There’s an excellent article about gullibility over at the Unherd site today. It starts off by talking about the hoaxer who, during Queen Anne’s reign, managed to convince all manner of people, including many in positions of authority such as the Bishop of London, that the inhabitants of Formosa, now Taiwan, were practising human sacrifice and lived underground. The article ends by talking about the various claims made about the White Helmets group that operated in Syria and how these claims have been amplified by state aligned media in Russia. It gets to its final point by way of speaking about the claims that the Moon landings were falsified by NASA and various 9/11 conspiracy theories.

This article quite rightly shows that the sort of hoax perpetrated by a person in Queen Anne’s time could not happen today, as many of us have met Taiwanese people and know that they don’t practise human sacrifice or live underground. We can see quite plainly that anybody who makes such a claim is talking out of their arse. This is because we can easily access the evidence to show that such a claim is wrong.

But having access to more evidence to disprove false claims doesn’t mean that hoaxes and false claims have not gone away. We are still plagued by the Flat Earthers who refuse to accept the now very obvious evidence that the Earth is an oblate spheroid but these types can be very easily dismissed and laughed at.

The problem as I see it comes from false claims and hoaxes that deal with stuff that is outside our general knowledge. Many of these false claims such as those regarding vaccines or science or the allegations of the existence of ‘VIP paedophile rings’ are accepted because the vast majority of people are not scientifically literate to the degree needed to be able to dismiss vaccine hoaxes and child abuse does indeed exist and some high profile people have been convicted of such abuse. In the modern world it’s relatively easy to appear scientifically knowledgable to the extent that a hoaxer could bamboozle members of the non-scientific public and get them to promote the hoax on social media. It’s also relatively easy to claim that you have ‘inside information’ that ‘proves’ the existence of a VIP paedophile ring, when no such evidence or information really exists. In both of these scenarios all the hoaxer needs to do is to appear knowledgable and put together a hoax that looks credible to the casual reader and because of modern social media connectivity the hoax will take on a life of its own and be spread by others unconnected with the original hoaxer.

Gullibility has not gone away. It’s still with us but the type of hoaxes have changed. Some of us have at one point or another in our lives been caught out by them much to our embarrassment and chagrin mostly through trusting a messenger who might previously have been reliable but who has later turned out to be false. We are not, on the whole, as gullible as those who bought into the idea that the Taiwanese were cave dwelling practitioners of human sacrifice, but we can be gullible in other ways and that’s why we should be careful about what we believe and what we promote. Sometimes when information seems too good to be true then it means that that information really is untrue.

You can read the Unherd piece on gullibility via the link below:

https://unherd.com/2021/09/how-gullible-are-you/