While I have often repeated George Carlin's observation[0] that:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
And felt superior, the truth (as it is with most things) is much more nuanced and complex.
Firstly, what we term our (singular) "mind" is really the synthesis of multiple, sometimes competing[1] neural systems.
In part, our "view" of the world around us isn't the real-time "I sense it and it's so" process we experience. Rather, our brains' multiple systems take in and interpret stimuli (including memories and physical responses sparked by those stimuli) and arrive at a "story" our brain tells us, that we see as "reality."
In most cases, the story is close enough to the actual events/stimuli around us, that we do just fine.
In many surroundings/situations we often make decisions/judgements which don't engage the higher-level reasoning portions of our brains, but instead rely on systems driven by emotion and responses selected for over millions of years of evolution.
An interesting and accessible discussion of this can be found in the recent PBS series Hacking Your Mind[2].
The upshot is that while we aren't necessarily dumb, our neural systems are susceptible to being misled when specific responses (fear is an excellent example) are induced by stimuli (in this case, social media posts) that push us to rely on the emotional/quick response systems in our brains more so than the slower, more reasoned/balanced systems.
And that isn't a dumb vs. smart thing. It's taking advantage of responses/processes that have evolved in us and our ancestors over millions of years. Those processes were (and sometimes still are) critical in quickly assessing whether or not a specific situation or individual poses a threat, an opportunity or can safely be ignored.
So, no. We aren't stupid, we're just wired to respond in certain ways that marketers and propagandists use to their own advantage.
Obviously, this is over simplified (hey, it's a comment on HN, not an academic paper), but I believe it elucidates the nuance/complexity of human interpretation and experience of "reality."
I'd welcome those who have actual expertise in this area to chime in with better/more specific information.
The human mind is really quite complex if you get into it, there are so many different phenomena going on yet the outcome, when rendered to (the consciousness of) the owner of the mind, it appears quite indistinguishable from reality itself. This might help explain why almost all people seem to have such high levels of confidence in their own beliefs being 100% accurate, but can so easily see cognitive errors in others (which they themselves cannot see).
All of this isn't incredibly well understood by scientists and philosophers, but there are all sorts of theories and studies that are chipping away at the mystery. Digging into the material while reflecting upon the nature and contents of one's own mind, a lot of interesting questions arise, like "just how is it that I seem to know the answer to so many things, and can often even articulate how I know things to be true, but then often discover I'm actually incorrect"? Or "I believe X, and I consciously attribute it to Y, but how would I know for certain that Y is the only thing upon which my belief rests"? It also makes reading social media a lot more interesting because you get to observe manifestations of the illusions up close.
Based on my layman knowledge of the underlying neurology & psychology, combined with the epistemic crisis (systemic racism/corruption, conspiracy theories, fake news, etc) that can be observed on a daily basis on any social media platform (and interfering with democracy), I have come to strongly "believe" that society should be having some serious conversations about whether this material should be included in some way with standard school curriculum, perhaps as a sibling to the anti-racism/stereotyping initiatives that seem to be showing some decent results.
Just a few of the many interesting theories about what's going on in our brains:
"Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of vision, it is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see: When we see a cat behind a picket fence, our perceptual system represents those parts of the cat that are occluded by the picket fence."
"If perception is sensitive to top-down influences because of the top-down sensitivity of amodal completion, then it is not an unbiased way of learning about the world, as our preexisting thoughts, beliefs and expectations could influence how and what we perceive (see Siegel, 2011 on a version of this worry). So we get a form of vicious circularity: Our beliefs, thoughts and expectations are supposed to be based on and justified by our perceptual states, but these perceptual states themselves are influenced by our beliefs, thoughts and expectations (because of the top-down influences on perception via amodal completion)."
reply