of discussion with
the social media networks when I was I started really
bothering when I started getting death threats.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I got death threats almost every day for two years.
Duke where I teach, they got some very frightening letters
and that they had to refer to the authorities. It
was a complex periit and I talked to lots of
those people.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
By the way it terms that I could convince that
it's against against just policy standards to threaten someone.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
And one of the interesting thing.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
That is happening is that people don't understand this reputation.
So imagine again Facebook, and imagine it. You start posting
things that people appose, people say, this is this is fair.
What happen is your reputation goes down. So imagine you
have one hundred thousand followers and when you post something,
(38:18):
ten percent of them get it, and then people start
complaining about you. So your reputation goes down. It doesn't
go to ten percent, it goes to nine percent or
eight percent. What do you see as an information generating engine?
You see less likes, so you said to yourself, let
me get more aggressive. So ironically, the solution that they
(38:42):
have is actually doing the opposite. But I think the
easiest thing to do is not allow bots. Think about
X versus LinkedIn, Like if you came from out of space,
you would say, these are not the same universe. I
(39:04):
think what's happening here sin is what's happening here. One
is allowing bots and anonymity. One doesn't allow bots and anonymity.
Things change very very quickly. So anyway, I think there's
lots of little things we can do. And and when
I started writing this book, I promised the publisher a
(39:24):
chapter on solutions. I don't have a chapter on solutions.
I have a chapter on you know, hopefully helpful. I
think there are solutions, but they are at the regulator level.
So all the all the media company can get together
and self regulate. The regulate can regulate them. But I
think there are lots of things that we could do.
(39:46):
We as the people need to decide we care enough
and it's important enough to act it. I don't think
I don't think it's impossible, but we need to suffer
enough from that to make it a priority, and I
think we getting there.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So I have a quick tangential question here, which is
sometimes on social media we see people who pedal conspiracy theories,
and I don't know if they actually believe it. I
don't know if it's a misbelief or if it's something
that works for them. This is consistent with what you
said about the likes and the algorithms and so.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
On, So how do you classify them.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
They're not exactly misbelievers, they're just taking advantage of other people.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
So there are lots of actors with bad intentions. So
there are states that are meddling in our life, and
there are bad actors that do things either financially or
for a social reason. Just for example, a real battle
(40:48):
happening in Wikipedia. People are trying to rewrite the world's history.
I think what I read is that in twenty twenty four,
the item that was most edited and re edited on
Wikipedia as Hitler. It has been dead for a while.
The fact that the debates are still going on tells
(41:09):
you something about So there are groups that are fighting
about reframing the truth, and there are groups that are
trying to create havoc. And yes, there are lots of
bad actors. So I focused on the psychology of not
people with bad intentions, but the people with good intentions
(41:31):
who get get dragged into it. But you're absolutely right
that there's lots of bad intentions. Like if you look
at COVID, there was one chiropractor in Florida that produced,
like I don't know exactly, but about ten percent of
the misinformation on COVID came, okay, came from him. At
(41:52):
some point it was ten percent. But there's lots of
very strange incentive in this in this world.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
So now you've said in your book that under the
right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
And presumably there are small.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Things that you and I have misbeliefs about. So what
do we do about that? How do we put checks
on ourselves?
Speaker 4 (42:15):
I don't think we can fix wrong beliefs. That's really hard.
We need to trust lots of things. I ask my
friends usually, I said, what do you believe in global warming?
All of my friends I believe it's a real problem.
And then I said, what if you read and they
(42:37):
said the UN report? And they said, did you really
read the UN report? And they said the summary? And
there's a lot of our beliefs that are based on trusts,
are based on partial information and there's just too much
to know. There's too much. No, I don't think we
can fix that. I think the real key is intellectual humility.
(42:57):
I think the real key is to recognize that we
know something, we believe something, but to be open to
the fact that we're wrong. And I think that's what
we try to do in scientific training for ourselves and
for students, is to embrace uncertainty. So if you ask
(43:18):
me what to do for ourselves and what I would do,
like if I could include a new course at the
University of high school, it wouldn't be media literacy because
that I think changes too quickly. It would be intellectual humility.
I think that's that's kind of a key. The key
for ourselves, and the other thing is is when we
(43:39):
talk to people, adopt the perspective of I'm trying to
learn here together. What's the point of fighting like it
doesn't work? Like it's an unbelievable thing. Right, people have
zero success Right, that's what you want to spend your
time on something you has zero success rate.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
It's unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (43:57):
So I think I think figuring out discussions of how
to get to a new shirt understanding and intellectual humility
are tightly linked, and that's what we need to do
for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
That was my interview with behavioral economists Dan Arili, and
to me, what surfaces is that misbelief is not just
something we can write off to a few misguided people,
but instead it's a feature of the human mind under
the right conditions. Our brains are prediction engines, and they're
constantly trying to weave data into a coherent picture of
(44:35):
the world, and they usually do a reasonable job, but
that same machinery can lead us astray when stress rises,
or when trust e roads, or when someone does something
mean to us, or when our social circles shift. In
these moments, the brain reaches for the explanations that are
comforting and coherent enough, and ones that feel like they
(44:58):
restore agency. It's of course tempting to imagine that we
are immune. In other words, that misbelief is something that
happens to other people. But with enough pressure or uncertainty
or emotional vulnerability, presumably every one of us has the
cognitive ingredients to slide into narratives that distort reality. And
understanding how this all happens matters for our communities, for
(45:22):
our scientific institutions, for keeping a healthy democracy, because when
misbelief takes root, it can reduce trust and create.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Entire parallel worlds of meaning.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
So the challenge is not to correct bad facts, because
that's often a fool's errand what we should be doing
is always working to understand the emotional terrain beneath the stories.
If we approach misbelief with humility and understanding, we can
do better not only at helping others, but recognizing the
subtle ways that our own beliefs are shaped by our communities,
(45:59):
our identity, these and our emotions. Go to eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
(46:20):
David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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