In this blog and in my book, Pandemic of Delusion (see here), I have written a lot about how it is that we are all so woefully susceptible to lies and misinformation. We are clearly far more vulnerable than most of us are willing to believe, particularly with regard to our own thinking.

Just as there are lots of ways that vines can wiggle their way into a garden, are many mechanisms by which lies can infiltrate our neural networks and eventually obscure the windows of our very perceptions.

And as with invasive species of vines, one infiltration mechanism is a simple numbers game. Our neural networks are “trained” through repetition. So regardless of how skeptical we imagine we are, the more lies we hear and the more often we hear them, the more we become increasingly comfortable with them.

Another counter-intuitive infiltration mechanism is size and scope. In many cases, the whopper of a lie is easier for us to accept than more modest lies. We conclude that surely no one would make up such a big lie, and surely a lie that big would be exposed it if were not true. So therefore it must be true by virtue of its audacity alone!

Implicit in this is the concept of anchoring, but I have not yet discussed this explicitly. The concept of anchoring is most often used in economics to describe the effect of pricing. If you “anchor” the retail price of a rock at say, $100 and then mark it down to say $10, most consumers conclude that $10 is a great deal on a rock that’s totally worthless. This perception is enhanced if you see lots of “competing” rocks being sold for similarly high prices and purchased by others.

As it relates to lies and misinformation, anchoring has a similar effect. When we hear a really, really big lie we sometimes accept or dismiss it outright. But the effect of the big lie is more insidious than that. First, as we have said, if we hear it often enough we will become inexorably more accepting of it. But also, the big lie anchors our skepticism.

Big lies anchor our skepticism in two ways.

First, a big lie causes us to consider that, as with the rock, there must be <some> value, <some> truth there. This plays well into our self-image as measured and open-minded thinkers. Our brains compromise. We take intellectual pride in not being fooled outright by the big lie even as we congratulate ourselves for being open-minded enough to consider that some of it might or even must be true.

Second, big lies further anchor our thinking when we are exposed to a lot of them. As with individual lies, we pride ourselves in rejecting <most> of the big lies, even as we congratulate ourselves for accepting that some of them might or even must be true.

And each lie we accept, or even entertain in whole or in part, makes it easier to accept more and bigger lies.

We humans have always had the same neural networks with the very same strengths and limitations. Our neural networks have always been trained through repeated exposure and have always been susceptible to the same confounding effects such as anchoring. But it is only very recently with the advent of social media that our neural networks have been exposed to so much misinformation so incessantly.

As if that was not enough to drive us to delusion, we now have Artificial Intelligence. AI has yet to show whether its god-like powers of persuasion will nudge us toward facts and reason or plunge us further into delusion and manipulation.

And to make it even worse, our reason has been further attacked the emergence of the virulent, invasive new species called Trumpism. Trump and his allies, intentionally or instinctively, leverage the power of big lies, repeated over and over, to cause us to believe absolute nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. Even democracy-ending nonsense.

Understanding the effect of big lies on us, particularly when we imagine that we are being moderate and measured in our acceptance of them, is critical. We have to understand this at a gut level, because we cannot trust our brains on this.

One final, and perhaps somewhat gratuitous comparison to make is that this “partial” acceptance of an anchored big lie is not unlike the imagined “reasonable” position of agnosticism when it comes to the completely, utterly false claim that god exists. It is perhaps not completely a coincidence that Trump’s most deluded followers are Evangelical Christians.