Gullibility
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Orson Welles first gained wide American notoriety on the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's novel of the same name. Adapted to sound like an actual news broadcast, it caused panic and even mass hysteria. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War."--Sholem Stein |
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Gullibility is the quality of readily believing information, truthful or otherwise, usually to an absurd extent.
It is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence.
Classes of people especially vulnerable to exploitation due to gullibility include children, the elderly, and the developmentally disabled.
