Open Alertness Do you think humans are easy to deceive?

Open Alertness Do you think humans are easy to deceive?

Hello, hello~ Hello everyone, I am the host Xiao P

Last episode we talked about how large garden birds send free, high-cost messages.

To put it bluntly, we don’t have to swear to God every time we send a message so that others can believe it. We just need to let those who send wrong messages be punished.

As long as there is this punishment mechanism, then humans can trust each other.

But this mechanism also has a prerequisite, that is, we must be able to judge which information is wrong.

When humans first appeared, they had mouths, throats, vocal cords, and ears, which are organs used for communication.

Harari said in The Great History of Humanity that the advantage of humans over Neanderthals is that they can imagine things that do not exist.

For this reason, we can send dozens of people forward with a single order.

And the other party is still trying to explain to the companion next to him that the enemy is coming!

Imagination is what Harari emphasizes.

However, communication is another important point for Xiao P. Otherwise, how can you make dozens of people understand what you are saying?

And if humans have benefited from communication very early on.

Then, evolutionary thinking can come into play.

Little P, I have mentioned evolutionary thinking many times.

Evolutionary thinking is a powerful tool. The simplest way to use it is that if the disadvantages of a method outweigh its advantages, it will be eliminated as time goes by.

Since communication has existed for so long, people will inevitably encounter the problem of abusing communication.

That is to say, lie~

Because humans are so capable of communicating, we are more easily misled and manipulated.

Therefore, we are bound to have the tools to deal with it.

Otherwise, this communication ability will definitely fail.

Because people who know how to abuse communication will definitely abuse it.

And if you don’t understand people and you won’t trust others, then this communication will be ineffective.

So, what are our coping tools?

is alertness.

I still remember that we were deciphering strangers, and I wanted to share with you the strange phenomena I observed.

People around me would think that human beings as a whole are easily deceived and easily manipulated.

However, he himself is not so easy.

I believe that most people think this way, but they may not want to admit the second point, because we all want to pretend to be a little modest.

I think the reason why I think this is because everyone thinks this way.

When we are young and ignorant, we are very gullible.

Then through gradual learning, we gradually become less gullible from being easily deceived, and we become more and more alert.

but! Not everyone is willing to keep learning, so when people who want to deceive people keep inventing new deception methods, those who are not alert enough will be fooled.

The previous mainstream school of thought likened this kind of vigilance to an arms race between deceiving and being deceived.

People who speak are becoming more and more sophisticated. Advertisers, media, and politicians are constantly coming up with new words to deceive people.

And obedient people must become more and more savvy. We read various psychology and behavioral studies, including thinking biases and ways of thinking, just to make ourselves less likely to be deceived and to increase our alertness!

The System 1 and System 2 theories mentioned in Think Fast, Slow can also be said to be a type of this mainstream theory.

System 1 is intuitive and fast thinking, while System 2 is rational and slow thinking.

Since we have learned and thought rationally, we can avoid being deceived.

So, with some methods, turn off other people's system 2, will he trust others easily?

This conclusion is quite consistent with our intuition.

To be deceived is ignorance, stupidity, and thoughtlessness.

If you make someone stop thinking, he will listen to you like a puppet.

Then let’s extend it a little further and say that those subliminal messages sneak through your prefrontal cortex (I haven’t mentioned this term for a long time), will you completely believe it?

Some people have invented brainwashing techniques, which first destroy a person's brain, just like Captain America's good friend Cold Warrior, who first erases your rationality and loses your ability to think, and then you can say and believe whatever you want!

Speaking of which, does it feel a little strange?

The front seems to be correct, but the extension at the back is weird.

We have seen behaviors and know that subconscious messages exist, but when it comes to using subconsciousness to influence people, the current experiments are still quite controversial.

Not to mention brainwashing. The word brainwashing comes from the last century. During the Korean War, a group of American soldiers were captured by China and underwent ideological transformation with communist ideas. After being rescued, they refused to return to the United States.

As a result, Brainwash was described by the media.

It sounds like China has developed some very powerful technology to manipulate the opponent's soldiers. It turned out to be Aztec monks.

However, his success rate was very low. Among the 4,400 prisoners of war, only 0.5% changed sides.

Moreover, these soldiers surrendered not so much because they sincerely surrendered, but because they surrendered in order to gain benefits in the camp.

As for being rescued, still supporting the Chinese government and refusing to return to China?

I think instead of assuming that the brainwashing is real, it is much more believable to assume that they are unwilling to return to the country because they expect to be subject to a military trial after returning to the country, right?

In fact, among those prisoners of war who returned to the United States, one was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the other was sentenced to death.

Why, the previous discussion seems to be correct and in line with our thinking, but when it is extended to the subconscious and brainwashing, it changes its tone?

Little P, I think, maybe, the problem lies in,

We cut tolerance into one dimension, which is vigilance.

Including, decrypting strangers, this book is also classified in this way.

That presupposed truth theory actually means that human beings' vigilance is generally very low.

Even those with specialized training are no better.

but! Why only look at the alert mind?

Does being gullible only have to do with alertness?

Hugo Messier overturned the mainstream idea and said that in fact, studies have long shown that it is difficult to influence people with the subconscious mind, let alone the brainwashing technique of torture. In the book Decoding the Stranger, there is a chapter, I didn't mention it on the show, but that chapter was about interrogation methods. Is it useful?

And the answer is, almost none.

Torturing people's brains will only make them less cooperative.

The latest research points out that if you ask a subject to judge something that he already knows, depriving him of his rationality will only make him more insistent on his own opinion.

It’s not that stupid people are more likely to be deceived, but that stupid people are more stubborn.

In 2010, Hugo and several researchers rethought the issue of communication.

Hugo believed that a better metaphor than alertness was omnivory.

Most animals are not omnivores like us that eat anything.

Like vampire bats, which only drink the blood of living mammals

Pandas only eat bamboo.

Koalas only eat the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. Even if the leaves do not grow on the tree but lie flat on the ground, the koala will not eat them.

Eating only one thing is actually a good survival strategy, so you don't have to expend excess energy digesting a variety of different things.

You don’t have to choose food, and you don’t have to worry about getting diarrhea after eating it, because you only eat that anyway.

However, it is obvious that if the environment changes today, these animals will be in dire straits. Without eucalyptus leaves, what will the koalas eat?

The road may be easy, but it will get narrower.

Therefore, humankind’s strategy is to be omnivorous.

Isn’t there a saying in China that says, everything that runs on the ground except cars, everything that runs on water except motorboats, and everything that flies in the sky except airplanes can be eaten!

I think this is why humans can spread all over the earth.

The road can become very wide, but it is not easy

This strategy also has risks.

We have to learn to judge what we can’t eat!

Meats can go rancid, plants can be highly toxic, and we are open to just about anything that looks edible.

But we also need alertness to make judgments.

I ate diarrhea this time, and I will avoid this food next time.

If you see other people being poisoned after eating it, you have to remember not to touch it.

It's something we take for granted, but for vampire bats, it's impossible and unnecessary.

And applying this set of ideas to communication is to open up alertness.

You don't go from being gullible to being alert.

But from being conservative to being both open and alert.

Compared with other primates, human communication methods can be said to be very rich.

For adult chimpanzees, pointing is the simplest and most common communication method that even a one-year-old child can learn, but they cannot learn it.

Communication is unnatural to chimpanzees compared to us.

In terms of communication, they are monovorous animals.

But for us, pointing with our fingers, pointing with our chin, pointing with our eyes, and even leaning our body slightly can send a message.

(This is really an exaggeration, and it is easy to be criticized for not being able to read the air, etc. I think humans can even send messages through the air they exhale)

We are super open to messages.

But just opening up is not enough, we must be vigilant.

We can trust others because of the free and high-cost information in the previous lecture, we can identify the true and false information, and we can punish people.

Thinking about it again, if we start from being easily deceived and gradually increase our vigilance, then primitive humans should be easily deceived, right?

But when we look at the people of primitive tribes, they are not easy to be fooled, but conservative in their thinking, they only trust their own tribesmen, and when they see outsiders, kill them first.

Is this gullible? I think they are very closed, and at the same time, they are not wary of people of the same race, that's right.

And look at us now, a society of strangers, the most important thing is to trust strangers, we have become more open.

And at the same time we are more alert.

Just imagine, those smart and thinking people, such as the listeners of Shu Shi Cooking, hey~

Do you love to absorb new things and are willing to think about the authenticity of this thing?

And the people we often call gullible,

Is it very difficult for you to convince him that he is being cheated?

Is it difficult for him to accept new information?

Especially those messages that are counter-intuitive?

Hugo's thinking, speaking of it, is actually not difficult, that is.

There is no such thing as a gullible person! If humans were gullible, humans would have been eliminated long ago.

Those who survived were either open and vigilant, or conservative and stubborn.

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