How gullible is the "average" person?

festa5

festa5

Well-known member
Frequently seem to come across stuff on social media that looks dodgy (made up quotes etc) and the comments suggest many people take it at face value and don't question it at all.

Is this is a bigger problem in wider society than we think or just a small sample of the outliers? My mind is frequently blown by how easily some swallow the very transparent lies of politicians.

This video appeared in my Facebook feed. I mean it's very clearly a spoof in the style of the office. It's fairly amusing to be fair. But then you read the comments...... how do people possibly think this is real? 🤯.

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I've noticed more and more people fill in empty gaps with their own narrative. If a politician / salesman/ newspaper article/ video fills those gaps they will often take it at face value and presume it must be true without any further scrutiny.

It terrifies me some of the things people believe/ say without any level of scrutiny- and repeat as if they know it is fact. This then perpetuates the situation.

AI fake videos are going to create chaos.
 
A majority voted for Brexit; many of them believed in "project fear".

I say pretty damn gullible. The new firm of gullibility is the proliferation of conspiracy theory: people are so convinced they are worth fooling, they find it easier to believe they are victims of conspiracy than they might be wrong.

Maybe the internet has made people "next level gullible": they're superficially cynical that they're prepared to believe anything about the person's motives.
 
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Children are conditioned at school to be gullible in, what is a pretty archaic education system.

The Internet has further added to this since cookies, personas and ai powered recommendation engines have come along.

We live in a bubble not necessarily of our own making. We have all made decisions based on poor information.

It's essentially part of the way humans evolved as pattern recognition machines. It aids survival but makes us vulnerable to false positive conclusions.
 
By nature I'm a right cynical get, so unless the source is pretty much proven to be as close to 100% reliable as possible (Private Eye for example) I'm automatically thinking ".....hmmmmmm, really??"

But have to agree with the OP, a lot of people have to be told how to think. Individual analysis and thought process is just too difficult and people CBA.

That's why the country is where it is in 2024 sadly.
 
It's a fascinating subject changing all the time.

The birth of www. has opened up a whole new level of fkwittery previously not known to neanderthal or man.

Some individuals have harnessed the power of access to this fkwittedness and have ridden it bareback for all it's mighty worth.

Trump, Bojo and Farage are/have been geniuses in embracing the gullibility of the fkwit and populist driven media in all forms looking for hits have been happy to swallow it up with a smile on it's face.

Nothing new though. Look at Hitler.
 
People read headlines. That's it.

I'm on X and the amount of people who post fake headlines (Anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, Chemtrailers) and who get sometimes 1000s of gormless fools replying with ".. oohh .. I knew it! I knew it!" posts is crazy. They're fake headlines made to look like web news articles (with the obligatory "fact checked" stamp on it) .. no source article .. no link .. no sign of the article on google if you search for it .. something somebody has knocked up in 2 minutes in photoshop .

And the gormless fools replying are the ones who claim they " .. do their own research" and who are trying to "wake the sheeple up" ..

So how gullible?

Very
 
h_m_boro said:
By nature I'm a right cynical get, so unless the source is pretty much proven to be as close to 100% reliable as possible (Private Eye for example)
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I subscribed to Private Eye for close to twenty years & I would never have described them as a 100% reliable source of information, 50% maybe.
 
It's not necessarily people being gullible. A lot of people don't seek out news, they seek out validation of their own world view. How many of the people commenting here on the gullibility of people actually followed the link and watched it and made their own mind up or did they just agree with OP and add their bit? My guess is the vast majority is the latter. That's exactly how these Facebook comments end up populated.

People often say things like the Daily Mail are brainwashing people to believe x, y or z but they aren't. People are reading the Daily Mail because it produces content that they agree with. If Daily Mail and the Guardian swapped names then the Daily Mail readers wouldn't all become lefties, they'd go and read the Guardian instead.
 
The Internet has given grifters, conmen and propaganda peddlers infinite opportunities to seek their pray and boy are they successful. They have gained incredible and dangerous influence who, had the internet not existed, would be ordinary Joes mumbling into their beers in the corner of a pub.
 
Nano said:
It's not necessarily people being gullible. A lot of people don't seek out news, they seek out validation of their own world view. How many of the people commenting here on the gullibility of people actually followed the link and watched it and made their own mind up or did they just agree with OP and add their bit? My guess is the vast majority is the latter. That's exactly how these Facebook comments end up populated.

People often say things like the Daily Mail are brainwashing people to believe x, y or z but they aren't. People are reading the Daily Mail because it produces content that they agree with. If Daily Mail and the Guardian swapped names then the Daily Mail readers wouldn't all become lefties, they'd go and read the Guardian instead.
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Very good point. As said above, we all live in our bubbles and often seek validation within them.
 
Zoophonic said:
The Internet has given grifters, conmen and propaganda peddlers infinite opportunities to seek their pray and boy are they successful. They have gained incredible and dangerous influence who, had the internet not existed, would be ordinary Joes mumbling into their beers in the corner of a pub.
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I don't believe that. Grifters are going to grift with whatever resources they have.

I think it's more about the very old saying (Twain I think) about lies getting half way round the world before truth gets its boots on.

The one thing that the internet has done has allowed like minded idiots to gather together more easily.
 
Nano said:
It's not necessarily people being gullible. A lot of people don't seek out news, they seek out validation of their own world view.
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I take your point, but I'd see that as part of being gullible: making yourself vulnerable to confirmation bias.

I rarely buy a paper now, but for a couple of decades I've made a point of reading papers whose natural stance is different to my own leftist position, so I usually go for The Times. It's good to have your own opinions challenged.
 
I taught A level Critical Thinking for a while and some of the students’ reasoning levels were, to put it bluntly, terrible. I remember one young lady thinking, because we live on an island, you could swim underneath it and really thought that the UK could be moved like a rather big boat.
 
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