Thank You for Smoking

by Michael Tobis     Department: Science & Society

There's an interesting radio series called Radio Lab on PBS that has some things in common with WIRED Science TV. I caught an episode today; it was about the psychology and physiology of lying. It turns out that liars are wired (er, sorry) differently than the rest of us. They have detectably more white matter in their brains.

I'm a hopelessly bad liar myself. On the other hand I seem to have a well-honed "BS detector". There have been a number of instances where I saw a con happening before other people did, one of them quite important in my circle of friends in college. (Don't say I didn't tell ya, guys...)

Meanwhile there's a group at Stanford that is studying something they call "agnotology", or the study of how ignorance and confusion is deliberately cultivated. It turns out the profession fictionalized in the movie "Thank You for Smoking" is real. Confusing the public about evidence that matters to the society is lying on a very large scale. Just like individual lies, though, it takes two to tango.

Somebody has to be good at lying, and somebody else has to have a motivation for believing the lies.

For instance, I am very willing to bet that opinions about the risk of sea level rise due to artificial climate change correlate negatively with ownership of beachfront property. People who are at risk, especially from something that they can't directly control, are just less likely to believe it.

The way to protect yourself from this is to just for a minute try believing what is against your own interests on for size. It might not even the balance entirely, but it might keep you from making really big mistakes.

As the world gets smaller, what you believe about it has bigger consequences. Please try to get it right. That involves questioning everything, questioning what you believe every bit as much as you question what you disbelieve.

Tags: gullibility, lies

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