Jun 30, 2023 11:59 PM
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/hardwi...nt-voices/
INTRO: “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”. It’s a well-known saying. But a more accurate version would be: “A confidently told lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”.
Because basically, we humans are far more likely accept and believe information delivered confidently. By a confident person, or by a source using confident language etc.
And as the modern world has shown us repeatedly, this regularly leads to undesirable outcomes.
Humans trusting confident people over unconfident ones is an established phenomenon. The ‘Confidence heuristic’ states that when two (or more) people are involved in a decision making process where they know different things, confidently expressed arguments are perceived as conveying better information, which determines the decision.
Why would this tendency come about? Well, humans are ultrasocial, and during our evolutionary development, most of our information about the world came from our tribe, i.e. other people.
So, If ancient humans heard someone confidently declare “There’s a predator coming!”, instinctively believing them was a valuable survival trait.
Humans are also hierarchical. We have social status, and our communities often have leaders, who tend to be confident sorts.
In the wild, where there’s danger everywhere, a tendency to unthinkingly believe the confident leader and quickly do what they say, is another useful survival trait.
On a more personal level, much of our thinking about, and perception of, others tends towards the egocentric; we relate what they do and say to our own experiences, because that’s typically what our brain has to work with.
If when we’re confident it’s for good reason, logically someone else being confident must have good reason to be too... (MORE - details)
INTRO: “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”. It’s a well-known saying. But a more accurate version would be: “A confidently told lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”.
Because basically, we humans are far more likely accept and believe information delivered confidently. By a confident person, or by a source using confident language etc.
And as the modern world has shown us repeatedly, this regularly leads to undesirable outcomes.
Humans trusting confident people over unconfident ones is an established phenomenon. The ‘Confidence heuristic’ states that when two (or more) people are involved in a decision making process where they know different things, confidently expressed arguments are perceived as conveying better information, which determines the decision.
Why would this tendency come about? Well, humans are ultrasocial, and during our evolutionary development, most of our information about the world came from our tribe, i.e. other people.
So, If ancient humans heard someone confidently declare “There’s a predator coming!”, instinctively believing them was a valuable survival trait.
Humans are also hierarchical. We have social status, and our communities often have leaders, who tend to be confident sorts.
In the wild, where there’s danger everywhere, a tendency to unthinkingly believe the confident leader and quickly do what they say, is another useful survival trait.
On a more personal level, much of our thinking about, and perception of, others tends towards the egocentric; we relate what they do and say to our own experiences, because that’s typically what our brain has to work with.
If when we’re confident it’s for good reason, logically someone else being confident must have good reason to be too... (MORE - details)