A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. It's a well-known phrase. But a more accurate version would be: a confidently told lie is halfway around the world before the truth has A got its boots on.
Lies can travel so much quicker because we humans are far more likely to accept and believe information delivered confidently by a confident person, or some other source, using confident language. And as the modern world has repeatedly shown us, this regularly leads to undesirable outcomes.
Humans trusting confident people over those who are more uncertain is an established phenomenon. The 'confidence heuristic' states that when two (or more) people are trying to make a decision but each person knows different things, confidently expressed arguments are perceived as conveying better information, which determines the decision.
Why would this tendency come about? Well, humans are ultrasocial and during our evolutionary development, most of our information concerning the world came from our tribe, in other words: the people around us. So, if ancient humans heard someone confidently declare: "There's a predator coming," instinctively believing what that person had to say was a valuable survival trait.
Humans are also hierarchical. We have social status and our communities often have leaders who tend to be confident sorts. In early societies, which faced danger at every turn, a tendency to unthinkingly believe the confident leader and do what they said, was another useful survival trait.
Esta historia es de la edición August 2023 de BBC Science Focus.
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