This article is from WeChat public account: made (ID: xingshu100) , author: Tian Xiaona, from the title FIG IC photo
It’s another April Fool’s Day in a blink of an eye. Did you lie today? Are you cheated today?
The world is getting more and more complicated, and deception is becoming more and more sophisticated. Is your anti-deception ability advancing with the times? The latest scientific research shows that instead of keeping pace with the times, we are becoming more and more vulnerable to deception.
Instead of keeping up with the times, we are becoming more and more vulnerable to deception.
01 The older, the worse the performance?
In the past, everyone thought that the more we know, the better logical thinking and scientific thinking, the harder it is for us to believe what is not real. According to this logic, in the era of the information explosion, we should be full of wisdom and hard to be fooled. But is this really the case?
Dan Kahan, sociology professor at Harvard University (Dan Kahan) Years of tracking experiments.
In the experiment, each subjectParticipants were asked to answer a series of questions, such as “What is the threat factor of global warming to human health and safety?”, “Can antibiotics kill both bacteria and viruses?” … At the same time, research The staff also examined the subject’s scientific literacy and ability to understand quantitative information and asked them to answer questions such as “the cost of a bat and a ball.” For the next 5 years, subjects will answer the same difficult gradient question every year.
The results show that, from a horizontal perspective, participants from large cities such as New York and Chicago that have faster information dissemination and higher economic performance perform better than those from Jim Thorpe, Sedona, etc. Subject of the town. But even so, their advantages are only reflected in intellectual issues, and they are not outstanding on issues that require judgment.
From a vertical perspective, the problem is serious. Although the scores of the intellectual questions are increasing year by year, the judgment of the vast majority of people, about 89.4% of the subjects, is decreasing year by year.
The older the subject, the worse the performance.
Prof. Dan Kahan believes: “ As we grow older, we receive more and more information, far exceeding our information processing capabilities, and many of them are even contradictory, which seriously affects us Judgment .
Even if you know that some information is wrong, long-term exposure to such information will still leave a mark on your brain. Everything that happens in life changes our brains, and sometimes this change is even permanent, unless we have the time and cognitive ability to reflect on these encounters and then decide whether to doubt the ideas it brings.
Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Niedergen Radboud University in the Netherlands (Daniel Gilbert) stated in an article published in Scientific American (Scientific American) : Our IQ has not decreased On the contrary, there is an improvement over our parents. However, we are not so willing to use them. The increasing fragmentation of information has made us more willing to accept the information fed by the Internet than to draw our own conclusions.
02 The world is too complicated for me to think
I don’t know if you still remember Zhen Yan’s body from the previous fire. Let’s revisit it.
Zhen Zhengti: I just realized that there is very little room for further improvement in my English level in the future. I am thinking that I need to improve my Chinese proficiency in the next step, so that I can study both at home and abroad. excellent!
Personal version summary: I need to learn Chinese well.
Obviously the same meaning, but the previous sentence is unclear.
Scientists said that Wrapping up some simple things with some tall concepts makes them look esoteric and complicated, because it can make the audience look at them because of overly complex explanations and lonely concepts. Fear, which may give up thinking and accept directly.
Professor David Rand of Stanford University (David Rand) is accepting “connection” said in an interview with the magazine, “This is because a large amount of complex and unfamiliar knowledge can lead to mental laziness. When we find that the information is more difficult than usual to receive When there is no obvious flaw in the information, we may choose to believe, because this can avoid thinking. “
Acceptance is a passive and unavoidable behavior, while rejection is an active behavior that will undermine the original passive acceptance. For example, if a person is told that a pencil is harmful to health, he / she must immediately believe the claim, and only in this case can he / she take proactive measures to finally decide not to believe the claim. These positive measures require cognitive energyPower, if an event hinders cognitive ability, then he / she may continue to believe that pencil is dangerous until the cognitive work is completed.
Rand believes that social media also encourages this laziness to a certain extent . “I think social media makes thinking especially difficult, because many features of social media are designed to encourage irrational thinking.”
Social media also encourages this laziness to a certain extent
News feeds on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram don’t make us think deeply-after all, our primary purpose of playing social media is to entertain and relax, not to read those that challenge us, force us to think or encourage us to take action Content.
03 We are more willing to spread lies than the truth
When humans were born, exaggerated stories, pranks, and rumors followed. Soon after the invention of typography, various printed pamphlets sprung up, spreading sensational reports to the public.
In 1611, a brochure covered the life of a Dutch woman who did not eat or drink for 14 years;
In 1654, a Catalan pamphlet stated that a monster with goat legs, a human body, 7 arms, and 7 heads was found;
In the 19th century, emerging newspapers quickly joined the counterfeiting party. The most famous prank is an astronomer published by the New York Sun (The New York Sun) in 1835John Herschel’s long text of (John Herschel) . The newspaper said that he observed a giant telescope on the moon with a telescope. They kept blue goats and built temples with sapphires.
…
Why are these brochures and newspapers publishing these sensational stories? Of course, to increase sales, these fake news are often very popular. For example, after the Lunar Story, the New York Sun’s circulation soared from 8,000 copies to over 19,000 copies per day.
Scientific research today also shows that lie will definitely spread farther than the truth .
How fake news spreads
In a 2018 study, U.S. researchers tracked 126,000 news releases on Twitter between 2006 and 2017 and based them on information from various fact-checking organizations like Politifact or Snopes Classified as fake or true. They found that fake news spread faster and farther than real news, especially political news.
Buzzfeed reviewed Facebook posts three months before the 2016 U.S. election and found that the top 20 most popular fake reports received over 8.7 million shares and comments. In comparison, the top 20 most popular reports from trusted news sites received only 7.3 million shares and comments.
What makes lies more popular than truth?
Researchers believe that is partly due to the novelty of lies and false reports . They found that fake news contains more than real newsPeople are surprised by more new information. Novelty attracts our attention and inspires our curiosity. We also tend to share more new information-maybe because we think it may be beneficial to others, or because it makes us look like Knowing a secret.
Obviously, fun is the most important thing, and whether the story is true or not is not important to us. However, we still need to explain why some people have difficulty recognizing a fictional story, while others will soon think it is false. Researchers believe that the reason for this is our previous perception, which affects the information we hear or read. But it is not clear whether this is the root cause.
Many people worry that various factors have killed our ability to tell lies. But No matter how easily the brain can be deceived, we all have the ability to control our thoughts. This control comes from our thinking.
We can get endless knowledge, all we have to do is decide: do we want to ingest only what the world throws at us, do n’t distinguish between true and false, or are willing to spend time and energy to find the truth.
After reading this article, do you feel that you have learned something and started to think and get the ability to discern?
Today is April Fool’s Day ~
So you might as well guess this article is true or false. Are these seemingly valid conclusions lying to you?
Finally, Happy April Fool’s Day ~~
This article is from the WeChat public account: made (ID: xingshu100) < / a> , author: Tian Xiaonuo