The social construction of bespoke realities

Self-deception often depends on epistemic teamwork.

The puzzle of weird beliefs

Why do people believe weird things? What gives rise to extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds? Why are bizarre conspiracy theories, cartoonish ideologies, and absurd religions and cults so widespread?

Strange beliefs are puzzling.

Like other animals, our nervous systems evolved, in large part, to enable us to track features of reality relevant to our biological goals. Given this, information processing in the human brain is broadly reliable and rational, geared to extracting accurate information and constructing veridical mental models. Of course, these inner models are highly selective and simplified. Nevertheless, if they were too inaccurate, we would be unable to navigate reality as successfully as we do.

Where, then, do extraordinary popular delusions come from? Why do people sometimes populate their mental models with imagined conspiracies, supernatural agents and forces, bizarre narratives, and so on?

One answer is simply that the world is complex, uncertain, and difficult to understand. As I argued recently, the truth is not the default when forming beliefs about distant, abstract realities.

Why do people believe true things?

A more influential answer is that humans are not perfectly rational. We are riddled with cognitive biases and often too lazy to use slow, careful reasoning.

These factors likely explain some inaccurate beliefs. However, they fail to explain the sheer wrongness and strangeness of many popular delusions.

As Dan Sperber points out,

“Apparently irrational cultural beliefs are quite remarkable: they do not appear irrational by slightly departing from common sense, or timidly going beyond what the evidence allows. They appear, rather, like down-right provocations against common sense rationality.”

Consider, for example, the belief that malevolent, shape-shifting witches plot against the community, that Satanic cults of cannibalistic paedophiles kidnap children from daycare centres, that a powerful water spirit attacks people who do not share their meat with others, that people’s social position is determined by actions they committed in past lives, that the creator of the universe sent his son (who is also himself) on an elaborate suicide mission to atone for humanity’s “sins”, or any number of other strange religious and ideological beliefs.

Rather than failed attempts at understanding, these beliefs seem more like active attempts at non-understanding. And although humans are not perfectly rational, it is difficult to see how run-of-the-mill cognitive biases could give rise to such radical departures from reality.

Self-deception

A more promising explanation of popular delusions appeals to self-deception.

Self-deception is undoubtedly a real and consequential feature of human psychology. “Lying to ourselves,” wrote Dostoevsky, “is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” According to Adam Smith, this tendency “is the fatal weakness of mankind” and “the source of half the disorders of human life.”