“The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” Wegner and Ward concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.” That unhappy insight probably helps explain society’s current gullibility crisis, with its attendant plague of propaganda, dogma, and venom. If your phone has blunted your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you. And you won’t hesitate to share deceptive information with others.
