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Are people inherently gullible?

radcen

radcen

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Are people inherently gullible? Are the mases simple-minded and pretty much do as they're told?

Example: War. More specific, WW2 between Britain and Germany (just for example purposes, we know there were more countries involved).

Granted, it should be noted that Britain was fighting more for self-preservation. But, deep down, did the common soldier really believe the common soldiers on the other side were evil? Did they believe the rhetoric their leaders told them?

As a related side question: Did average Germans honestly and deep down believe Jews were bad, or were they just suckers for good propaganda? The Jew-hating thing could be attributed to culture and handed down from generation to generation, but that still ties into the 'gullible' possibility. People believed what they were told whether it was true or not.

Or, were the common soldiers pretty much the same on both sides? Wanting the same thing, to be left alone and have a nice life, raise a family, and so on.

If the latter, why do we (collective "we") fall for the rhetoric and go to war? Going back to the self-preservation aspect, if somebody else is buying into the dumb-ass rhetoric and attacking you then you have no choice but to either submit or fight. Hence, as long as somebody is gullible, war won't stop, but... what would happen if all the average soldiers on all sides simply refused to fight?
 
Looking at the success rate of populist tyrants and demagogues in general, gonna go with a firm "yes."

But, a lot of the time, such people take power when the people are weak and vulnerable -- the fascists and communists/socialists of the 20th century, for example.

It's nothing that can't be avoided though.
 
Another example that came to mind is our National Guard. At times they fire on their own people... people just like them (for the most part), simply because they're told to.
 
radcen said:
Another example that came to mind is our National Guard. At times they fire on their own people... people just like them (for the most part), simply because they're told to.
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What?????


lol
 
Van Basten said:
Looking at the success rate of populist tyrants and demagogues in general, gonna go with a firm "yes."

But, a lot of the time, such people take power when the people are weak and vulnerable -- the fascists and communists/socialists of the 20th century, for example.

It's nothing that can't be avoided though.
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That is a good point. Vulnerability, especially economic, will trigger a level of desperation that will make people consider more extreme alternatives than they otherwise would. Suddenly, the rhetoric doesn't seem so extreme and ridiculous anymore.
 
radcen said:
Granted, it should be noted that Britain was fighting more for self-preservation. But, deep down, did the common soldier really believe the common soldiers on the other side were evil? Did they believe the rhetoric their leaders told them?
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Yes ... When you have people shooting at you and actually killing your friends as you watch, you very quickly become convinced that the other side is evil.
 
brothern said:
Yes ... When you have people shooting at you and actually killing your friends as you watch, you very quickly become convinced that the other side is evil.
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Right, but that's immediate and situational. Prior to the fighting, and back at home, did these people have anything against the others?
 
"So what I want to talk about today is belief. I want to believe, and you do too. And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning.

"We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior. In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there -- if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice. And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us.

"I call this process "patternicity" -- that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is. So let's do a thought experiment. You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa. Your name is Lucy, okay? And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? Your next decision could be the most important one of your life. Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive. But no harm. You just move away. You're more cautious. You're more vigilant. On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin award. You've been taken out of the gene pool.

"Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. This is the only equation in the talk by the way. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations. So the default position is just: Believe all patterns are real -- All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind. And so I think that we evolved ... there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I'll come back to."

Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception | Talk Subtitles and Transcript | TED.com
 
Most people are sheep and will think and do whatever they are told to.
 
radcen said:
Another example that came to mind is our National Guard. At times they fire on their own people... people just like them (for the most part), simply because they're told to.
Click to expand...

I like to think that ignorance plays a part here, which of course makes us gullible.
We use propaganda on our own people to get them to hate the enemy. We demonize the enemy, tell lies about them, and so on. If we see on our own that the enemy isn't horrible, just fighting out of fear, it makes us less likely to shoot them for no other reason than being ordered to.
 
radcen said:
Are people inherently gullible? Are the mases simple-minded and pretty much do as they're told?

Example: War. More specific, WW2 between Britain and Germany (just for example purposes, we know there were more countries involved).

Granted, it should be noted that Britain was fighting more for self-preservation. But, deep down, did the common soldier really believe the common soldiers on the other side were evil? Did they believe the rhetoric their leaders told them?

As a related side question: Did average Germans honestly and deep down believe Jews were bad, or were they just suckers for good propaganda? The Jew-hating thing could be attributed to culture and handed down from generation to generation, but that still ties into the 'gullible' possibility. People believed what they were told whether it was true or not.

Or, were the common soldiers pretty much the same on both sides? Wanting the same thing, to be left alone and have a nice life, raise a family, and so on.

If the latter, why do we (collective "we") fall for the rhetoric and go to war? Going back to the self-preservation aspect, if somebody else is buying into the dumb-ass rhetoric and attacking you then you have no choice but to either submit or fight. Hence, as long as somebody is gullible, war won't stop, but... what would happen if all the average soldiers on all sides simply refused to fight?
Click to expand...


You should read Larry Niven's essay Why Men Fight and What You Can Do About It.

The first section is entitled Why Men Fight and runs a few pages. Pretty good stuff.

The second section is entitled What You Can Do About It and is very short: it actually consists of just one line, which says:

Not a damn thing.


Pretty much sums it up.
 
Logicman said:
View attachment 67182834
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30904197.jpg
 
Moderator's Warning:
KNOCK IT OFF. Yes, you two. Don't pretend you don't know who I mean, and don't make me come back here again.


The topic is whether people are gullible as it relates to persuading a nation to go to war. Stick to it.
 
radcen said:
But, deep down, did the common soldier really believe the common soldiers on the other side were evil? Did they believe the rhetoric their leaders told them?

... Hence, as long as somebody is gullible, war won't stop, but... what would happen if all the average soldiers on all sides simply refused to fight?
Click to expand...
I just yesterday heard from an ex-marine about a USA report (no link) that after World War II they did a study about the kill ratio per bullet and found that a there were a huge amount of more bullets then there were casualties, and that there was a change in strategy in Vietnam where the military had to instruct the soldiers in shooting at the enemy soldiers, and so in Vietnam the ratio of bullets to kills became lower.

What they found was that in WW II the common soldiers were purposely shooting overheads as they did not want to murder the enemy (the Germans).

Of course not every soldier was shooting overhead but there was a significant number which required a change in strategy for the military.

A big reason for that was that the soldiers of WW II were all drafted and many had strong religious beliefs.




================================================


ReverendHellh0und said:
RAMOSS said:
Kent state.
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So one incident from 45 years ago?
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There is also the Branch Davidian compound of Waco Texas.

Link = Waco siege - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Just think back 10 years about the stupid ****s who fell hook line and sinker for colin powell's UN presentation and actually believed the iraq invasion had to do with WMDs or combating terrorism.

War is so insanely stupid that the only way to account for it is gullibility on enormous scale. Everyone gets used and rarely are the perpetrators themselves punished. The emperor of japan was still a god at the end, despite the millions of lives thrown away for nothing.

But in terms of hating the enemy, contrast a voluntary force with a massive draft like WW2 and in the latter, you will get pretty much a reflection of the general population, at least until they're in combat. Some germans hated jews and commies, some couldn't have cared less.

One thing is consistent however: the longer the enlistment, the more contempt they held for *civilians* on both sides. Fussell's account of WW2 indicates even the conscientious objectors were less hated than civilians, who in their own gullibility and blind patriotism would never tolerate such open disdain for the same soldiers who hated them.

What would happen if they refused to fight? Probably similar to the french revolution, they'd just mutiny and turn on the leaders, or the draft riots if they aren't deployed.

But this is so rare in history and by WW2 there were safeguards, such as dropping soldiers on a beach where the only retreat was into the ocean, soviets setting up machine guns to fire at any of their own soldiers who refused orders. And if you're a Brit in germany, what are you gonna do, run into the wilderness and starve to death? Heck even by the civil war, there were executions of troops stationed right outside the cities who got homesick and returned home for the weekend.

The young are easily taken advantage of because they believe they're invincible, they'll survive and get to blow **** up and the war will be won by christmas and hey, it's better than being a 'coward'. Check out "Western Front" to see that even parents would call their kids cowards and disown them if they didn't enlist.

Everyone is optimistic at the onset, and therein is the gullibility that begins to enable war. They have to believe it'll be easy victory or at least a war of necessity. But necessity for who? Victory for who? The outcome is highly unlikely to matter to the individual soldier, no not even in manchester in WW2. Here religion or nationalism fills the void. Without these, very few wars would ever take place.
 
brothern said:
Yes ... When you have people shooting at you and actually killing your friends as you watch, you very quickly become convinced that the other side is evil.
Click to expand...

That almost never happens and especially not by the side that has any chance of winning or even mobilizing in response.

It's like saying americans should've taken pearl harbor personally, but considering how few were at the scene or could even accurately imagine it...

The military and industry response was out of nationalism, with a healthy dose of jap hating, not personal self defense
 
radcen said:
Are people inherently gullible? Are the mases simple-minded and pretty much do as they're told?

Example: War. More specific, WW2 between Britain and Germany (just for example purposes, we know there were more countries involved).

Granted, it should be noted that Britain was fighting more for self-preservation. But, deep down, did the common soldier really believe the common soldiers on the other side were evil? Did they believe the rhetoric their leaders told them?

As a related side question: Did average Germans honestly and deep down believe Jews were bad, or were they just suckers for good propaganda? The Jew-hating thing could be attributed to culture and handed down from generation to generation, but that still ties into the 'gullible' possibility. People believed what they were told whether it was true or not.

Or, were the common soldiers pretty much the same on both sides? Wanting the same thing, to be left alone and have a nice life, raise a family, and so on.

If the latter, why do we (collective "we") fall for the rhetoric and go to war? Going back to the self-preservation aspect, if somebody else is buying into the dumb-ass rhetoric and attacking you then you have no choice but to either submit or fight. Hence, as long as somebody is gullible, war won't stop, but... what would happen if all the average soldiers on all sides simply refused to fight?
Click to expand...

I've often wondered about the gullibility of the Jews at that time. I mean, they had years to leave Germany before immigration laws kept them from leaving. They knew Hitler was crazy, didn't they? Were they so gullible? I know that they kept waiting on people to help, but when help didn't come, why didn't they try to help themselves? Gullibility, I think. They never thought it would get as bad as it did, until it did, and then it was too late.
 
There was an amazing study published about how gullible people are these days.

 
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