Imagine you’re sitting in a room, filling out some lame survey, and you start to see smoke. What would you do? Would you try to find where it’s coming from and do something about it? Or would you just sit there and wait for instructions? Most of us like to think we’d get up and do something.
We all think highly of ourselves.
In 1968, a couple of psychologists at Columbia University found an interesting answer to that question. They put students in a room and started filling it with smoke. They didn’t tell them the smoke was part of the experiment. And they learned something interesting. When it was just one person in the room, by themselves, 75 percent of the time someone got up and did something.
The dynamic completely reversed when they added more participants. Put two more people in the room, and suddenly someone only does something about the smoke 38 percent of the time. And when you secretly tell those other two participants not to do anything, it drops down to 10 percent.
This study became known as “the smoky room experiment.” It was just one of many studies that alerted us to our future.
Here’s another question:
You’re in a room by yourself, and you have to stay there for 15 minutes. You have two choices. You can sit quietly and think. Or you can push a little red button to deliver mild electric shocks to yourself. Again, most of us say we’d never shock ourselves out of pure boredom, just to escape 15 minutes of introspection.
And yet…
As it turns out, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women prefer to shock themselves rather than spend 15 minutes alone. That’s according to a 2014 study at the University of Virginia.
So I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but hear me out: Combine these studies, and you arrive at something equal parts hilarious and terrifying. Put three people in a room with a little red button and start filling it with smoke, and they’re more likely to sit there and shock themselves to death than to do anything to save each other. This is what the world looks like to me at this point. The world is on fire, and we’re all sitting around tapping buttons that only cause self-injury.
Does that sound accurate to you?
If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with the world, how we could wind up in such a mess, psychology offers plenty of reasons. Sure, we can definitely blame billionaires for a vast majority of the world’s problems, but that doesn’t explain why so many of us out there just want to sit back and let them destroy everything. My theory: The billionaires know about these cognitive weaknesses, at least intuitively, and their superpower is finding ways to exploit them.
I’m a former professor, and I spent years studying human psychology because I wanted to understand why we, as a society, seem to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again until the planet lies in ruins.
It became something of a hobby.
Humanity isn’t doomed to these short circuits, but any hope for us lies in understanding our faulty wiring so we can do better. Of course, if you’re a true pessimist, you’ll simply get a kick out of reading about all the ways humans are hard-wired for destruction.
Let’s get into it:
Do you think humans have the capacity to think about the longterm future? A study by a psychologist at UCLA found that most people regard their future selves as a stranger. His team plugged people up to machines and monitored their brains while asking them questions. There’s a region of our brains that light up when we think about someone we don’t know. That’s the exact same part of the brain we use when we imagine ourselves months or years from now.
It’s no wonder societies can’t seem to make good decisions, at the ballot box or otherwise. They feel no intimate connection to the version of themselves that has to live through the consequences. It doesn’t mean we’re incapable. It means that thinking about your longterm future is an intentional act. It’s something you have to train yourself to do, to map out the consequences of doing something that simply satisfies your emotions in the moment.
It’s hard.
In 2009, a Harvard business professor introduced “Kanter’s Law,” which describes the way major changes feel impossible when you’re in the middle of them. She was describing business transitions, but it sums up the current mess pretty well. When things get tough, people tend to rush back to the status quo. They prefer the devil they know, even if it’s killing them.
A psychologist at NYU published an entire book backing up Kanter’s Law, except he called all of this systems justification theory. It’s another way of saying something we’ve all seen over the last generation:
People fear change, and their fear keeps them trapped in miserable conditions. They’ll actually go out of their way to justify toxic norms while rejecting alternatives because they’re so scared to lose the little bit of comfort or security they’ve got. They’ll cling to that as long as they can. A Harvard psychologist called it “the region beta paradox.” If things get bad fast, that motivates everyone to action. If things get bad slowly, almost nobody wants to disrupt their version of “normal.”
They’ll just suffer.
Psychologists have found other corollaries to this behavior, like “shifting baseline syndrome.” As things get progressively worse, our longterm and generational memories forget what normal used to feel like. It’s hard to remember that things used to be any better than they are now.
Meanwhile, it’s very hard to convince someone that bad things could actually happen to them. They assume they’re going to be fine, no matter how bad things get. Psychologists call this optimism bias. A 2011 study confirmed that a majority of people simply don’t think statistics apply to them.
Almost everyone thinks they’re going to beat the odds. In short, they simply don’t count on reality having any personal impact. There’s a term related to optimism bias, called “selective updating.” Basically, when we take in new information about risks, our brains want to exempt us from the numbers. Most of us never think we’ll be the ones running from a flood or a fire.
You see this idea all the time in eyewitness accounts. At some point, many of them say something like, “I never thought it could happen to me.”
That’s selective updating.
In the 1960s, a psychologist at Duke University identified perhaps our most crucial weakness in the face of fascism and collapse:
We ignore warnings.
Not only do we ignore warnings, but a large portion of society takes a bizarre pride in shrugging them off while downplaying threats. Psychologists call this pride “reactance,” a stubborn refusal to take precautions. It only gets worse the harder you try to convince them to take a threat seriously. It doesn’t matter what evidence you show them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a friend or a member of their family. They’re more likely to turn on you than listen.
Psychologists have even identified a behavior called “vicarious reactance,” when people who are taking warnings seriously nonetheless want to defend the “individual rights” and “choices” of idiots. Their brains would rather protect someone’s right to do something stupid, even if that behavior puts everyone around them at risk. This problem has gotten especially bad in western societies that elevate individualism or collectivism. Yeah, that tracks.
In the 1970s, a study confirmed an especially disturbing behavior, something we’ve seen too many times today. Researchers showed evidence to religious high school girls that Jesus wasn’t actually divine. They found the evidence compelling, but it didn’t matter. Most of them didn’t question their faith.
In fact, many of the girls reported that seeing evidence that challenged their views only strengthened their faith in those views.
It wasn’t a fluke.
Studies across decades have confirmed similar reactions. For example, one study in 2020 found that Trump supporters weren’t persuaded by compelling evidence of his crimes and wrongdoings. In fact, the information made them more likely to start attacking his opponents, accusing them of wrongdoing. That’s exactly how things have played out over the last few years.
Psychologists have been confirming Leon Festinger’s concept of “cognitive dissonance” for generations. If you don’t remember, Festinger documented a cult’s insistence that the world was going to end, which only grew stronger every time their deadline for the apocalypse passed.
What’s even more interesting are Festinger’s studies showing that the less you pay someone to do meaningless work, the harder they lie to themselves about a hidden purpose, just so they don’t have to admit they wasted an afternoon. Meanwhile, people who got paid fairly for the same work complained more.
Perhaps it has occurred to you that billionaires have read these studies, or at least had someone summarize the findings for them. Imagine how a billionaire reacts to the notion that paying workers less actually makes them more likely to find meaning and purpose in their work, and paying them more actually provides a foundation of dignity and self-respect to complain.
It doesn’t take rocket science.
Meanwhile, researchers figured out years ago that credentials actually make little or no difference in the persuasiveness of an argument. One study confirmed this all the way back in 2010: Nobody actually cares about your degrees, your publications, your accomplishments. If they don’t already agree with you on some level, then they’re going to dismiss your qualifications.
Specifically, psychologists call this process “selective perception.” We all tend to filter out the information and evidence that doesn’t align with our worldviews. Research has also found that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps, precisely because you consider yourself “immune.” An educated person stops monitoring themselves for bias.
They get complacent.
On a similar note, psychologists have identified a behavior called “moral licensing” and a related one called “moral cleansing.” It’s similar to the educated person who thinks they can never fall for propaganda. Once someone does a few good things, they earn a reputation as a “good person.” Once they’ve established that reputation, society lets them do all kinds of bad things.
You can license a politician…
Or an entire country.
When someone does something bad, and they secretly know it, they often choose to engage in rituals of “moral cleansing” instead of actually accepting accountability for their poor behavior. These rituals often involve virtue signaling, moral grandstanding, and scapegoating of others deemed to be less morally upright than them. All of this behavior has one goal, repairing an individual’s damaged perception of themselves as a good person. That’s all they’re trying to do.
Entire societies can conduct moral cleansing rituals.
Entire societies can also engage in something psychologists call “social amnesia.” In the 1990s, a psychologist named Russell Jacoby introduced this concept to explain how politicians and institutions get away with selling the same bad solutions to the same crises over and over, ignoring our real problems. Societies have a way of erasing tragedies that reveal too much about their skewed values. Consider how many people knew anything about the 1918 pandemic until it was thrust back into collective consciousness, and consider how much John Barry’s history in The Great Influenza reveals noble memories of Woodrow Wilson, a eugenicist warhawk. Americans don’t want to know that. So they forget it.
The biggest problem of all is how our societies handle truth tellers. You can lie to someone over and over again, and the repetition itself becomes a truth. As an article in the Journal of Cognition explains, "Repetition generates the illusion of epistemic weight." If your brain sees something a lot, it's wired to give it more credibility. The billionaires understand this perfectly.
It’s how advertising works.
Meanwhile, truth tellers get a raw deal. Because they often have to voice unpleasant ideas, and they have to criticize those in power, they run afoul of the human mind’s key biases and fallacies. People want to exempt themselves from reality. They don’t want to challenge the status quo. They want to morally license and cleanse themselves and each other. They take pride in shrugging off warnings and declaring their personal freedoms in the face of disaster.
Because of all this, someone who breaks all of those illusions becomes the ultimate villain. Psychology backs that up.
In the 1990s, psychologists John Skowronski and Donal Carlston defined this phenomenon as “spontaneous trait transference.” As Skowronsky explains, "politicians who allege corruption by their opponents may themselves be perceived as dishonest" and "critics who praise artists may themselves be perceived as talented." If you describe someone as negative, unreliable, or dangerous, people tend to misremember it as a self-description. Later, Rick Brown and John Bassili found that people transfer personality traits to inanimate objects like bananas.
It’s incredibly difficult to speak the truth when the architects of comforting lies have everything working in their favor.
So…
We live in a world where you can hand a button to someone and expect them to start shocking themselves within 15 minutes if they get too bored. We live in a world where you can convince someone that bananas are evil, as long as you tell them so enough times. We live in a world where presenting compelling evidence to someone actually strengthens their belief in conspiracy theories.
That’s why we’re in such a mess.
There’s no need to lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling and asking darkness and deities why things are so bad or why it often feels like nobody actually wants to save the country, or the planet. Psychologists know because they’ve been studying our brains for more than 100 years, and they’ve seen the depths of our capacity for self-deception. Billionaires have also seen it, and they’ve built a system that nurtures these flaws rather than trying to condition our better selves.
So you can finally put the question to rest.
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