Key Concepts of CI

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In short, excellent. Our hope is that the principles of CI can transform our society into one that is more reasonable, more just, more beneficial for all. But cognitive immunology is still in its infancy, and 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? We think so.

Mental immune disorders arise from several different places:

• Ideas can disrupt mental immune function. The idea that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, for example, tends to prevent people from modifying and updating their beliefs (i.e., it impedes learning.)

• Attitudes can 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.

• Cultural conditions can damage mental immune systems. As culture wars escalate, people begin responding defensively to challenging ideas, thus short-circuiting critical thinking and learning. Public defiance of the norms of accountable talk attacks mental immune systems at a critical point. Mental and cultural immune health hinge on the common understanding that you or I, when faced with better reasons than our own, will allow them to change our minds.

Mental immune systems malfunction in two basic ways: 

• Type 1 misfires involve a failure to spot or remove a problematic idea. For example, you could take a snake oil sales pitch at face value, form a false belief about the product's curative powers, 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 for solving a budget shortfall 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 bad ideas, but if you’re too critical, you screen out good ones, too. A healthy mental immune system sits in a “Goldilocks zone” between overcritical and undercritical.

This is exactly like bodily immune health. When a body's 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. The ideal lies somewhere in the middle.

Yes. Mental autoimmune disorders happen. For example, a cult leader can hot-wire his followers’ mental immune systems, rendering them prone to attack many true and useful commonsense beliefs with relentless and fervid doubts.

Cultures also have an 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, however, have little infrastructure for slowing the spread of bad information. Some subcultures—think of those spurred by online propaganda—actively subvert mental immunity. Cognitive immunologists describe subcultures that normalize irresponsible talk as “immune compromised.”

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. 
• 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 climate denial).