ABSTRACT
Feelings of gullibility arise when people are persuaded to believe false propositions. The feeling is uncomfortable and threatens people’s self-esteem. One method for reducing the discomfort is to “double down” on the false belief, thereby believing that they have not been duped at all. Although people do not expect every communicative act to be entirely truthful, they do expect that communications will lie within a reasonable distance of the truth. We refer to this reasonable distance as the envelope of legitimacy. In this chapter, we argue that when people are persuaded to believe propositions that lie outside their envelope of legitimacy, the state of gullibility ensues. In order to reduce the unpleasant feeling state, people often increase their insistence that the false statement is indeed true. To test an aspect of this hypothesis, we surveyed voters from the 2016 U.S. presidential election, finding that Donald Trump voters who exhibited greater sensitivity to feelings of gullibility were significantly more likely to believe that their candidate’s campaign promises would come true, especially those that seemed most unlikely.
