Book Read Free

Not Born Yesterday

Page 12

by Hugo Mercier


  end up saying nothing, depriving us of potentially valuable in-

  formation. After all, a tip from your foodie friend might still be

  useful, even if she hasn’t taken every potential factor into account

  in formulating her advice.

  What we need is a way of managing expectations, a way for

  senders to tell receivers how much weight to put on the messages.

  This is the function of commitment signals.34 We can indicate how

  much we commit to every thing we say (or write). When we com-

  mit, we are essentially tel ing receivers that we are quite sure the

  message will be valuable to them. Audiences should be more

  likely to accept the message, but they should also react more

  strongly if it turns out we haven’t been very diligent after all.

  Commitment signals abound in human communication. Some

  commitment markers are explicit indications of confidence: “I’m

  90 ch ap t er 6

  sure,” “I guess,” “I think,” and so forth. Epistemic modals—

  might, may, could— also modulate commitment. Increased

  confidence (and thus commitment) is also signaled implicitly

  through nonlinguistic signals such as a greater variation in

  pitch.35 Even the sources we provide for our beliefs have impli-

  cations for our degree of commitment. Saying “I’ve seen that

  Paula is pregnant” commits us more to the truth of Paula

  being pregnant than does “ People say Paula is pregnant.” Even

  young children are able to take these signals into account: for

  example, two- year- olds are more likely to believe confident

  speakers.36

  Adjusting how much we take into account what people say as

  a function of their level of commitment is sensible, but only if

  two conditions are met: not every body’s commitments should

  be treated equally, and we should adjust our future trust in light

  of past commitment violations.

  Elephants Do Not Forget (When People Have Been

  Overconfident)

  To properly take commitment into account, we must keep track

  of how much our interlocutors value our continued cooperation,

  so we know how much weight to put on their commitment. The

  more we think they want to keep cooperating with us, the more

  we can trust their commitment. But we must also keep track of

  who is committed to what so that we can adjust our trust accord-

  ingly. If commitment signals could be used wantonly, without

  fear of repercussions, they would not be stable. In an attempt to

  influence others, every body would constantly commit as much

  as pos si ble, making the signals worthless.

  In a series of experiments, psychologist Elizabeth Tenney and

  her colleagues asked participants to deliver a verdict in a mock

  w h o t o t r us t ? 91

  trial on the basis of two testimonies, delivered by two witnesses,

  one of which was more confident than the other.37 Because par-

  ticipants had no other way of distinguishing between the testi-

  monies, they put more faith in the more confident witness. Later

  on, both witnesses were revealed to have been wrong, and par-

  ticipants now found the witness who had been less confident to

  be more credible: she had been as wrong as the other witness,

  but less committed.

  Colleagues and I have replicated and extended these find-

  ings.38 Participants were exposed to two advisers who pro-

  vided the same advice but with diff er ent degrees of confidence.

  After it was revealed that both advisers had been wrong,

  participants were more willing to trust, even in a completely

  unrelated domain, the adviser who had been less confidently

  wrong.

  Saying that overconfidence doesn’t pay might seem odd.

  Aren’t there many successful politicians or businesspeople who

  are full of bluster? It is pos si ble that overconfidence might pay in

  some settings, as when we lack good feedback on the speaker’s

  actual per for mance. However, it is impor tant to keep in mind

  that these settings are the exception rather than the rule. In small

  groups, when people can monitor each other’s words and deeds

  quite easily, overconfidence is a poor strategy. Small- scale tradi-

  tional socie ties, which are relatively close to the environment

  our ancestors lived in, offer a great example. When an individual

  becomes a leader in such a society, it isn’t thanks to empty blus-

  ter but because they have superior practical skil s, give better

  advice, or know how to resolve conflicts.39 We also see this in

  our everyday lives. Some of us might have been taken in by an

  ebullient friend who swears their ideas are the best. But this is

  short- lived. If their ideas don’t pan out, we learn to adjust our

  expectations.

  92 ch ap t er 6

  We are more influenced— every thing else being equal—by

  more committed speakers, those who express themselves more

  confidently. But those more committed speakers lose more if it

  turns out they were wrong. These costs in terms of lost reputa-

  tion and ability to influence others are what keep commitment

  signals stable.

  Deciding Who to Trust

  Deciding who to trust has little to do with looking for signs of

  ner vous ness or attempting to spot elusive microexpressions. It

  is not even primarily about catching liars. Instead, it is about rec-

  ognizing who is diligent in communicating with us: who makes

  the effort to provide information that is useful to us, rather than

  only to them. And diligence is all about incentives: we can trust

  speakers to be diligent when their incentives align with ours.

  Incentives between sender and receiver are sometimes natu-

  rally aligned— when people are in the same boat. However,

  even minor misalignment in incentives can create communica-

  tion breakdowns, so that naturally aligned incentives are rarely

  sufficient on their own. To remedy this prob lem, we create our

  own alignment in incentives by keeping track of who said what,

  and by lowering our trust in those who provided unhelpful in-

  formation. In turn, this monitoring motivates speakers to be dili-

  gent in providing us information, creating a social alignment of

  incentives.

  Because we are able to track others’ commitments, and adjust

  our trust accordingly, most of human communication isn’t cheap

  talk but costly signals, as we pay a cost if our messages turn out

  to have been unreliable. Arguably, it is this dynamic of commit-

  ment that has allowed human communication to reach its

  unpre ce dented scope and power. However, this ability to keep

  w h o t o t r us t ? 93

  track of who said what, as well as to figure out whether a speak-

  er’s incentives are more or less aligned with ours, depends on

  having access to a wealth of information. Through the majority

  of our evolution, we would have known for most of our lives most

  of the people we interacted with. As a result, we would have had

  plenty of information to recognize aligned or misaligned incen-

  tives; to spot overconfident, unreliable, deceitful individuals;r />
  and to adjust accordingly how we value their commitment.

  Ironically, even though we are now inundated with more infor-

  mation than ever, we know very little about many of the people

  whose actions affect us most. What do we know of the people who

  make sure the products we buy are safe, who operate on us, who

  fly our planes? We barely know the politicians who govern us,

  besides what we can glean from scripted speeches and carefully

  curated insights into their personal lives. How are we supposed,

  then, to decide who to trust?

  One of the organ izing princi ples of open vigilance mecha-

  nisms is that, in the absence of positive cues, we reject com-

  municated information: by default, people are conservative

  rather than gullible. The same applies to trust. If we don’t know

  anything about someone— indeed, if we don’t even know who

  they are—we won’t trust them. A first step to establish trust is

  thus to be recognized, as an individual or an entity. This is why

  name recognition matters in politics, and branding matters in

  marketing.40

  Obviously, a name isn’t enough. To convince others of the reli-

  ability of our messages, we have to do more. As we’ve seen in

  the preceding chapters, good arguments, having access to rele-

  vant information, or having performed well in the past can

  make a speaker more convincing. However, trustworthiness is

  often a bottleneck. Many arguments fall flat if we don’t accept

  their premises on trust (e.g., that such and such study showing

  94 ch ap t er 6

  no link between autism and vaccines exists and is reliable). Even

  the best- informed, most competent speaker shouldn’t be listened

  to if we don’t think they have our interests at heart. Research on

  advertising and po liti cal be hav ior lends some support to the im-

  portance of trustworthiness. As we wil see in chapter 9, celebri-

  ties help sell products mostly when they are perceived as expert

  in the relevant domain, but trustworthiness matters even more.41

  To the extent that the perceived personal traits of politicians

  weigh on voting decisions, a study suggests the most impor tant

  trait is “how much the candidate really cares about people like

  you”—in other words, whether you think their incentives are

  aligned with yours.42

  The importance of trustworthiness is also highlighted by the

  damage done when it breaks down. As a rule, the positive effect

  that association with a (competent, trustworthy) celebrity might

  have for a product is swamped by the fallout if negative informa-

  tion about the celebrity emerges.43 For example, following the

  revelations about Tiger Woods’s philandering, three brands that

  had recruited him— Pepsi, Electronic Arts, and Nike— lost

  nearly $6 bil ion in market value.44 Similarly, politicians are barely

  rewarded for keeping their electoral promises (which they do

  most of the time, at least in democracies), but they suffer high

  electoral costs when they are convicted of corruption (as they

  should).45

  The relative paucity of information available to help us decide

  who to trust means that, if anything, we do not trust enough— a

  theme I will return to in chapter 15.

  7

  WHAT TO FEEL?

  in the early 1960s, Tanganyika was in a state of flux. It had

  declared its in de pen dence from British rule in 1961 but remained

  part of the Commonwealth until 1962, when it shed that last link

  with the United Kingdom. A year later, Tanganyika would unite

  with neighboring Zanzibar to become the modern state of

  Tanzania.

  But in 1961, politics was not the only area of turmoil in Tan-

  ganyika. In the Buboka district, on the western shore of Lake

  Victoria, children were behaving weirdly. It all started on Janu-

  ary 30, when three teenage girls, pupils at the same boarding

  school, were beset with sudden, uncontrol able bouts of laugh-

  ing and crying that lasted several hours.1 A year later, nearly one

  hundred pupils were affected. The school was forced to close

  down. The pupils went back home, spreading further their un-

  usual and upsetting be hav iors. Over the coming months, the

  contagion would affect hundreds of young people throughout

  the district.

  Outbreaks of bizarre be hav ior are hardly novel, and they are

  far from over.2 In 2011, dozens of teenage girls from Le Roy, a

  small town in upstate New York, were affected for months on end

  with symptoms similar to those that had stricken the pupils in

  Tanganyika fifty years earlier.3

  95

  96 ch ap t er 7

  When describing these events, it is difficult to avoid analogies

  with epidemiology: outbreak, spread, affected, contagion. The

  two doctors who reported the events happening in Tanganyika

  described them as “an epidemic of laughter.”4

  The same analogies are often used to describe how people act

  in crowds. In the late nineteenth century, contagion became the

  dominant explanation for crowd be hav ior. Gustave Le Bon wrote

  that “in crowds, ideas, sentiments, emotions, beliefs possess a

  power of contagion as intense as that of microbes.”5 His colleague

  Gabriel Tarde noted that “urban crowds are those in which con-

  tagion is fastest, most intense, and most power ful.”6 The Italian

  Scipio Sighele suggested that “moral contagion is as certain as

  some physical diseases.”7

  It is hardly surprising that the analogy between the spread of

  emotions and pathogens flourished at that time. The second half

  of the nineteenth century was the golden age of the germ the-

  ory of disease, when it allowed John Snow to curb cholera epi-

  demics; Louis Pasteur to develop inoculation against rabies; and

  Robert Koch to identify the agents that cause anthrax, cholera,

  and tuberculosis.8

  The contagion analogy, as the germ theory of disease, would

  only grow more successful. It has been used to describe panics,

  such as the (supposed) reactions to Orson Welles’s “War of the

  Worlds” broadcast, when thousands of listeners, thinking the

  Martians had landed, are supposed to have fled in panic: the “first

  viral- media event.”9 Armies are depicted as routing in “a conta-

  gion of bewilderment and fear and ignorance.”10 Nowadays, talk

  of contagion and viruses has become ubiquitous when describ-

  ing the effects of social media— take the phrase viral marketing,

  for instance— and not only in the popu lar press. In 2014, two

  articles were published in the prestigious Proceedings of the

  w h at t o f e e l? 97

  National Acad emy of Sciences that attempted to detect and ma-

  nipulate “emotional contagion [in] social networks.”11

  There are indeed tantalizing parallels between the way dis-

  eases, on the one hand, and emotions or be hav iors, on the

  other, spread. People do not voluntarily emit pathogens. Simi-

  larly, the expression of emotions or such bizarre be hav iors as

  uncontrol able laughing or unstoppa
ble dancing are not under

  voluntary control. People do not choose to be affected by patho-

  gens. Similarly, people do not make a conscious decision to

  start laughing or crying when they see others do the same—

  indeed, in many cases they actively resist the urge. Some patho-

  gens at least are extremely difficult to fight off. Likewise with

  emotions and be hav iors in crowds: “Few can resist [their] con-

  tagion,”12 suggested Nobel Prize– winning author Elias Canetti.

  Fi nally, pathogens can have dire consequences. Similarly, behav-

  ioral or emotional contagion can (or so it is said) “make of a

  man a hero or an assassin”;13 it can lead individuals to “sacrifice

  [their] personal interest for that of the collective.”14

  If nineteenth- century psychologists relied chiefly on crude

  observations of crowd be hav ior, their successors have performed

  impressive experiments showing how fast and automatic the re-

  action to emotional signals can be. Recording the movements

  of their participants’ facial muscles, psychologists John Lanzetta

  and Basil Englis showed that seeing someone smile or frown im-

  mediately leads to the same muscles being activated in the ob-

  server’s face.15 Later, psychologist Ulf Dimberg and his colleagues

  showed that this automatic imitation happened even when the

  emotional expressions were presented so quickly that they could

  barely be consciously registered at all.16 This almost instan-

  taneous activation of facial muscles is believed to be a sign of

  contagion: people automatically take on the facial expressions

  98 ch ap t er 7

  of those they observe, which leads them to feel the same emo-

  tion. Psychologist Guil aume Dezecache and his colleagues have

  even shown this mimicry can extend to third parties: not only

  do observers take on the emotional expressions of those they

  observe, but those who observe the observers also adopt the

  expression.17

  With such results, it is hardly surprising that one of the most

  influential books in the field of emotional communication, by

  psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rap-

  son, should be titled Emotional Contagion, and bear on the

  power of “rudimentary or primitive emotional contagion— that

  which is relatively automatic, unintentional, uncontrol able, and

  largely inaccessible to conversant awareness.”18

 

‹ Prev