Do We Believe Everything We're Told?

"Some reports contained false statements that exacerbated the severity of the crime"

Should "false" be highlighted here?

This is scary.

Nick, fixed.

Spinoza's view seems on the face of it much more likely than Descartes's, because it is much easier to implement. Anyone who has programmed knows that the easiest way to write a program to deal with an input is just to accept it, and that a check can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, how is one to understand a sentence without at least modeling the belief that the sentence is intended to elicit, so that one might at least understand what it means (the sentence itself is merely a character/phoneme string and so does not yield meaning intrinsically), and the obvious and readily available way to model such a belief is to actually enter it. Much easier simply to enter into that actual brain state associated with the belief and add maybe a flag to mark it as nonserious, than to enter into a wholly different state. We may infer from child studies that the higher order skill of contemplating a belief without holding it is not immediately acquired, for it is only at age 4 or so (I think) that a child is able to understand that others have beliefs that differ from reality.

Did you just believe that Descartes was modeling "cognitive-process flow" because some psychologist told you so? Or is possible that Descartes was, y'know, prescribing how rationalists should approach belief, rather than how we generally do?

Spinoza suggested that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve propositions which are rejected by consideration.

That sounds like what Sam Adams was saying at the Singularity Summit -- the idea of "superstition" being essential to learning in some respects.

This reminds me of a proof I was working on the other day. I was trying to show that a proposition (c) is true, so I used the following argument.

If (1) is true, then either (a) is true or (c) is true. If (2) is true, then either (b) is true or (c) is true. (a) and (b) cannot both be true. (1) and (2) are true, so therefore (c) must be true.

This seems to follow Descartes' model of consideration and then acceptance of the proposition (c). However, I could have saved myself about half a page of space if I had simply started out by rejecting (c) and then waiting for a contradiction to "appear."

Of course this is quite the opposite of the Spinoza model, but like Constant said, it makes sense that you can save time and brain power by actively modeling a belief and then seeing what follows. As for why acceptance is the default, I'm not exactly sure. Perhaps it is simply quicker to accept a proposition rather than to waste time looking for its opposite.

So doesn't this tie in well with your previous article about the denier's dilemma? It seems, if Gilbert/Spinoza are right, that the CDC mythbusters problem of people mis-remembering as "true" the myths presented by the CDC, is an example of this mechanism (strengthened by reinforcement effects of re-encountering the myth).

I would just like to point out that this paper: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01576.x titled 'believe it or not' claims to refute the strongest of Gilbert's ideas (and rightly so in my view)

One of the most obvious examples of commonly encountered unreliable information are advertisements. Gilbert's results suggest that knowing that the information in advertisements is highly unreliable doesn't make you immune to their effects. This suggests that it's a good idea to avoid perceiving advertisements entirely, especially in situations where you're trying to concentrate on something else. The obvious way to do this is to aggressively use ad-blockers wherever possible; unfortunately there are still media where this isn't practical.

What about statements that are so loaded to their listeners that they're rejected outright, with seemingly no consideration? Are they subject to the same process (and have such outrageous implications that they're rejected at once), or do they work differently?

Contrary to what many seem to believe, I consider advertising to be one of the least harmful sources of unreliable information. For one thing, the cacophony of advertisements send us contradictory messages. "Buy my product." "No, buy my product." One might argue that even such contradictory messages have a common element: "buy something". However, I have not noticed that I spend less money now that I hardly ever put myself at the mercy of television advertising, so I have serious doubts about whether advertising genuinely increases a person's overall spending. I notice, also, that I do not smoke, even though I have seen plenty of advertisements for particular brands of cigarettes. The impact of all those cigarette advertisements on my overall spending on cigarettes has evidently been minimal.

For another, the message itself seems not all that harmful in most cases. For example, suppose that advertising is ultimately the reason that I buy Tide detergent rather than another brand of detergent. How much am I harmed by this? The detergents all do pretty much the same thing.

And in many specific cases, where people's behavior has been blamed on the nefarious influence of advertising, what I generally see is that the accuser has curiously neglected some alternative, very likely explanations. Smoking is attractive because it delivers a drug. Smoking was popular long before it was advertised. I suspect that no more than a very small fraction of smokers started smoking because of advertising.

I have heard that advertising mainly shifts consumers from one brand to another. In that sense it is wasteful and an economist could give an argument for taxing it. I happen to like the subsidy of media by advertisements, so I wouldn't advocate it.

If people are that much more trusting when they're distracted, then it's important not to multi-task if you need to evaluate what you're looking at. Maybe it's just important to not multi-task.

In addition to advertisements, should we avoid fiction when we're distracted?

"Spinoza suggested that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve propositions which are rejected by consideration."

Whether this view is more accurate than DesCartes' view depends on whether the belief in question is already commonly accepted. When in the typical situation a typical person Bob says "X is Y, therefore I will perform act A" or "X should be Y, therefore we should perform act A", Bob is not making a statement about X or Y, he is making a statement about himself. All the truth or reality that is required for Bob to signal his altruism is that it be probable that he believes that X is Y or that X should be Y. The probability of this belief depends far more on what else Bob and his peers believe than it does about the reality or truth of "X is Y".

Between teaching mathematics to freshmen and spending most of my time learning mathematics, I've noticed this myself. When presented with a new result, the first inclination, especially depending on the authority of the source, is to believe it and figure there's a valid proof of it. But occasionally the teacher realizes that they made a mistake and may even scold the students for not noticing since it is incredibly obvious (e.g. changing something like ||z - z_0|| to ||z - z_1|| between steps, even though a few seconds thinking reveals it to be a typo rather than a mathematical insight).

Sometimes (and for a few lucky people, most of the time) individuals are in a mental state where they are actively thinking through everything being presented to them. For me, this happens a few times a semester in class, and almost always during meetings with my advisor. And occasionally I have a student who does it when I'm teaching. But in my experience this is a mentally exhausting task and often leaves you think-dead for a while afterwards (I find I can go about 40 minutes before I give out).

All this leads me to a conclusion, largely from my experience with what behavior produces what effects, that in mathematics the best way to teach is to assign problems and give students clues when they get stuck. The problems assigned, of course, should be ones that result in the student building up the mathematical theory. It's certainly more time consuming, but in the end more rewarding, in terms of both emotional satisfaction and understanding.

Hugo Mercier's citation above for "Believe it or Not" by Hasson et al. wants money to give you the article. The article is available for free from Hasson's home page at:

http://home.uchicago.edu/~uhasson/

The direct URL is:

http://home.uchicago.edu/~uhasson/Belief.pdf

I, for one, found the color changing text completely persuasive.

I'm amazed that Spinoza got it right at that time.

Well, no modern dictator I know off understimates mass-media.

And basic rights and freedoms, where they do work at all, do tend to work against excluding your opponents as information source of the majority.

I'm not sure I'd interpret the results quite like that. "We believe everything we're told" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. I don't have a deep-seated, strong belief that 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 ≈ 2,250. That's just a quick guess, based on the information currently floating around in my skull. If you asked me for another guess tomorrow, I might give a radically different answer.

It seems like we just encounter a lot of information over the years, and it all gets tossed into the giant box that is our skull. Then something comes up (something we see or hear, a word, an idea we have... anything) and our brain quickly rummages through the box for related concepts. It's not a comprehensive search by any means; it's just a quick search that is heavily bias toward concepts at the top of the box (those added or used most recently). This is generally a useful bias, since it's likely to turn up relevant information quickly.

If some of the concepts that come up during the search have a [FALSE] tag attached, we'll ignore them, or maybe even treat them as counter-evidence to whatever we're evaluating. The problem is that sometimes we're only half-listening when we encountered certain information, and never attached a [FALSE] tag. Or maybe the [FALSE] tag wasn't attached well enough to stick. For example: "I remember two of my geeky friends arguing about whether glass was a slow-flowing liquid or a true solid, but I forget who wound up being correct when they finally googled it."

But there are all sorts of other things attached to each bit of knowledge that's floating around in our brain, besides just a simplistic [FALSE] tag. We can remember where we heard it (college class, hearsay, scifi book, newspaper, pier-reviewed publication, etc.) and maybe even how we felt about it at the time (Were we surprised to learn it? Still skeptical afterward?). Ideally, we'll remember a lot of supporting evidence and ideas, and a few attempts to prove the notion false and how the tests failed.

The things we think of as our core beliefs tend not to be made up of only random hearsay. They tend to be based on ideas we are pretty sure about. They may have accumulated a bunch of week supporting evidence in addition, over the years, due to confirmation bias. Even weaker beliefs (like those based on some source we read once and were pretty sure was reputable) require a basic amount of evidence.

Perhaps my argument is only about the meaning of the word "belief". After all, it seems arbitrary to declare some standard for our guesses at which point we are willing to call one a belief instead of a best guess. But in practice, that seems to be exactly what we do. I try to set my bar fairly high, and reserve judgement on a situation until I'm reasonably confident, but other people seem willing to form opinions on very little evidence, at the risk of turning out to be wrong. And That's fine, so long as our opinions are still evidence based. It doesn't matter if the threshold is p>.99 or p>.95 or even p>.75, so long as we can agree on p and base our decisions on it.

But concentrating on errors, fallacies, heuristics, and biases that affect mainly our guesses seems like it would have limited value. Perhaps they are a way of catching errors early, before they propagate into deeply held beliefs. Or perhaps they would be useful for avoiding continuously adding small bits of support to our deeper beliefs (a form of confirmation bias). It would be extremely interesting to do a longitudinal case study, and track the development of a bad idea, from formation to conclusion. Say, from the journal of someone who came to believe in conspiracy theories or something similar. I wonder to what degree our natural human biases influence the long-term development of our opinions.

Well I suppose I'm not going to be idly reading random tabloid headlines while waiting in the checkout line anymore for starters.

So is it possible to train one's brain such that it reflexively employs the Decartes method, as it were?

I hate our brains sometimes, mine in particular. I just read "According to an unverified rumor I just made up, people will be less skeptical of this essay because of the distracting color changes." and thought, "Hmmm, I wonder if that could be true." When the first part literally said ACCORDING TO AN UNVERIFIED RUMOR I JUST MADE UP! It is embarrassing to say that it took me reading that more than once to realize how I just glossed over the first part, or just separated it from the rest of the text as two separate entities. First part: hehe funny joke. Second part: stated like a fact so that I did indeed "passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve propositions which are rejected by consideration." 🤦🏼‍♀️

distraction had no effect on identifying true propositions (55% success for uninterrupted presentations, vs. 58% when interrupted); but did affect identifying false propositions (55% success when uninterrupted, vs. 35% when interrupted)

If you are confused by these numbers (why so close to 50%? Why below 50%) it's because participants could pick four options (corresponding to true, false, don't know and never seen). 
You can read the study, search for keyword "The Identification Test".