The Funnel of Misbelief

There’s plenty of misinformation circulating on the internet. But there’s one story you can believe.

A Duke University professor was hospitalized with an injury. Then, someone made a video of him in his hospital bed and posted it on the internet.

That’s odd, for sure. Not what usually happens in the hospital.

But things got even weirder over time.

According to the professor, the video “described how my injury got me to hate healthy people, how that got me to join Bill Gates and the Illuminati in creating the Covid pandemic. It also caused me to attempt to try and kill as many healthy people as possible using the virus and the vaccines, to control people.”

Every bit of it was false.

But some people believed it. An acquaintance even emailed him and asked, “What happened to you?”

The experience led professor Dan Ariely to write a book called Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things. The book is a very personal exploration of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and what causes people to fall into distrust.

He talks about...