Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber.
The Enigma of Reason: a new theory of human understanding.
Penguin. 2017

If reason is what makes us human, then why do we humans often behave so irrationally? Taking us from desert ants to Aristotle, cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber explore how our ‘flawed superpower’ of reason works, how it doesn’t, and how it evolved to help us develop as social beings.

Hugo Mercier.
Not Born Yesterday: the science of who we trust and what we believe.
Princeton Universty Press. 2020

Why people are not as gullible as we think

Not Born Yesterday explains how we decide who we can trust and what we should believe—and argues that we’re pretty good at making these decisions. In this lively and provocative book, Hugo Mercier demonstrates how virtually all attempts at mass persuasion—whether by religious leaders, politicians, or advertisers—fail miserably. Drawing on recent findings from political science and other fields ranging from history to anthropology, Mercier shows that the narrative of widespread gullibility, in which a credulous public is easily misled by demagogues and charlatans, is simply wrong. Not Born Yesterday explains why even failures—when we adopt harmful beliefs, spread wild rumors, or fall for quack medicine—are better explained as bugs in otherwise well-functioning cognitive mechanisms.