What is Cognitive Immunology?
Explaining the science of mental immunity
What is Cognitive Immunology?
Explaining the science of mental immunity
Key Concepts
Cognitive Immunology
Cognitive Immunology
Cognitive Immunology
Mental Immunity
Cognitive Immunology
Cognitive Immunology
Cultural Immune Systems
Cultural Immune Systems
Cultural Immune Systems
Mental Immune Disorders
Cultural Immune Systems
Cultural Immune Systems
The Science Behind CI
Cognitive immunology is an emerging science, but its practitioners are informed by decades of relevant research. Explore the extant and ongoing research behind this science.
Applied CI
Cognitive immunology is an eminently useful science, and it is already being applied to good effect in addressing the cultural problems of disinformation and science denialism. Learn how applied CI can help promote wisdom, justice, and a meaningful existence for all people.
Cognitive Immunology
What is cognitive immunology?
Cognitive immunology (CI) is the science of mental immunity. It’s a field of research that goes back to the 1950s. The premise—now fully validated—is that our minds have immune systems, just as our bodies do. But where bodily immune systems protect us from infectious microbes, mental immune systems protect us from infectious ideas.
Cognitive immunologists study how mental immune systems work. They seek to understand common mental immune disorders and reveal the root causes of mental immune collapse. (A mind’s capacity to distinguish fact from fiction—and good ideas from bad—can sometimes deteriorate rapidly.) Cognitive immunologists are shedding light on why epidemics of irrationality occur: they happen when cultural conditions compromise mental immune systems.
Cognitive immunologists also devise interventions designed to boost mental immune performance. It’s not enough, it turns out, to teach critical thinking: citizens of a highly networked society need deep immunity—strong resistance to misinformation, divisive ideologies, and morally disorienting ideas. A systematic approach to building mental immunity offers a more promising path to a sustainable future.
Mental Immunity
What is mental immunity?
Mental immunity is a mind’s resistance to bad ideas. If a skilled thinker is resistant to a certain kind of propaganda, we can say that she has strong immunity to that propaganda. This means her susceptibility to that propaganda is low. (Immunity and susceptibility are each the inverse of the other.) On the other hand, a small child might be prone to believe in tooth fairies, which means her susceptibility to tooth-fairy belief is high, and her immunity low.
What are cognitive immunology’s prospects?
Cognitive immunology is still in its infancy. We’re only scratching the surface of what it can do. In the 1700s, no one could foresee how profoundly immunology would transform the human condition. But since then, we’ve learned how many diseases work and developed astonishingly consequential remedies. Immunology has eradicated countless sources of misery and saved literally billions of human lives. Could cognitive immunology be similarly transformative? It’s worth a shot.
What are mental immune systems?
Minds conduct operations to spot and remove bad ideas. (“Bad” here means false, misleading, irresponsible, harmful, or overly problematic.) The infrastructure that supports these operations is the mind’s immune system. These systems are distributed in two senses. First, many parts of the brain participate in the assessment of ideas—the frontal and temporal lobes, the hippocampus, and the amygdala, for example. Second, the relatively new concept of mental immune function cuts across more traditional categories like critical thinking, curiosity, mindset, and fair-mindedness.
Are mental immune systems real?
If you mean, "Are mental immune systems a discrete chunk of matter devoted solely to sifting ideas?” then no. On this standard, though, the body’s immune system wouldn’t count as real either, since the body’s immune system is distributed, not discrete. As long as we define “mental immune system” by its function—its job is to filter ideas—we can be confident that mental immune systems really do exist. Why? Because such filtering really does happen, and something—a mental immune system—does the filtering!
CULTURAL IMMUNE SYSTEMS
What are cultural immune systems?
Cultures also have infrastructure for filtering ideas. Fact-checkers, for example, work to stop the spread of misinformation. A free press with investigative journalists can do a lot to keep politicians honest. The subculture of science has evidential norms and expectations of peer review, and these serve to make scientists less prone to false beliefs. Other subcultures have little infrastructure for slowing the spread of bad information. (Some subcultures—such as those created by online propaganda peddlers—actively subvert mental immunity.) Cognitive immunologists describe subcultures that normalize irresponsible talk as “immune compromised.”
MENTAL IMMUNE DISORDERS
What causes mental immune disorders?
Some ideas disrupt mental immune function. We can call these “immune-disruptive” ideas. The idea that you’re entitled to your opinions, for example, tends to prevent people from modifying and updating their beliefs (which is to say, it tends to prevent learning.)
Some attitudes disrupt mental immune function. Arrogance, for example, tends to interfere with needed belief modification. By contrast, humility is a key element of mental immune health.
Some cultural conditions damage mental immune systems. Culture wars, for example. As culture wars escalate, people begin responding defensively to challenging ideas. But this tends to short-circuit critical thinking and learning. Public defiance of the norms of accountable talk attacks mental immune systems at a critical point. The norm that requires us to yield to better reasons—that is, allow them to change our minds—turns out to be pivotal for mental and cultural immune health.
Are there different kinds of mental immune disorders?
Mental immune systems malfunction for all kinds of reasons, but they misfire in two basic ways. Type 1 misfires involve a failure to spot or remove a problematic idea. For example, you could take propaganda at face value, form a false belief, and act as if that belief were true. Type 2 misfires happen when a mental immune system encounters good information and attacks or neutralizes it (perhaps because it feels threatening in some way). For example, I could reflexively dismiss a useful suggestion because it comes from a political rival. Both types of misfire can lead to bad decisions.
Mental immune health involves a balancing act: you must be critical enough to screen out lots of bad ideas, but if you’re too critical, you screen out too many good ones. A healthy mental immune system sits in a “Goldilocks zone” between overcritical and undercritical.
This makes mental immune health exactly like bodily immune health. For the latter also involves a balancing act. When an immune system is sluggish or underactive, scientists describe it as “immune suppressed” or “immune compromised.” When an immune system becomes overactive or attacks the body’s own tissues, scientists call that an “autoimmune” disorder.
Is there such a thing as mental autoimmunity?
Yes: mental autoimmune disorders happen. For example, a cult leader can hot-wire his followers’ mental immune systems, rendering them prone to attack (with doubts) many true and useful commonsense beliefs.
Do mind parasites really exist?
For all practical purposes, yes. In fact, they’re everywhere. For most of human history, they’ve gone by names like “bad idea” and “falsehood.” Bad ideas have all the properties of mind-parasites:
- Parasites require a host; bad ideas require a host.
- Parasites replicate (create copies of themselves); bad ideas replicate.
- An infectious parasite can get a host to spread copies of it (think of an infection-spreading sneeze), and an infectious idea can get a host to spread copies of it (think of salacious rumors).
- Just as pathogens flourish at their hosts’ expense (think Covid), bad ideas can flourish at our expense (think of the idea that climate change is a hoax).
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