Humans have intuitive and reflective beliefs. Often, these affect how we weigh and process our arguments and views. Listen to Hugo Mercier, Cognitive Scientist and Author of Not Born Yesterday, as he shares provocative findings from his books. 

In this episode, he and host Greg LaBlanc have fascinating conversations on what kind of environments shape our biases and what we choose to believe in. Don't miss their discussion on when and how to assess good and bad arguments to better our lives. 

Finally, tune in for their riveting exchange on how conversations and disagreements on belief affect social learning and progress. Some excellent insights were tackled to help listeners understand how the government, politicians, and brands use propaganda and ads to affect our reasoning and gain our trust.

Understanding Choice Blindness: Why We Contradict Our Own Argument When Presented as Coming from Others

"Choice blindness, which has been discovered by some Swedish psychologists. It's not surprising that I really want to establish that this is a very kind of well-established plaintiff by which it's very easy for people to be lied to in terms of what decisions they made. And so the prediction that we made was that people should be critical [...] and objective when it comes to other people's arguments—accepting good arguments and rejecting bad arguments. And that they shouldn't be quite lazy and lenient when it comes to their own arguments. For they should just accept anything as long as they thought everything themselves if you wanted to be able to evaluate your arguments in the more objective facts. The idea would be to be able to write something down and then turn off the part of your brain that recognizes the argument as your own. And then you'll be able to evaluate it more objectively and in a way. I mean, that's what happens to us when you've written something that a few years ago and you read it again, and it feels a bit frightening to you [...] When you're writing is good too, wait for a little bit and kind of revisit it. It's because you gained some distance. It feels like someone else's writing."

Why don't we have a natural instinct to seek out those who have views that disagree with ours?

"We tend to be around people who are doing those because otherwise, we'd have to argue constantly, which is a bit of a pain. Even if you think you have people who come from different, different schools in anthropology or whatever international schools, it might be really hard for them to argue because they disagree about most of the premises. So it's good to agree on those things before discussing them. So, for instance, maybe your closest colleagues shared a broad vision of the field, but sometimes agree, but in the sense of the details of an experiment or interpretation of a result, and that's when the discussion is the most productive. Find the kind of context in which people would mostly agree with us and disagree on some points. But the issue that's at stake is when everybody around us agrees with us, then it is good to try to seek out someone who tends to disagree."

On why and how social learning is crucial to human progress

"Social learning is crucial, but it can only work. It can only be evolutionarily stable if people are concerned with what they accept and then if they have good reasons to accept something. If it comes from a trustworthy source. If they have good arguments."

Will it be beneficial to create a space where people argue and discuss their bias, eventually coming to a collective agreement for a better cognitive division of labor?

"Yes, that's exactly right. To unwrap that a little bit, we're suggesting is that we know that reasoning means I have my biases. So what it's often called is confirmation bias. That is a tendency when you consider a conclusion or a belief that you have to overwhelmingly find reasons that will support that. The analogy of the lawyer has a conclusion that they have to defend. And then you not only find arguments for that conclusion, unfortunately when we're engaged in the back and forth, a discussion, we are also both lawyers for our point of view. But what's amazing, when we evaluate the other person's arguments, we also become the judge. And so there are quite a bit of data shows. When you are faced with good arguments, even an argument that challenges your views, you are able to recognize the strength of the arguments. And so, a discussion, as long as you're in mostly good faith, which is kind of the case by default, you alternate taking the mental arguments. That is what makes an argumentation work."

What can we try to do to better align our mechanism for reasoning for the environment that we're in?

"We have to train ourselves not to get better at rejecting information because we're already very good at this. What we have to get better at is accepting more information and understanding why, science, and some of these amazing institutions that we have, our use cases ate very reliable. You don't want to just accept everything. Understanding how these institutions work and what makes them reliable in what cases they will be, more or less reliable. Just putting yourself in a position that we can accept more of those. We can trust more people than in more of these amazing institutions that we have."

Guest Profile

• Hugo Mercier’s Profile
• Hugo Mercier on Twitter
• Hugo Mercier on Google Scholar

His Work

• Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe
• The Enigma of Reason