"You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition"

In daily life, social mistakes often cost more than intellectual ones, so it can feel like it's more important to belong than to be correct.

In this article, Dan Williams joins many others in framing the anti-intellectual tendencies of today's populist movements as a matter of social dynamics like this. We've known for a long time that the simplest story wins. It's as true in politics as it is in marketing. Unfortunately, reality is nuanced and often inconvenient. Being wrong or, even worse, not knowing is experienced not as an opportunity, but as failure. Moreover, it's scary.

Consider that this tendency exists in a world where fewer and fewer people hold more and more power over everyone else, and it's not hard to understand the rise of conspiracy theories, alternative medicine, cults, and similar systems. All these fringe positions offer an escape valve for the pent-up fear, frustration, and exhaustion of living in a complicated world without easy answers. Their simpler, more comforting narratives affirm what we wish was true, implying that the balance of power and truth is different.

The role of education emerges as an obvious focal point, not only for where the problem starts but for how we can hope to address it.

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We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.

For one thing, we rely on complex networks of cooperation to achieve almost all our goals. Given this, much of human behaviour is rooted not in ordinary material self-interest but in the need to gain access to such networks—to win approval, cultivate a good reputation, and attract partners, friends, and allies. Human decision-making occurs within the confines of this social scrutiny. We evaluate almost every action, habit, and preference not just by its immediate effects but by its reputational impact.

In well-functioning human societies, individuals advance their interests not by bullying and dominating others but by impressing them. These high-status individuals are admired, respected, and deferred to. They win esteem and all its benefits. Their lives feel meaningful and purposeful.

Surprisingly, one of the psychological traits that reliably correlates with a conspiratorial mentality is narcissism. It is obvious why paranoia would drive people to posit nefarious hidden plots. Why would tendencies towards grandiosity and entitlement have similar effects?

One reason is that conspiracy theories offer an intoxicating status inversion. By rejecting the “official knowledge” disseminated by society’s elites, the conspiracy theorist rejects their claim to intellectual superiority. It is the conspiracy theorist, not the elites, who knows things that others—the gullible sheeple—do not. Through their bravery and insight, they have seen through society’s lies and uncovered what is really going on. To someone who craves feelings of status and self-importance, there is something delicious about such a worldview.

When voters are asked to “trust the experts” or “follow the science”, these requests have symbolic significance. They ask some humans to grant prestige to other humans—to acknowledge that others know better than they do.

Given this, the populists’ rejection of expertise does not liberate them from bias and error. It guarantees bias and error. Gut instincts, intuition, and “common sense” are fundamentally unreliable ways of producing knowledge.

You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. And as long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.