HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025155 sciences: people are easy to influence, they are too trusting, and they tend to place their trust in the wrong people. This is the answer of most social psychologists. "They take the famous Asch conformity experiments, in which participants believe a group over the evidence of their own eyes; and Milgram obedience experiments, in which participants agree to electrocute one another at the experimenter's request to show that people are sheep. "Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, a strong proponent of the view that humans are gullible, has even claimed that people couldn't help but believe (at first at least) everything they read! Tim Levine, a leading researcher working on lie detection, thinks that people rely on others to be trustworthy most of the time, and that as a result they can afford to be so bad at detecting deception. Paul Ekman, the famous emotion researcher, claims that when we see someone express an emotion, we can't help but mimic it. No surprise then that crowds and their emotional members drive each other mad! Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich, proponents of the dominant mode of cultural evolution, postulate that people are easily influenced by prestigious individuals —wherever their prestige comes from—and consensual opinions—whatever their value. "This is also the answer of dominant figures in anthropology and sociology, explaining the persistence of culture by our tendency to suck in whatever ideas surround us without a second thought; in political science since the ancient Greeks, explaining the success of demagogues by how easily people follow charismatic leaders, even toxic ones; and in much social commentary, consider Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky as an example. "In Vigilance, I argue that they are wrong." HUGO MERCIER is a cognitive scientist working for the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon. Previously, he did a postdoc in the Philosophy, Politi