Why do smart people fall for stupid things? Here is what I think is an important part of the answer that almost never gets discussed.
It’s easy to look around at the stupid seeming things that other people believe (e.g., people who join harmful cults, get scammed by a con artist, become vocal evangelists for a placebo treatment, or jump on the hype train of some outrageous new bubble) and wonder: “How on earth can they be so dumb?”
The answer, a lot of times, is simply the trust they have in someone else.
In other words, if a person were to evaluate the bad idea itself – call it X – they may well see it as dumb, dangerous, or full of hot air.
Instead, someone that person sees as impressive and totally trustworthy (or someone they just really like and respect) tells them that X is the next big thing. Or that X will change their life. Or that X will make them rich. Or that X will solve a problem for them that they desperately want solved.
This puts their brain in a predicament. They can either believe:
(1) That this impressive person who they deeply trust is deceiving them
Or
(2) That his impressive person who they trust is right – and their life will be way better off because of it!
If their trust in the person is great enough, or, at least, greater than their level of skepticism, (2) may win them over simply for that reason.
But (2) may also win them over for one or more of these reasons:
- they so desperately want this to be real – they so want to be special, or rich, or to have their biggest problems finally solved
- it’s difficult and painful to believe this person they trust so much is deceiving them or so wrong about something important
- they sense it will damage the relationship if they refuse to believe, and they care deeply about the relationship
- they have a hard time saying ‘no’ – perhaps it makes them very anxious to do so
In other words, there are a great many dumb things that even smart people end up believing in simply because people believe people. To be clear, this is not the only mechanism by which smart people fall for dumb things. Being smart is not the same as acting rationally all the time. But this trust-based force is, I think, an important mechanism.
While a belief in others is wonderful and admirable in many instances, it can also be a chink in our skepticism and rationality. It can lead us to believe in crazy and dangerous things that we wouldn’t be likely to believe without that trust. We see this when people get scammed by their favorite influencer or when they become true believers in quack cures because they have a friend who says it changed their life.
While this effect often happens when one person we trust causes us to believe in X, the effect is magnified when more people around us believe. Being recruited into a harmful cult by a trusted friend can be difficult, but leaving a cult – at which point all of our close friends are believers in X – is far more difficult. And growing up in an authoritarian regime – where EVERYONE we’ve met seems to believe in X, makes X that much more impossible to resist.
When rationality is discussed, it’s often talked about at the level of the individual. But quite a bit of our thinking we necessarily outsource to others – we can’t make sense of everything ourselves. When we allow someone into our circle of trust who doesn’t deserve to be there, that can jeopardize our rationality. Hence, an important meta-skill of rationality is knowing who to trust – and not being suckered into trusting those who don’t deserve it.
Almost everyone is susceptible to this phenomenon of being duped because of our trust in people, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.
One thing that I think helps is to treat trust as being multi-factor. I can trust a person in one way or in one domain but not another. Or, put another way, earning trust is multi-dimensional. I can see someone as trustworthy because:
- I know they wouldn’t betray me and that they care a lot about me
- I know that they vet evidence carefully, come to their beliefs in a rigorous way, and approach new information skeptically
- I know that they are extremely knowledgeable about a specific topic area
Being strong in one of these domains doesn’t automatically make someone strong in another. So, viewing someone as trustworthy in one of these domains shouldn’t cause you to view them as trustworthy in the other ones. And yet, that’s what many people do.
If you track trust in a one-dimensional way, it puts you at a lot of risk because someone you trust may have a very bad idea that they really want you to believe in. It may be hard to reject that idea because you trust them so much – and that may mean joining a harmful cult, buying into the peak of the next bubble, putting stock in an ineffective treatment, or being scammed.
This piece was first written on September 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 22, 2024.
Never thought about the “trust is multi-factor” part, great point!
I guess another reason for smart people doing stupid things is just hindsight bias, of things seeming obviously stupid in hindsight when in fact they probably weren’t. Eg right now many smart people believe in Bitcoin, while many other smart people think it’s a bubble or pyramid scheme or otherwise useless. And many people in both groups seem to think the other side is stupid. Once Bitcoin settles into one of the two extremes, to them it will even more look as if many smart people on the other side were deluded to believe in the wrong outcome, when in fact the final outcome is just unclear at this point, and it’s not stupid to believe in either hypothesis.
The second and third factors “always looks carefully and sceptically” and “has expert knowledge” seem like good reasons to believe someone, even when your own (hastier and less expert) judgement suggests it may be wrong. For example, I long believed that using gas appliances had to be more energy efficient than using electricity generated by burning gas, due to transmission losses. But the experts said the opposite and they were right. I’d mistakenly ignored efficiency losses in the appliances