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http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160323-why-are-people-so-incredibly-
gullible
Why Are People So Incredibly Gullible?

Based on the research to date, Newman suggests our gut reactions swivel around just five simple questions:

* Does a fact come from a credible source?
* Do others believe it?
* Is there plenty of evidence to support it?
* Is it compatible with what I believe?
* Does it tell a good story?

It’s always worth asking whether you have thought carefully about the things you are reading and hearing. Or are you just being a cognitive miser, persuaded by biased feelings rather than facts? Some of your dearest opinions may have no more substance than the great banana hoax of the year 2000.- KIKI

An interesting article kiki, I suggest you post it in one of Sig's threads like the "Freedom in Ukraine" thread. There you will see a real cognitive miser in action.-ONEOFTHETHREESTOOGES

Obviously you didn't read the article. It explains how 'source' and 'number of people who believe' are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of a claim.- KIKI

"Source" is irrelevant to the truth of a claim? Haha you wish. Obviously you didn't understand the article.-ONEOFTHETHREESTOOGES

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Why do so many false beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence?

One, somewhat humbling, explanation is that we are all “cognitive misers” – to save time and energy, our brains use intuition rather than analysis.

As a simple example, quickly answer the following questions:

“How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”
“Margaret Thatcher was the president of what country?”

Between 10 and 50% of study participants presented with these questions fail to notice that it was Noah, not Moses, who built the Ark, and that Margaret Thatcher was the prime minster, not the president – even when they have been explicitly asked to note inaccuracies.

Known as the “Moses illusion”, this absentmindedness illustrates just how easily we miss the details of a statement, favouring the general gist in place of the specifics. Instead, we normally just judge whether it “feels” right or wrong before accepting or rejecting its message. “Even when we ‘know’ we should be drawing on facts and evidence, we just draw on feelings,” says Eryn Newman at the University of Southern California, whose forthcoming paper summarises the latest research on misinformation.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Apparently, autistics spot these errors rather easily. They don't "filter" well, and their emotion-based filters are defective; they tend to be very alive to their immediate input.

Maybe an autism "epidemic" isn't such a bad thing.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This discussion deserves not to be buried in the "Russian and Assad's War Crimes in Syria" thread.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60278&p=6

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you bring up an interesting point: Human survival typically depends on human interaction, not so much on alertness to the environment. Our attention is fixed on other humans since birth- our vision geared toward human-type faces and our hearing attuned to human-type speech-sounds. So of course our minds are also geared towards fitting in with the "human" environment, not the natural one, more so since our evolutionary past has intensified our self-domestication.

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Originally posted by kpo:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This discussion deserves not to be buried in the "Russian and Assad's War Crimes in Syria" thread.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60278&p=6

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Yes, this article deserves a thread of its own. I don't know why kiki posted it in the Russia war crimes thread; presumably because she thinks the evidence of Russia's/Assad's crimes is spurious, and that people are 'gullible' if they believe it.

I find it constantly entertaining how you and kiki are always hot on the latest psychological research of how political partisans fool themselves, and fall for misleading information, but you never think to apply it to yourselves.

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by THGRRI:

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Originally posted by kpo:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This discussion deserves not to be buried in the "Russian and Assad's War Crimes in Syria" thread.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60278&p=6

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Yes, this article deserves a thread of its own. I don't know why kiki posted it in the Russia war crimes thread; presumably because she thinks the evidence of Russia's/Assad's crimes is spurious, and that people are 'gullible' if they believe it.

I find it constantly entertaining how you and kiki are always hot on the latest psychological research of how political partisans fool themselves, and fall for misleading information, but you never think to apply it to yourselves.

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Says it all KPO.

" political partisans fool themselves, and fall for misleading information, but you never think to apply it to yourselves."

It's what we have been pointing out about SIG and 1kiki from the get go.

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Triple yep. I said that over a year ago to Beavis, "Yes, the US Gov is making a mess of many things and I disagree with many of it's actions... just like other governments including Russia. Don't you see the similarities?" But agenda driven and 'gullible' they've swallowed the Red pill and just won't or can't look at themselves. That's why I continue to point how amazing it is and how regular they complain about the very things they are guilty of. Uncanny. It's like the ethical side of their unconscious trying to communicate with them.

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Saying they found "a darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies" than has been previously suggested, a group of scientists say ritual human sacrifice promoted stratified social systems – and helped to sustain inherited class systems once they were established.

After comparing dozens of societies, the researchers found that ritualized human sacrifice was far more common in highly stratified societies than it was in egalitarian societies. Noting the high level of overlap between religious and political sectors in the societies, the scientists write, "human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a divinely sanctioned means of social control."

Acknowledging that their findings might be "unpalatable," the scientists say, "our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today."

For the study, researchers looked at 93 traditional Austronesian cultures – societies that share a family of languages and span from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Taiwan to New Zealand. For each one, they noted how segmented the society was — designating them egalitarian or either moderate or highly stratified — as well as the presence of human sacrifice in their rituals.

The work was done by psychologist Joseph Watts at the University of Auckland, along with scholars in social sciences and evolution from Germany and Australia; their findings were published in Nature on Monday.

While the cultures shared similarities in their language, they had a wide range of religious beliefs and observances. Many also practiced human sacrifice; the researchers laid out some of the reasons:

"Common occasions for human sacrifice in these societies included the breach of taboo or custom, the funeral of an important chief, and the consecration of a newly built house or boat. Ethnographic descriptions highlight that the sacrificial victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, and the instigators were of high social status, such as priests and chiefs."

As for how the sacrifices were carried out, the list includes "burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being crushed under a newly built canoe, being cut to pieces, as well as being rolled off the roof of a house and then decapitated."

Their findings, the researchers say, are "consistent with historical accounts that speculate that in order for human sacrifice to be exploited by social elites, there must first be social elites to exploit it."

The study is the latest modern attempt to understand the cultural role played by human sacrifices – rituals in which people were killed in the name of a supernatural entity. As the researchers note, such practices are known to have taken place "in early Germanic, Arab, Turkic, Inuit, American, Austronesian, African, Chinese and Japanese cultures."

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"Source" is irrelevant to the truth of a claim? Haha you wish. Obviously you didn't understand the article.

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I, also, fell for the "Moses illusion" and answered "two!", my favorite number, too quickly.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

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I, also, fell for the "Moses illusion" and answered "two!", my favorite number, too quickly.

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It's also worth noting that the question could be asked another way to trip people up. We don't know how many animals are there, there are still undiscovered species out there.

And also, to be fair, no one is going to stop and say "is this a trick question" when they're just perusing an internet article. I'm not really sure this can qualify as evidence for gullibility. Laziness maybe.

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You all live in a very scary world indeed. Ask me how I know....

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
ONEOFTHETHREESTOOGES spoke for all of them when it said

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"Source" is irrelevant to the truth of a claim? Haha you wish. Obviously you didn't understand the article. Just wanted to point out what an embarrassing moment that was, for it.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
And also, to be fair, no one is going to stop and say "is this a trick question" when they're just perusing an internet article. I'm not really sure this can qualify as evidence for gullibility. Laziness maybe.

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