It amazes me that anyone at all savvy could really believe that Microsoft's (alleged) IT support would have the telephone numbers of all their licensees, AND be monitoring their on-line activities. All billions of them.
People don't think that way. We are all the centers of our own universes, and sometimes folks DO get phone calls when their machines are infected with viruses. I have been known to call the owners of Web sites whose servers have been compromised and are being used to distribute malware, for instance.
The more general truth is that our brains are hard-wired to make us gullible. Brains are not instruments of reason; they are organs of survival, just like teeth and claws. As social animals, we have brains that are highly tuned to believe and obey those we see as authority figures--it's a survival trait. A full discourse of how our brains have been optimized to make us incredibly gullible is beyond the scope of a post on a Web forum (though I can
recommend a few good
books on the
subject).
All of us--every single one of us--makes cognitive errors and mistakes in logic and reason that, with the right argument on the right subject, makes us incredibly gullible. Whether it's anti-nuclear or anti-GMO folks who believe that nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms of power or genetically modified food is harmful, or folks who believe that abstinence-only education is a good policy to prevent teen pregnancy, or folks who think that the collapse of the mortgage industry had to do with greedy poor people buying more expensive homes than they could afford, or people who think that vaccines cause autism, all of us are potentially gullible if the right misinformation that touches the right fears or hits the right social or political frameworks comes along.
We are not reasoning beings. We are rationalizing beings. Becoming a reasoning being takes a lot of hard work and a good deal of training, and even being educated in one particular arena doesn't make you smart in any other. (The Nobel-Prize-winning neurologist who diagnosed Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's fell for a Nigerian 419 scam.)
This is, as you can probably tell, something I feel very passionately about. I've
written several
essays on the
topic, and even created a
poster that lists some of the most common errors of reasoning.
