Goldilocks zone of trust
Trust thought for Today - the implications of people trusting too little and not too much.
Very interesting article, which I am cherry picking to highlight this because it aligns with my beliefs!
"Despite all these attractions, the misinformation panic is largely misguided. Contrary to widespread beliefs, the share of misinformation in most people’s information diet is minimal, conspiracy theorising does not seem to have increased in recent years, and those who consume high rates of misinformation are largely hyper-partisans or dogmatists anyway. Moreover, even when people’s misinformed beliefs are corrected, this often seems to have little effect on their behaviour.
More generally, the popular image of human beings as ‘Homo Credulous’, gullibly accepting whatever information they come across, is mistaken. Most mass propaganda and advertising campaigns fail abysmally. If anything, people trust too little than too much, placing excessive reliance on their own intuitions than on information from genuinely reliable sources."
But "If we understand bad media content and information through a narrative in which people are the gullible victims of disinformation campaigns or social media platforms, we ignore more important questions, such as: Why are people so attached to specific ideas and narratives? And how might different social, political, and economic conditions influence such attachments?
Just reading Dawn of Everything at the weekend, we also take steps to define ourselves by distinguishing what we are not and how we are different from others by aligning with what they are not. More important than previously thought and I feel important here.