You Are More Gullible Than You Think

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Would you accept an offer to lose 15 pounds in a month with no special diet or exercise, enjoy a luxurious Hawaiian vacation for only $199, or earn $5,000 while working from home only three or four hours a week? If you answered “yes” to any of these fictional offers, you may be gullible. However, day-to-day gullibility is often much more subtle. Do you believe that your partner or spouse will love you forever, no matter what? Do you expect that everyone at work will meet deadlines and pull their weight on a group project? Perhaps you resemble one of the 4.5 million Twitter contributors who are 70 percent more likely to spread fake news on social media than communicate truth (Vosoughi et al., 2018). All the premises, thoughts, and actions described above exemplify some form of credulity, otherwise known as being conned or tricked.

Gullibility, defined as the psychological state whereby a person can easily be deceived, often results in “being duped or taken advantage of” (Greenspan, 2008, p. 2) because the person makes decisions based on unlikely propositions that lack proof. The practical impact of gullibility is immense and may result in the distortion of personal reality and the tendency to make poor social, civic, and economic decisions including overestimating the positive qualities of others, advocating for contrived and dubious causes, or falling for elaborate and financially untenable Ponzi schemes. In short, being gullible means trusting people and the information they share as truthful, a reluctance or inability to think logically and rationally, and relying on personal evidence that cannot be replicated or observed by others.

Why are some people so gullible?

Individuals who lack street smarts or common sense are most prone to gullibility. However, anyone, at any time, may get caught in the wicked web of gullibility. Being gullible means that you believe something in the absence of evidence, or you consciously evaluate a person and question information integrity yet reach the wrong conclusion because you lack sensitivity to untrustworthy claims (Teunisse et al., 2020). Described by psychologists as “social intelligence,” gullible individuals are often thought to be overly trusting and easily manipulated because they lack social skills and the ability to detect or evaluate the motives of others.

Susceptibility to bunk and succumbing to shady intentions likely means two things. First, you are a person who is prone to taking the path of least resistance toward reaching your goals. In practice, being easily convinced means it is less effortful for you to just agree and move on to the next thing than it is to spend your time arguing (with yourself or others) to no avail (Pennycook & Rand, 2019). You might also be the type of person who does not care much about justifying your beliefs; thus, you concede to other opinions. Second, the beliefs you use to make your decisions may be unconventional and not map very well onto reality. In other words, you might rely on the wrong type of evidence or bad information when making choices. To figure out why some people succumb to gullibility pitfalls and why others do not, we need to examine a variety of other cognitive, emotional, and cultural factors related to flawed decision-making.

Some root causes of gullibility

You unconditionally respect authority and tend to conform. Many of us unconsciously believe that being a decent human means that we should cooperate with others. We might think that always needing to be “right” and debating other people is a flaw. After all, saying no to others is a push back and most people don’t like the perception of being classified as “difficult.” When someone who is in a position of actual or perceived power (doctors, lawyers, professors, significant others) make a request, we often assume they know what they are talking about and we automatically default to believing the person’s perspectives are honorable and accurate. However, like every other profession in the world, high-status individuals also make mistakes, and some may also have devious intentions.

You are overconfident in your knowledge. There is a direct positive relationship between what we think we know and the tendency to be gullible. Those who believe they have expertise on a topic often make more errors than those who have requisite knowledge because they are overly confident in their decisions (Dunning, 2019). The perception of ample personal knowledge blinds the gullible person to the reality that they are making a mistake when a credulous decision is evaluated. Even in situations where the evidence is highly suspect, the gullible person avoids asking for feedback or advice from others because they erroneously believe that asking for help (or a second opinion) reflects on their lack of knowledge, something they may be reluctant to admit.

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You fail to use analytical thinking. Those who are less gullible are much more likely to use analytical thinking, which critically evaluates information before a decision is made (Swami et al., 2014). Instead, the gullible person relies on personal experience or intuition as the basis for decisions and may even reject known information because the questionable message at hand appears to be more salient or easier to understand. Sometimes referred to as using “rules of thumb,” we are comfortable being in the ballpark, ignoring the fact that an informed decision often requires deeper reasoning and evaluation.

You are traditional and culturally consistent. Some people stake their identities based on aligning with a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group or culture. When cultural concerns dominate a person’s life, they automatically defer to the accepted practice of that culture. As such they may fail to critically evaluate the pending proposition, instead routinely falling in line with dogmatic group beliefs and expectations. Many examples of group gullibility fall into this category, including the belief that storming (or conspiring to storm) the U.S. Capitol was a wise decision. This aspect of gullibility is particularly troublesome for those who advocate for certain political or civic causes, as the group perspective is endorsed irrespective of the absurdity of the claim.

You lack self-control and tend to make impulsive decisions. One method that salespeople and advertisers use to exploit gullibility for profit is by creating an emotionally charged decision. When emotional pleas are made, a person can become consumed with satisfying the emotion rather than making a well-informed logical and long-term beneficial decision. For example, we often jump at a buying opportunity in shortage situations, regardless of the actual need—toilet paper, anyone? The impact of emotion is intensified when the person has a lot to think about, a situation described as having “high cognitive load.” When the person is bombarded with information, they want to reduce the cognitive strain and thus make hasty but less informed decisions. Too much emotion or too much to think about may cost you more time and money.

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You think it’s a good idea because others seem to agree. The concept of pluralistic ignorance whereby we go along with the crowd has happened throughout history. Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals privately reject a norm, but mistakenly believe others endorse it (Munsch et al., 2018). The belief that something could not be bad or wrong if everyone else is doing it has led to some of the most horrid and regrettable events in human history. The Holocaust, the perpetuation of slavery, limiting women’s workplace rights, and even the proliferation of many religions were all based on the perception that others thought it was a good idea, despite the absence of evidence supporting the idea or movement.

You are biased. Humans are notoriously bad at clear thinking, which inevitably leads to gullibility. For example, we often falsely believe that when one event follows another that the first event caused the second. Known as a conjunctive fallacy, we erroneously associate past patterns and events as predictive of what we believe to be true, despite lack of evidence. A stereotypical example is paranormal phenomenon. You hear a crash in the kitchen and quickly conclude you have ghosts, likely devoid of any real investigation or the ruling out of other plausible explanations. Additionally, we tend to believe that our opinions are more justified than those of others, we ignore or do not understand real-life probabilities and the likelihood of occurrences, and we actively pursue information and people that justify our preconceived notions, while ignoring or rejecting contrary evidence. Perhaps the most disturbing example of personal bias is when prior commitment guides our future behavior, which happens when we invest our physical or mental resources toward a person, cause, or idea that we know is foolhardy, but nonetheless relentlessly pursue that option, because of the past connection.

Gullibility with benefits

Despite the apparent social, economic, and civic liabilities of gullibility there are benefits to being overly trusting and accepting improbable propositions. First, those individuals who fall for dubious claims provide concrete examples to inform the rest of society. For example, the alleged anti-vaccination campaign by some societal segments is a conduit that allows for the presentation of evidence concerning vaccine effectiveness and safety to be brought to the forefront of discussion. Replicable evidence can be presented, and gullible theories can be debunked by the analysis of the evidence and not through opinion.

Second, being gullible provides a prime opportunity for the evaluation of one’s beliefs and values. Provided that the prospective choice is consciously evaluated, the reflective individual can engage in a process of self-evaluation, determining what aspects of their identity contribute to their decisions. While the typical person may not be overly introspective, if deliberate thought is devoted to a reasoned based-evaluation of a person, message or situation, the decision process can become a strength rather than a liability. The gullible provide exceptional examples as to why emotionally based decisions are often the ones most regretted.

Third, being overly skeptical (the antithesis of gullibility) means you may be overly critical of just about anything. Instead of going along with convention and popular opinions you automatically resist. The annals of history are full of stories of those righteous individuals who resisted conformity for the pursuit of truth and honor, most of whom wound up dead or imprisoned. Finally, we should consider that in the social sciences even the soundest evidence-based decision has a 5 percent statistical probability of being wrong (otherwise known as a false positive). Being gullible may mean inadvertently making the correct choice 1 out of 20 times. In addition, there is a long history of resistance to once unconventional ideas including things like the round earth, gravity, and the existence of evolution. Sometimes the most naïve and uninformed may be the individuals who are the first adopters and subsequently the heroes of future generations.

How to become less gullible

Check back soon to learn specific strategies to overcome gullibility, the subject of Part Two of this series.