I just finished reading a book called “Nobody’s Fool, Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.” It is written by a pair on cognitive psychologists. They start off by talking about “Truth Bias”
Humans operate with a “truth bias” -we tend to assume that what we see and hear is true until and unless we get clear evidence otherwise. We hear now, believe right away, and only occasionally check later.
Truth bias is a feature, not a bug. Most people tell the truth most of the time (or at least they do not lie deliberately), making a bias toward truth both logical and reasonable. Without a shared assumption that people generally speak the truth, we’d be unable to live together in communities, coordinate our actions, or even hold simple conversations. But truth bias is also an overarching factor that plays a critical role in every con, scam, and fraud. It is a prerequisite for almost any act of deception, and when it impairs our otherwise rational decision-making, we refer to it with terms like credulity, naivete, or gullibility.
Nobody’s Fool, page 2
The book goes on to describe ways in which we are conned and what we can do to counter it. They talk about focus, and how it is important to extract meaningful patterns, make inferences, and solve problems.
This downside of focus creates one of the oldest and easiest ways for frauds, hucksters, and marketers to fool us into making bad choices. They don’t have to hide critical information from us —they only need to omit it and count on us not to think about it ourselves.
Nobody’s Fool, Page 34
The counter to this is to ask “What is missing” I’m sure you can all see where this is going at it relates to the Church. Missionaries don’t need to hide anything, they just omit the hard stuff and count on the investigates to not think about it. The book then talks about the Theranos fraud case, and the questions not asked by investors after they were shown demonstration of this new blood testing machine:
“Did that machine right there actually carry out the assays you say it did?” But by politely not asking what was behind the curtain, investors and business partners cost themselves billions of dollars. Had they asked, they might not have gotten a straight answer, but a crooked answer could have been revealing too. It can pay to seek more information, even if we don’t receive it, because the fact that the facts were hard or impossible to find is itself information.
page 40
I love this line from above: ” because the fact that the facts were hard or impossible to find is itself information”. Before the internet, how hard was it to find facts about church history? Is the fact that much of the original historical documents (minutes of the Q15 meetings, apostles journals, etc) are locked up and off-limits to historians information that is useful?
We could compile a long list of words and phrases that can be deployed to signal quality without providing evidence of it. If someone says that “a rigorous process is in place,” we should ask for a description of that process and assume that it is not rigorous until proven otherwise. When someone says, “We are being transparent,” we ought to wonder why they are bragging about it instead of pulling back the curtain.
page 124
M. Russell Ballard’s famous quote “We’re as transparent as we know how to be in telling the truth” jumps out right about now. Should we wonder why they are bragging about it instead of pulling back the curtain?
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this quote from the book
“The originals have been lost.” Many of the frauds that we have studied involved a mysterious, untimely, or convenient disappearance of evidence. Such an occurrence should lead us to question more.
Page 123
Golden plates anyone?
Wheat & Tares 
William is absolutely correct about the existence of the Truth Bias. But he has omitted to mention that it can only exist in the presence of the Laziness Bias that is so prevalent today.
For the funds in business, pop culture, and religious organizations can only flourish if the general public is unwilling to study and learn for themselves. Every major fraud of the last 50 years was easily detected once a few diligent individuals decided to research the foundations of the idea the fraud was based on.
Is it any surprise that the hordes that are too lazy to get out of their pajamas and leave their basements are so easily taken in? Someone whose only exposure to learning is reading the summaries of Dua Lipa’s book club list is never going to be able to spot even the most obvious of frauds.
Dude, no offense, but it’s literally Christmas Eve, and you’re posting about confirmation bias for the umpteenth time?? This is the bloggernacle equivalent of the Bishop giving a tithing talk during the ward Christmas program.
The waters we Mormons swim in have been opaque for so long that most of us hardly notice it. We learned early on to not ask questions, and now the questions don’t occur to us any more. This leaves the leadership and curriculum writers free reign to say what they want without fear of prompting questions. But some of the questions are so obvious that we should wonder why they’re not coming to mind.
For example:
– In relating the origin of the PoX, Russell Nelson said, “And then, when the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord, each of us during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation.” We should have all kinds of questions about this significant event. When and where did it happen? How did Elder Nelson know that all of the other apostles received a spiritual confirmation? Why did none of the other participants, particularly in the 1st Presidency, talk about this revelation in the days following the PoX announcement, especially given the backlash?
– When Elder Ballard pointed out that the 1832 1st vision account was described in the Improvement Era in 1970, the obvious question was: What about before 1970? The answer to that question completely undermines the intent of Ballard’s example.
– The Gospel Topics article on the BoA offers up the possibility that “[the papryi] catalyzed a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri.” Obvious question: Why would God reveal the BoA to Joseph in a way that caused Joseph to think that he was translating the papyri? Isn’t that deceptive on God’s part?
The shepherds saw the angels and the babe in Bethlehem, and then in a few months came the massacre of the innocents, and the baby was forgotten, probably presumed dead. When the family came back, they went to Nazareth, where nothing that happened in Bethlehem was known. Most of the shepherds, the older ones for sure, went to their graves knowing that they had seen something, but not knowing what it meant. I hope everyone here can find some happiness at Christmas time. I do not claim to know all things, and I am at peace not knowing lots of things. I find it more attractive to say what I do believe, instead of telling others that they’re idiots for believing what they profess. Merry Christmas to everyone here. To those able to believe, keep on believing, though the nations (and neighbors) furiously rage together. The shepherds, and Simeon and Anna and never saw the deliverance, but it still happened, thirty I three years later. Golden plates? There are grounds to believe.
I don’t know if it’s a trend or just something I’m better at noticing with age, but there seems to be more and more call out on overcoming “truth bias” in our encounters with information. One the one hand I feel like it can make people overly paranoid and distrusting. On the other hand, I wonder if we fall short in applying it enough times.
I’ll admit a lot of the narrative I was taught in Primary doesn’t always add up. But at the same time, if I start holding opposing voices and writings to the same standard of questioning, I’ve found that doesn’t always hold up either. Often the real thing (or at least the layer I’ve so far found to be the deepest), is better than the previous two layers. I suppose I could be accused of falling back to my original form of “truth bias,” but it hasn’t really felt that way. And ultimately, after going so far (whether or not it’s actually far enough), I think some amount a “faith” has to be placed in the narrative you’ve finally come to accept, whether you’re a believer or unbeliever.
I also won’t deny that time, experience, questioning, prayer, and logic, among other things, has made my belief in the reality of the Holy Ghost a position I find quite reasonable, and obviously also shapes my view.