Misbelief

The book opens with a strange email. In July 2020 an acquaintance Ariely had once helped for free writes: «When did you become so greedy?» Following the links, Ariely lands in a parallel universe that casts the author as the «chief consciousness engineer» of the «COVID hoax», plotting with Bill Gates and the Illuminati to sterilise women with a vaccine. Videos show Ariely in Nazi uniform; people call for «Nuremberg 2.0» trials. At first Ariely laughs; then the death threats start.

Ariely explains how the «evidence» was manufactured, and this is one of the most instructive parts of the book. At a 2017 medical conference Ariely had made a joke in the style of Jonathan Swift's «A Modest Proposal»: to cut healthcare costs, slow down ambulances and encourage smoking — «but wait, we already do this». Editors cut the joke out of context and set it to concentration-camp footage. A sentence about a Gates Foundation project on child nutrition in Africa was spliced onto another about vaccines. Photos of the burns that covered 70% of the author's body in adolescence were used to claim Ariely «hates healthy people».

The most powerful scene is a phone call with a woman who has been denouncing Ariely. Ariely offers to show tax returns to prove no government paid him. She reads even that as suspicious: «This insistence suggests there is more hidden beneath the surface.» After the call she posts again on Facebook. Ariely draws an important lesson: a misbelief cannot be changed with facts in a few emotional minutes on the phone. Ariely also writes about a woman known since the author's childhood, almost family, who no longer believed a word — one of the saddest moments in the book.

The introduction includes a curious side story about a «half beard». Because of the burns, no hair grows on the right side of Ariely's face, and for years the other side was shaved to hide it. After a month-long hike the beard stayed, thank-you messages arrived from people with scars, and Ariely came to accept the scars. The detour shows the author's honest voice. Ariely then compares how dealing with the hate shrank «mental bandwidth» to research on the scarcity mindset in poverty, and finds a way out through curiosity.

Chapter 1 opens with a familiar scene: with some loved ones, we can only talk about the weather now. Ariely offers historical examples (Romans who believed Nero was alive, the «replaced» Paul McCartney, the Illuminati bunker under Denver airport) and rejects treating misbelief as a left or right problem. A chart based on Adam Enders's research shows liberals and conservatives holding different but equally absurd beliefs. The best metaphor: misbelief is like an autoimmune disease — healthy scepticism goes into overdrive and turns against us.

The weakness is depth. Ariely admits that most of the research cited is old, the «cornerstones» of the field; in that sense the book is more personal essay and popular summary. Conversations with «misbelievers» are, by the author's own account, reconstructed from memory to convey their gist. Readers should also know that a 2012 paper Ariely co-authored was retracted over fabricated data (Ariely denies faking it). For an author writing about trust, that context matters.

• A vivid, personal story in which the author is the target
• Empathy toward «conspiracists» rather than mockery
• Short, practical tips at the end of each chapter