![Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by [Mercier, Hugo]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41m8paJ6huL._SY346_.jpg)
As a big fan of Mercier and Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason, I was excited about the publication of this book. If you are not familiar with The Enigma of Reason, please feel free to skip to the paragraph after next. If you’re curious, then read on.
One of the reasons I found The Enigma of Reason so appealing was that it had a unique quality of being both scholarly yet unconventional. Somehow it was both dry yet electrifying. Although it devoted many (if not most) of its pages to rather technical aspects of cognitive science, it also made fascinating historical and cultural observations, culminating with a genuinely literary essay on the nature of reason and its place in the lives and minds of some of our most profound thinkers. It had a quality that set it apart, intellectually. At very least, it resonated with me. Although Not Born Yesterday is excellent, it does not resonate with me the same way The Enigma of Reason did, and still does. If you understand what I'm saying and it concerns you, think of this as a 4/5 star book rather than a 5/5 star book.
Not Born Yesterday is nevertheless (see above) an outstanding work. Its tone, which is sustained evenly over its roughly 275 pages, generally falls somewhere between Daniel’s Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast And Slow and Malcom Gladwell’s Blink. Importantly, Mercier has a hard edge when it comes to what he’s best at discussing, which is cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to call this book “pop psychology,” at times it begins to feel like it is. Fortunately, however, Mercier’s 'edge', his deftness, directness and authoritativeness in discussing what he knows best, manages to come to the rescue each time the anecdotes start to feel Gladwellian. In addition to that, he provides the reader with about 30 pages of notes and 40 pages of references, not including the other 275 pages.
Mercier’s argument is clear from the title: humans are not as gullible as most of us often think. Because of the “the danger of communication” (31), Mercier argues that “the logic of evolution makes it essentially impossible for gullibility to be a stable trait” (46). “True gullibility,” he goes on to say, would lead “to the prompt collapse of human communication and cooperation” (29). Mercier argues that “Human communication is kept mostly reliable by a whole suite of cognitive processes—mechanisms of open vigilance—that minimize our exposure to unreliable signals and […] inflict costs on unreliable senders” (28). Much of the book is dedicated to exploring this “suite of cognitive processes.”
Mercier provides heaps of examples, case studies, and so on, to drive home his point, which is, again: “the masses” are not nearly as gullible as they seem, because gullibility is not adaptive.
Mercier even has a whole section (pages 262-265) titled “Gullible about Gullibility?” that is devoted to just that, namely, why so many people—even brilliant people—are gulled (and gull others) into thinking that human beings are, as the rule, gullible. Mercier seems to particularly relish smashing the commonly held link between unsophistication and credulity. Children of all ages, he makes clear, are often more shrewd than adults.
Here is one last longer quote, to share more of the tenor and tone of the book, as well as to reiterate the main idea:
“Far from being gullible, humans are endowed with dedicated cognitive mechanisms that allow them to carefully evaluate communicated information. Instead of blindly following prestigious individuals or the majority, we weigh many cues to decide what to believe, who knows best, who to trust, and what to feel. The multiple mass persuasion attempts witnessed since the dawn of history—from demagogues to advertisers—are no proof of human gullibility. On the contrary, the recurrent failures of these attempts attest to the difficulties of influencing people en masse” (14).
Lastly, I want to touch on the concept Mercier calls “open vigilance” and the idea of the evolutionary risks of simply talking to other people, the “danger of being misled and manipulated by communication” (30). Mercier is saying that there is a “suite” of cognitive processes that come not from some rosy, naive desire to trust and love, but instead from a hard-won, evolutionary need to doubt and survive. His argument here dovetails nicely with the main idea of his (and Sperber's) previous book The Enigma of Reason, which is essentially a more granular investigation of one of these “processes.” (“Reason” had multiple evolutionary purposes and reasoning for the sake of being reasonable or logical was not one of them.) According to evolution and Mercier, the purpose of all of these “processes” is to reproduce, and so on.
It might sound odd here, but I can’t shake the feeling that looming near Mercier’s thesis is George Steiner’s vastly underacknowledged masterpiece After Babel. In it Steiner ponders why the human race has evolved so many languages. If “the communication of information,” of ostensible and verifiable ‘facts’” is the primary purpose of human discourse, then why would so many languages get in the way of clear, direct, reasonable fact-sharing? I think Mercier is on to something here (whether he knows it or not), and I think Steiner, perhaps a scientist in the broadest sense, would be glad to see that Mercier and his colleagues have already begun seeking an answer to why, when using language, “we reject the empirical inevitability of the world.” (496) Gullibility enables this "empirical inevitability" the same way, analogously at least, speaking the same native language does. Not being able to understand another's language simply blocks intercourse. Why then did we evolve this way? Even more so, hearing the vaguest trace of an accent can hurl us into a kind of linguistic uncanny valley where all gullibility is immediately suspended and only pure evolutionary suspicion and caution burns, waiting for any and all possible threats to our survival.
- File Size: 2114 KB
- Print Length: 384 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (January 28, 2020)
- Publication Date: January 28, 2020
- Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B07W62V5WP
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#175,262 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #184 in Epistemology Philosophy
- #40 in Epistemology (Kindle Store)
- #291 in Social Psychology & Interactions
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