Having worked in communications and public affairs in my whole career, I can partly agree to that. There is a lot of intuitive thinking and group thinking (eg. I am anti-establishment, so I repeat by default some of the positions of my fellow group members: anti-vaxx, anti 5G, anti-government, anti-industry, against pharmaceuticals, etc. or I belong to an original population of this country, so I am against immigrants, muslims, leftists, pro-weapons, against the EU, etc.). On topics that are outside of group-thinking, it is much easier to change opinions and mass communication may have an effect on both opinions and behaviour. Especially on new topics, it is much easier to persuade people with rational arguments: for instance during the mad cow crisis, even at McDonald's we managed to build trust from 30% to 60% on the topic of food safety in the period of one year.
Mercier is not convinced of this argument. He also questions the impact of advertising, which is of course ludicrous. He writes: "Targeted advertising can, it seems, have some limited effects, but these have only been proven on product purchases, with relevant data on the users' profiles, and the effects were tiny, adding a few dozen purchases after millions of people had seen the ads". Anybody who's been active in advertising will be able to tell you, sales figures in hand, what the impact can be of advertising, by creating immediate purchases, long term customer preference, market share, etc. If it wasn't effective, companies and governments wouldn't spend the actual annual amount of around 580 billion dollar on advertising (2019). Mercier can claim that masses are less gullible than we think, but he seems to think that advertisers are all idiots. Does he really believe that companies would invest that kind of money if it wasn't effective somehow?
But I can agree with Mercier that people are less gullible than we think, and that many implicit thoughts and feelings just require some instance to make them explicit in order to gain confidence and become manifest, as in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. It takes time to gain trust and it takes a lot of effort to change people's opinions through open debate and repetition of the facts.
One strategy that he does not suggest, but that in my opinion may be very effective, is to educate people about cognitive sciences - make it a mandatory class at school - to make them understand the processes behind their thinking and how thoughts are connected to feelings, intuitive responses and group-thinking. It is only by offering individuals mechanisms to understand bias, that they may be more open to challenge their own thinking instead of only other people's arguments. That, and of course a much more open culture of debate and citizen participation in political decision-making.
Despite my comments, I would still highly recommend this book. It may be wrong on some points, but it gives an important perspective on our collective thinking.
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