What is it about?

Why do people vary so greatly in their susceptibility to unreliable information? The evidence points to a surprising conclusion: our minds have information-filtration systems that operate in much the way the body's immune system does. For example, both systems manufacture antibodies that attack perceived threats. Sometimes the mind's defenses function at a high level; other times, they fail in spectacular fashion. (That's why some worldviews become progressively more enlightened, and others become massively disordered). Simply put, susceptibility differences turn out to be traceable to the operations of the mind's immune system. The science of misinformation susceptibility, though, has been hampered by its failure to posit mental immune systems -- or for that matter, make a truly systematic study of them. In this article, we show: (1) Why mental immune systems should be catalogued among the real, and (2) Why scientists need to unlock their secrets. Just as immunology allowed us to tame many infectious diseases, the emerging science of cognitive immunology may help us prevent devastating outbreaks of misinformation.

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Why is it important?

Infectious diseases have killed billions of people, and humanity was once helpless in the face of them. The discovery of the body's immune system changed all that: once scientists accepted that such systems exist, they got busy studying them, unlocked their secrets, and ushered in a monumental revolution in public health. We now live in a world where infectious information causes a multitude of harms. Fortunately, advances in the cognitive sciences allow us to say with some confidence that the human mind has an immune system of its own. By unlocking its secrets, we should be able to do for our minds what we've already done for our bodies: protect them from the worst kinds of infectious agents. This paper lays out the conceptual foundations of cognitive immunology, the emerging science of mental immunity.

Perspectives

We the authors are extremely proud of this paper. We think it provides a solid conceptual foundation for a promising new science. We think that reading it might just shift your perspective on the human condition. In time, we think the science it envisions -- "cognitive immunology" -- will deliver robust solutions to our world's misinformation problem. We've taken pains to make the paper accessible, engaging, even pleasurable to read. We invite people of all stripes to engage with the ideas here. Whether you're a journalist, policy-maker, free-speech advocate, concerned citizen, or a cognitive scientist, we invite you to examine our arguments, even help us refine and develop them.

Andy Norman
Carnegie Mellon University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Do minds have immune systems?, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, December 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000297.
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