Etymology aside, Homo sapiens it seems is easily mislead.

Circus pioneering giant and renown hoaxter P.T. Barnum is famously quoted as saying “there's a sucker born every minute”; a reference to the unfathomable gullibility of human beings, and a fact that fake news hawkers and the Permanent Political Class gleefully embrace today.

“Post-truth” was Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2016, defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” "Alternative Facts" entered our lexicon in 2017 when Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway used it during a Meet the Press interview on NBC, and President Trump routinely deflects criticism as “Fake News”. Steven Colbert introduced the word “Truthiness” in 2005, now defined as “the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts”. AI-powered face-swapping technology now challenges the reality of video with so-called “deep fakes”, adding to the increasing difficulty that the public seems to have distinguishing advertising from reality as critical thinking vanishes without struggle in the rear-view mirror.

Just why are human beings so gullible? A paper written by Dr. Norbert Schwarz and Dr. Eryn Newman (S&N) of USC entitled “How does the gut know truth? The Psychology of Truthiness” explores the growing reliance on intuitive evaluation rather than analytical reasoning. “Analytic answers, akin to knowledge from the book, draw on relevant knowledge and may involve extensive information search, which is taxing and requires cognitive resources. Intuitive answers, akin to knowledge from the gut, are less demanding and rely on feelings of fluency and familiarity. The easier a claim is to process and the more familiar it feels, the more likely it is judged 'true'. When thoughts flow smoothly, people nod along.” This aligns with Leon Festinger's Social Comparison Theory, which holds that people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing respectively with the opinions and abilities of others. A widely held belief is easier to believe. An article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007 (Weaver, Garcia, Schwarz & Miller) entitled “Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion From Its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus” identified the tendency of people to accept a repetitive message “Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgements is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of one group member.” This accounts for the disproportionate political influence of small but vocal special-interest groups, and explains why politicians tirelessly trumpet the same banal campaign slogans when seeking another term at the trough. “Choose Forward”, banal and immediately tiresome to many Canadians, was widely embraced by millions last Election Day. This is called “staying on message”.

Another aspect of political messaging is that people are more likely to accept a claim that is compatible with their own beliefs than one that is not (Abelson et al., 1968; Wyer, 1974). This accounts for why partisan politics are easy to sell and how a billionaire real estate developer from New York was able to sweep West Virginia on a “Clean Coal” platform (the logic of which escaped voters in California, for example) to become Leader of the Free World. This is called “tailoring the message.”

According to S&N, information is also more likely to be accepted when it comes from a credible source. Relying upon intuitive evaluation, familiarity is key “Repeatedly seeing a face is sufficient to increase perceived honesty and sincerity as well as agreement. Familiarity equals Credibility in an intuitive mind.

Increasingly, so-called social media platforms play a role in election campaigns; pioneered successfully by Barrack Obama in 2008. Social media is however a Petri dish for misinformation. S&N found “Intuitive truth tests foster the acceptance of information on social media. On Facebook, one's friends (a credible source) post a message that is liked and reposted by other friends (social consensus), resulting in multiple exposures to the same message. With each exposure, processing becomes easier and perceptions of social consensus, coherence and compatibility increase. Comments and related posts provide additional supporting evidence and further enhance familiarity. At the same time, the filtering mechanism of the feed makes exposure to opposing information less likely.” Social media provides then a perfectly designed vehicle for emotive and fact-free messages. Driven by what former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya described as the Social Feedback Loop, social media comments spread like Ebola. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

Every four years, unaware that they are doomed by the decline of reason and three million-year-old Australopithecus software, voters forget all the lies that they heard during the last election cycle (often even the lies told by the incumbent Government in order to get elected) and head to the polls with confidence in the Democratic process.

In the current climate of pandemic panic paralyzing the world, leadership and accurate information are even more important. Critical thinking is...well, critical.