Are the Sheeple Really, Well, Sheeple? A Reply to Adam Mastroianni By Brian Simpson

Academic Adam Mastroianni at his substack makes the case that the somewhat common-sense observation that most people are stupid, is plain wrong. Psychology has a field dealing with cognitive errors, errors of thinking, and there are a lot of them. People get fooled by a number of puzzles, even the so-called educated. Sure, but making mistakes does not indicate mass stupidity. Mastroianni goes on to point out that if the masses really were stupid, then how could the human race have survived the extreme hardships of the past? Point taken, but no-one is proposing that people are totally dysfunctional. I think the observation running through much Dissent Right and anti-vax social criticism, is that people are easily manipulated and stampeded into obedience. It would be foolish to ignore the fact of mass compliance by the majority of people with the Covid mandates, which were unprecedented. Yet, as China showed, even the most compliant races have their breaking point, where resistance follows, so there is hope of change.

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-radical-idea-that-people-arent

“If you learn a little psychology, you might come away thinking that people are stupid. 

After all, one of psychology’s main exports is cognitive biases. There’s the conjunction fallacy, the endowment effect, false consensus, false uniqueness, the curse of knowledge, the availability heuristic, the better-than-average effect, the worse-than-average effect, hyperbolic discounting, pareidolia, the hot-hand fallacy, the Turkey illusion, the Semmelweiss reflex, social cryptomnesia, reminiscence bump, and the “women are wonderful” effect. That’s just a taste, and the list gets longer every year. With all these cognitive biases, it’s amazing that people even manage to feed and bathe themselves.

In fact, “people are stupid” seems to be an assumption we all share and a chorus we love to hear. Say it on YouTube and you might get 31 million views. Write it in a book and you might become a bestselling author. Make it into a movie and it might become a cult hit. Dave Ramsey, the professional blowhard, puts it well:

You ever get in a room full of stupid people? Like, you know, you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your relatives are saying something that’s absolutely ridiculous, I mean really stupid. […] And you realize there’s not anything to say, because if you say something to them, it’s not going to do any good, because they’ve already made up their mind to live neck deep in the stupidity.

I used to believe this, too. As a kid, I loved reading stories from the Darwin Awards, which ridicule people who were so stupid that they died. But since then a few experiences have pried this little hunk of misanthropy out of my head and squashed it like a bug, and I’m better for it. I’d like to do the same for you. 

IF WE’RE SO STUPID HOW COME WE’RE STILL HERE

It’s true that people’s decisions are not perfectly rational. That discovery is so important that it’s won two Nobel Prizes so far. 

But “less than perfectly rational” doesn’t mean “stupid.” Our species couldn’t have survived for over 300,000 years if we were a bunch of nincompoops—we’d have gone extinct long ago from tap-dancing near crevasses or trying to hug grizzly bears or snacking on poison berries. Instead, we learn languages simply by listening to them, we remember innumerable facts for our entire lives, we walk on uneven ground and almost never fall over, we see stuff and immediately know what it’s called, and we read people’s minds just by looking at ripples in their facial muscles. Our astounding success is exactly what makes our mistakes interesting.

(For comparison, constructing an artificial intelligence that can do just one of these things takes a bunch of rare metals, a global supply chain, hyper-specialized factories, exorbitant amounts of energy, terabytes of training data, and thousands of people all working together for years. Meanwhile, people can produce an additional human intelligence by accident.)

We should treat cognitive illusions like psychology’s other great export: visual illusions. These circles look like they’re different sizes, but they’re not! These rings look like they’re rotating, but they’re sitting still! These lines look tilted, but they’re straight! Visual illusions don’t prove you are bad at seeing. They prove that your visual system is doing tons of stuff under the hood to make you good at seeing, and specially-designed images can expose its clever tricks. Cognitive illusions do the same—they help us understand how the mind works by figuring out how the mind breaks, just with words and numbers instead of pictures.

WHY EVERYONE FEELS LIKE THE LAST SANE PERSON IN A WORLD GONE MAD

To their credit, some psychologists will remind you that people are smart, or they’ll point out that some cognitive illusions disappear if you make the questions resemble the kinds of situations people encounter in their everyday lives. So why does research like this often get written up as “people are stupid” (i.e., “Your Lying Mind: Science Suggests We’re Hardwired to Delude Ourselves”)? I think the biggest reason is that we expect to hear that people are stupid; a few features of the mind make “people are stupid” an extraordinarily easy thing to believe.

First, there’s naive realism: the belief that you simply see the world as it is. Your brain doesn’t tell you this, but it starts Photoshopping reality as soon as photons hit your retina and vibrations hit your ears. So when other people say that reality is different, they simply seem mistaken. And if they resist when you try to correct them, they simply seem stupid.

Second, there’s psychological distance. Real people are complicated, and if they disagree with you, it’s easy to think of all the reasons why: they were raised differently, they don’t have all the facts, or maybe they even have more facts. But as I wrote in Bureaucratic psychosis, if you’re less connected to someone, you see them less as a person and more as a blob. Blobs are simple. If a blob disagrees with you, that's because it’s a big dumb sack of gelatinous ooze.

And third, there’s correspondence bias, the tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their personalities rather than to their situations. You see a dude get angry and assume he’s an angry dude, rather than he’s having a bad day. 

Here’s a little story. The first time I landed at LaGuardia Airport in New York, a woman asked me if I needed a taxi. “I do!” I said, thinking how everyone was wrong about New Yorkers; they’re actually quite friendly. She then led me to a parking garage and directed me to enter an unmarked SUV, which was not yellow like the taxis I had seen on TV. I realized I was perhaps doing something foolish, but she let me sit in the passenger seat, and I figured that if she decided to drive me into an alley where her accomplices could surround the car and steal my things (I assumed this was her plan), I would simply grab the wheel and drive us into a wall, and she, being older than me, would be dazed longer, allowing me a chance to escape.

This is the kind of logic that only makes sense when you’re 19 and you’ve mainly learned about the world by playing Grand Theft Auto. You may feel, reading it, like I made a series of stupid decisions because I’m a stupid person—that’s the correspondence bias part. But I don’t feel like I’m a stupid person. I feel like I was in a stupid situation because I know all of my extenuating circumstances: I was young and naive, I was trying to be polite, each decision seemed reasonable at the time, etc. 

(In the end, my would-be kidnapper merely overcharged me.)

Naive realism, psychological distance, and correspondence bias combine to create the funny feeling that common sense is uncommon. And that’s unfortunate, but it’s also a totally sensible way for a human mind to work. Naive realism is necessary—if your unconscious mental systems had to wait for your conscious self to sign off on everything, you’d drive your car right into a tree (fortunately allowing you to escape any middle-aged scammers in the car). The effects of psychological distance are necessary, too: if you could only conclude something about “people in general” by thinking about each of eight billion people one by one, you’d go insane.”