333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know about you, but doesn't it bug you when other people are wrong about things? Like I know you and I generally are correct about all of our beliefs, but out there on the internet or even in society, it seems that there's more and more people who have false beliefs about things, and they even sort of nurture those false beliefs by hanging out with other people who have false beliefs.
What is up with that and what can we do about it? Now of course all of us have some false beliefs and famously there's this idea that we have biases that nudge us towards one set of false beliefs or another. And then some of us are going to say like there's a whole group of people who have more biases than we do and we can have that argument. There's motivated reasoning, right? There's a reason that people, either for wishful thinking purposes or for identification with some political tribe or other kind of group, want to have some beliefs because it's part of their identity.
Okay, but is that really the reason why people have these false beliefs? Either susceptibility to just as Our guest, Gordon Pennycook, will put it today, pseudo-profound bullshit or susceptibility to misinformation or conspiracy theories. And what Gordon is going to tell us is it's actually not quite about cognitive biases and motivated reasoning so much as it's about what he calls unthinkingness. That is to say, when you're faced with a claim, whether it's you know a claim you see on the internet or, you know, someone's giving you a fortune cookie, you evaluate that claim, and you can evaluate it either
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