Much of the knowledge we use to navigate the world comes from what others have told us. Without the implicit trust that we place in human communication, we would be paralyzed as individuals and cease to have social relationships. "We get so much from believing, and there's relatively little harm when we occasionally get duped," says Tim Levine, a psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who calls this idea the truth default theory.
许多我们用来探索世界的知识来源于他人的口中，没有我们在人际交往中的隐含信任，我们就会受限于个体，并且不再具有社会关系。伯明翰阿拉巴马大学的心理学家蒂姆·莱文提出的真相默认理论指出，“我们从信仰中收获颇丰，当我们偶尔被欺骗时，伤害是较小的。”
Being hardwired to be trusting makes us intrinsically gullible. "If you say to someone, 'I am a pilot,' they are not sitting there thinking: 'Maybe he's not a pilot. Why would he say he's a pilot?' They don't think that way," says Frank Abagnale, Jr., a security consultant whose cons as a young man, including forging checks and impersonating an airline pilot, inspired the 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can. "This is why scams work, because when the phone rings and the caller ID says it's the Internal Revenue Service, people automatically believe it is the IRS. They don't realize that someone could manipulate the caller ID."
信任是天生的，这使我们本质上容易受骗。“如果你告诉别人‘我是一个飞行员’，他们不会坐在那里想：‘也许他不是一个飞行员，为什么他要说自己是一个飞行员呢？’这不是他们思考的方式。” 安全顾问弗兰克·阿巴内尔说。弗兰克在年轻时伪造支票并冒充航空公司的飞行员，他的经历成了2002年上映的电影《逍遥法外》的灵感源。“这就是诈骗行为起作用的原因，因为当电话响起，来电显示表明对方是国税局时，人们自然会相信是国税局。他们没有意识到有人可以操纵来电显示。”
Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, calls that the liar's advantage. "People are not expecting lies, people are not searching for lies," he says, "and a lot of the time, people want to hear what they are hearing." We put up little resistance to the deceptions that please us and comfort us -- be it false praise or the promise of impossibly high investment returns. When we are fed falsehoods by people who have wealth, power, and status, they appear to be even easier to swallow, as evidenced by the media's credulous reporting of Lochte's robbery claim, which unraveled shortly thereafter.
马萨诸塞大学的心理学家罗伯特·费尔德曼称这是骗子的优势。他说：“人们并不期待谎言，人们也并不在寻找谎言，很多时候，人们都愿意听取他们听到的声音。”我们几乎不反对给我们带来欢喜与安慰的欺骗，无论是虚假的赞美还是不可估量的高投资回报的承诺。当我们被拥有财富、权力和地位的人欺骗时，似乎更容易轻信谎言，正如媒体轻信了罗切特的抢劫声明，而这件事不久后就真相大白。
Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accepting lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change, accuse the U.S. government of masterminding the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, and spread other "alternative facts," as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability. Debunking them does not demolish their power, because people assess the evidence presented to them through a framework of preexisting beliefs and prejudices, says George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. "If a fact comes in that doesn't fit into your frame, you'll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it -- or attack it if it's threatening."
研究人员表明，我们特别容易接受那些印证我们的世界观的谎言。奥巴马并未出生在美国，否认气候变化，指责美国政府策划“9·11事件”，并传播其他“替代事实”（特朗普的顾问在回答关于总统就职典礼参与人数的问题时提出该词），诸如此类的梗之所以在互联网和社交网络上大肆传播，正是因为这种弱点。加州大学伯克利分校的认知语言学家乔治·拉科夫说，揭穿谎言并不驳倒谎言，因为人们通过一个预先存在的信仰和偏见的框架来评估提供给他们的证据。“如果一个事实不符合你的框架，你将不会注意到它，或者忽略它，或者嘲笑它，或对它感到困惑 ，或者判定它是威胁的话就攻击它。”
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