What happens once information reaches a human receiver, and why does that receiver accept some messages but reject others? I finally got around to reading Hugo Mercier’s 2020 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. Six years seems eons ago now, a different world even, but the book contains useful insights for our current epoch of misinformation and galloping technologies.
Humans are nowhere near as gullible as we tend to think. Given our extraordinary dependence on information supplied by other humans, this makes evolutionary sense. A species that simply believes whatever it’s told will not last very long. Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying supplies a humorous vista of where abuse of the gullible can lead.
Instead, we practise what Mercier calls “open vigilance”. We compare new information with what we already know; judge whether a source is competent, trustworthy or likely to have an ulterior motive; look for supporting arguments; and adjust our level of trust accordingly. As a consequence, mass persuasion fails much more often than the literature on propaganda, advertising, political campaigning and fake news would have us believe.
I’ve always broadly intuited this: distrust in ordinary human cognition is overdone, even if some of Mercier’s scaffolding underneath the argument feels less solid. Historical anecdotes, anthropological observations and psychological experiments are assembled into a convincing pattern, yet sometimes without establishing that another selection of evidence could produce a different pattern.
Mercier also pushes back against the idea of an evolutionary arms race between deceivers and deception-detectors. Yet if, as he argues, people become better judges of trustworthiness through the act of trusting, presumably successful deceivers also learn through the act of deceiving. Sender improves, receiver adapts, sender adapts again. Arms race, meet back door.
The inconvenient sender
For those working in communication, however, the most useful insight lies elsewhere. We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about messages. What is our narrative? Which channel should we use? What tone will resonate? How do we counter this rumour, rebut that accusation, or explain this policy?
But we sometimes forget that our various target audiences are evaluating something upstream of all of this: the sender. Of course, I’m not the first to say this. Research into “source credibility” goes back at least to the 1950s. Two basic questions pop up: does this person know what they are talking about, and do I trust them to tell me the truth? Mercier arrives at the same junction through evolutionary psychology. For folks working in crisis-comms, another layer is added: an organisation’s previous conduct and its prior relationship with stakeholders affect how people interpret what it says during the next crisis.
In pedestrian terms: effective communication depends on something the lowly comms strategist cannot fix with words alone: whether the organisation gives people good reason to trust it. That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s something I pondered during recent work on information manipulation in the MENA region. Some of the most effective ‘hostile’ material is effective precisely when much of it is true. The ‘best’ information manipulation fields real events, genuine grievances and visible fault lines. No need to formulate a conclusion, let alone an action.
This creates an uncomfortable problem for communicators. If an accusation works because it accords with people’s lived experience, “counter-messaging” may be about as useful as a Ferrari in a traffic jam.
A way out… sort of
Mercier offers a rather more optimistic reading. People compare messages with experience. They assess incentives. They remember who has proved reliable. They become suspicious when words and observable reality diverge. For the communication strategist, that is both good news and bad news. The good news is that audiences are harder to manipulate than we sometimes imagine. The bad news is that audiences are harder to manipulate than we sometimes imagine. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Which is exactly what makes the comms profession, sitting at the crux of impossible-to-pin-down human cognition, one of the most challenging, riveting fields to be in.
Author’s note: The text is fully human-written. AI helped map the research, stress-test the argument and proofread spelling and grammar. The analysis, voice and final wording are mine, as is responsibility for any errors.
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