Believing in hoaxes saved our ancestors’ lives. Today is another world

How come hoaxes, that is stories that, contrary to what was the myth for the ancients, have been irrefutably denied several times, resist, flourish and increase their hold, although sometimes it seems incredible to even think you can believe it?

Actually, the tendency to believe in hoaxes can be seen as the byproduct of a number of characteristics of our cognitive worldinherited from ancestors for whom these characteristics were evolutionarily speaking advantageous (although today it may seem incredible).

For example, the marked ability of our species to seek and discover even tenuous correlations in apparently chaotic data is probably what made it possible to obtain very useful information for survival in times when it was more important to suspect a correlation between events and react cautiously than to risk losing one’s life; However, this highly developed ability carries the cost of the apophenia bias, i.e. the tendency to see correlations even where there are noneinstead of reasoning rationally and acting on robust statistical considerations. Apophenia and many other traits of our cognitive processes constitute biases that diminish rational abilities, but they saved our ancestors’ lives in remote times; for this reason these biases are so difficult to contrast when one wants instead to favor rational action. Precisely because of their ability to inhibit rational thought (and to overcome it quickly), these traits can be exploited to one’s advantage in sectors such as marketing or politics or communication (that is, when it comes to making others believe such things to further our interest) to convince others (or convince themselves) of the most incredible lies, without fear of being contradicted by any set of documented facts and any rational analysis.

To understand the full weight of this phenomenon, it is worth showing a concrete example.

Readers will have noticed that, particularly in this period in which the Sars-CoV-2 epidemic is much less dangerous in our country than in the past, there is a continuous hammering of certain newspapers and many social media pages on the death events of young and healthy peopleall collected under the generic and imprecise binomial of “sudden deaths”.

Communicators who insist on this theme are exploiting exactly the mechanism of apophenia: by combining a pristine vaccination with a subsequent “inexplicable” death, the idea is reinforced (actually preconceived in those who follow this nonsense) that to cause these very disparate dead or, failing that, illnesses of sportsmen and airplane pilots, whether the vaccines.

By introducing a spurious correlation, because it is obtained through the intentional selection of the events to be correlated starting from a set of data in which such a correlation does not exist, and by obsessively hammering away with headlines and strong words, the desired association is obtained, without even the need to recall some brief rational element; it is sufficient to present a signal and show its succession, true or presumed, with respect to an event, to establish apophenic conditioning, and thus obtain a comfortable and profitable position as “discloser of the truth”.

One element in particular should also be noted: precisely because of its protective heuristic meaning for our ancestors, apophenia works particularly well when the “hidden meanings” or “clarifying signs” that one believes to see while searching for imaginary correlations imply a condition of danger.

That is, it is a particularly good cognitive phenomenon for the “fear market”, i.e. for the propagation of aversion and the reinforcement of fear towards something.

We can easily see it, even outside the obsessive anti-vaccine narrative: the system adopted is in fact always the same, whether it is a question of demonizing GMOs, glyphosate, vaccines, nuclear energy, 5G or any innovation targeted, we invariably witness the frantic search for spurious correlationsof signals to be placed in sequence artificially and without any respect for the most elementary statistical rules, in order to make our simian self imagine an imaginary tiger behind the rustle of every bush.

Meanwhile, however, the world in which we have evolutionarily forged has disappeared, and we live in an extremely complex, fast, intricate and enormously wider world. This means that a large number of heuristics such as apophenia, poorly sensitive to the truth of the facts and directly connected to our own physiology, which perhaps were harmless or even worked well for most of our evolutionary history, today can and in fact be they are very harmful.

We are faced with the challenge, and the possible catastrophe, which originates in the extreme modification of our planet due to our own number: it is absolutely essential to stop being the components of a species that reached a few tens of thousands of individuals, and begin to become individuals capable of controlling and containing the scope of our actions through rational and scientific thoughtwithout falling prey to bias ticklers.