Why and how to take the fruit and leave the chaff

The notion of decoupling, suggested by Cosmides and Tooby as a way to expla in how audiences are protected against the misleadingly false aspects of na rratives, is itself crucially misleading. The behavioral and linguistic evi dence suggests, rather, that the processes by which we protect ourselves fr om misinformation a) don't work reliably enough to suggest that they are au tomatic, and b) all seem to be culturally dependent in ways that evolved ad aptations could not be. The evolutionary argument itself suggests that it w ould actually be maladaptive if the making of such distinctions were automa tic and decontextualized.