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Not\\xa0Born\\xa0Yesterday explains how we decide who we can trust and what we should believe \\u2014 and argues that we\\u2019re pretty good at making these decisions. Hugo Mercier demonstrates how virtually all attempts at mass persuasion \\u2014 whether by religious leaders, politicians, or advertisers \\u2014 fail miserably. Drawing on recent findings from political science and other fields ranging from history to anthropology, Mercier shows that the narrative of widespread gullibility, in which a credulous public is easily misled by demagogues and charlatans, is simply wrong.

Why is mass persuasion so difficult? Mercier uses the latest findings from experimental psychology to show how each of us is endowed with sophisticated cognitive mechanisms of open vigilance. Computing a variety of cues, these mechanisms enable us to be on guard against harmful beliefs, while being open enough to change our minds when presented with the right evidence. Even failures \\u2014 when we accept false confessions, spread wild rumors, or fall for quack medicine \\u2014 are better explained as bugs in otherwise well-functioning cognitive mechanisms than as symptoms of general gullibility. In this lively and provocative conversation Shermer and Mercier discuss:

• If we\\u2019re not as gullible as we\\u2019ve been led to believe, then why do so many people apparently believe in ESP, astrology, the paranormal, the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and the like?
• Epistemic Vigilance and skepticism
• why most Germans did not believe in Nazi ideology
• honest signaling, costly signaling, and virtue signaling
• Malcolm Gladwell\\u2019s book Talking to Strangers and why the \\u201cdefault to truth\\u201d theory is wrong.
• folk biology and why creationism is intuitive and evolutionary theory counterintuitive
• conspiracy theories and why we believe them (or not)
• the real meaning of conformity experiments in which people appear to go along with the group
• why people join cults \\u2026 or ISIS.
• why people belong to religions, and
• why we are not living in a post-truth era, and why access to accurate information has never been so good.

Hugo Mercier is a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris and the coauthor of The Enigma of Reason. He lives in Nantes, France. Twitter @hugoreasoning

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