Today is the worst day of the year for the more gullible among us, as well as the humorless and the whiny, but those people suck anyway. Still, we’ve all been taken in by April Fools’ Day pranks, even if, in retrospect, they were obviously fake. But why?
The above video from PBS’ BrainCraft boils it down to how we process information. We can either piece together the facts we have and assemble them into a whole, called bottom-up processing, or we can accept something at face value and break it down into parts, called top-down processing. Top-down processing makes us more likely to be fooled because you’re starting with the idea that whatever you’re hearing or seeing is real.
It doesn’t help if a prank is designed to play to our personal biases or desires. If you’ve been waiting to hear that Tool has finally put a new album out, you might click on their “song leak” before you realize you’ve been had. Even if it is quite danceable.
If you’re taken in, don’t feel bad. Not only are you not alone, you might be fighting your own brain.