After the elections that brought Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States or allowed Brexit, interpretations abounded that attributed the results to gullible voters fed false news.
The remote-controlled ads to punch the minds of citizens were designed thanks to the personal data managed by companies such as Cambridge Analytica, which made it possible to develop a precise psychological profile on which the campaign managers acted as if they were pressing a lever.
The psychologist Hugo Mercier (Saint-Nazaire, France, 44 years old) assures that they did not change the meaning of those elections.
“I think there is now a clear consensus among those who have seriously studied it that companies like Cambridge Analytica had no impact,” he says.
There is a very human intuition, supported by decades of studies, that humans are easy to convince, even of the wildest ideas.
Everyone is gullible, except ourselves.
Mercier, a researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, wrote a book, which is now published in Spanish under the name
We have not been deceived
(Shackleton Books), which questions this position.
Searching for answers in the evolutionary origin of mechanisms such as reason or trust, the researcher explores the advantages and risks of believing others or the circumstances in which each option may be preferable, and tries to explain why, in many cases, if we sin something, it is suspicious.
Mercier remembers that sometimes those who think they are the smartest are just the ones who err on the side of gullibility.
"The most interesting thing about cases like Cambridge Analytica is that they were able to use these beliefs about people's credulity to sell products that didn't work to people who wanted to take advantage of that credulity," he says in a video call interview.
Ask.
Why do we always think that others are gullible with fake news, but that we see reality as it is?
Answer.
It is a bias that helps us.
You tend to think that you are better at accepting good messages and rejecting bad ones, while others have just the opposite tendency.
It's a part of us thinking we're better than everyone else.
We want to think that we are better at discriminating the correct information and the reality is that everyone is pretty good.
Q.
You have written a book saying that it is very difficult to convince those who think differently, and it is curious, because you do not write a book if you think that it will not influence anyone.
R.
The complicated thing is mass communication.
In that context, you usually don't have time to exchange arguments.
You don't know the person who gives you a piece of information, be it a politician or someone on TV, and your first reaction is to be quite skeptical and reject the information if it doesn't fit your beliefs.
But in your daily life, when you talk to your family or your friends, you know that you can trust them in most matters.
You know who knows more about a subject and you have time to exchange arguments.
In these more local contexts, people change their minds frequently, and usually for the better.
It is not about stopping exchanging arguments, because we usually do it with our friends, work colleagues or profession and in that context things work.
Rather than think that half of their country holds views that you find repulsive, they prefer to think that they have been brainwashed by the media.
Q.
If changing people's opinions in a massive way is so difficult, how do ideologies change over time?
Is it not because of the impulse of intelligent and powerful people who influence others?
A.
To some extent, it is so.
But sociologists and political scientists who have studied changes in positions on certain issues, such as the death penalty, gay rights or abortion, what they see are generational changes.
People, between 20 and 25, already have a series of political convictions that, for the most part, are not going to change.
But the people of new generations usually have different beliefs from those of the previous generation.
There are exceptions.
Positions on gay marriage in the US, for example, have changed too quickly to be a purely generational phenomenon.
In these issues that people talk about a lot, and that are covered a lot in the media, we don't know to what extent the influence is from the media or has to do with the influence of people talking to their close people.
Still, it's very slow, it happens over 20 years, but on a few issues those changes of mind can happen within a generation.
What seems to happen in those cases is that the faction that has the best arguments tends to win, albeit slowly.
But it's not like a magic wand, like running a communication campaign and having everyone change their opinion.
Many decades are necessary.
On a few issues such changes of opinion can occur within a generation.
Q.
Are you saying then that if a group wins an argument it is basically because they are right?
A.
Usually, yes.
I am, I suppose, a progressive, but people have become more liberal on issues like climate change, accepting that it has been caused by humans.
On most issues, you tend to see a convergence towards more enlightened positions and opinions that are more in line with the facts, when it is possible to determine them.
Change, as has happened with climate change, is very slow, but it tends to go in the right direction.
Q.
You say that changes in opinion on some social issues are a generational issue, but in your book you say that you disagree with the idea of the physicist Max Planck, who said that erroneous scientific paradigms only change when the scientists who defend them die.
You think it's easy for them to change when the right information is presented.
A.
Science works faster than other fields, because it is a relatively small community and when new evidence comes to light, the whole community changes its opinion relatively quickly.
The most extreme case is mathematics.
When new evidence is presented, the arguments are provable and everyone who understands them will be convinced in a matter of days or weeks.
On social issues, it is different.
The arguments can be very strong, but they are not demonstrative like the mathematical ones, so more time is needed.
The scale and speed of the transmission will depend on the quality of the arguments and how many people are interested.
Q.
Throughout the world, the most extreme right-wing people think that there is an ideological hegemony, with powerful people in the media or in multinationals, promoting an ideology that wants to undermine the family or the homeland.
And on the left, many people believe that the opposite is true, that the great economic powers prevent the oppressed from rising up by hiding or disguising their oppression.
A.
In both cases I think it's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think in both cases it's something people do to dismiss opinions they don't agree with.
Rather than think that half of their country holds views they find repulsive, they prefer to think that they have been brainwashed by either the left or right-wing media.
What happens, in both cases, is that people have their opinions and the media tells them what they want to hear.
I think [education] makes us less conservative.
Makes it easier for us to change our minds
Q.
Are there times when it may be convenient for us to maintain our opinion, even if they give us credible arguments against it?
A.
One of the reasons why people hold their opinions, even when given good arguments, is to avoid losing face.
When you change your mind on an issue that you have advocated, if you are an activist against nuclear energy, for example, it usually has a social cost.
Q.
Is gullibility over gullibility a way to protect ourselves and our ideas and to look good?
A.
Exactly.
We don't have to question our opinions.
We only discount views we don't like by saying they've been brainwashed.
Q.
Does education make us less gullible?
R.
I think it makes us less conservative.
It makes it easier for us to change our minds, among other things, because education makes you more open to science and accepting new ideas.
But at the same time, as the Sokal affair showed, more educated people can be more vulnerable to things that sound like science but aren't.
In general, education makes you more open and better able to assimilate new information.
That's better overall, but it also makes you more vulnerable to some speech.
Q.
What do you think we could do to improve public discourse, so that there would be more mutual trust and more respect for the facts?
R.
I wish I knew.
The credibility of the authorities is very important.
For example, when we look at conspiracy theories, researchers see that they are most successful in countries with the most corruption.
If we want people to trust the authorities, the media or science more, these instances have to be more transparent and less corrupt.
Much of the work we must do, rather than educate the public, has to do with ourselves improving our practices as providers of reliable information.
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