*Can* people actually tell fiction from reality?

[Raphael]

When people discuss fiction, they generally seem to assume that everyone except very young children knows that fiction isn't real. But some recent developments might cast doubt on that idea.

Some people, including, I think, our host, have pointed out that some major right-wing conspiracy theories of our time basically take elements from science fiction movies of the past 60 years or so, like powerful people being replaced by clones, or microchips being injected into people in order to mind-control them, and pretend that these things are happening in the real world.

So, was it always wrong to assume that adults can tell the difference between fiction and reality?

[zompist]

So, was it always wrong to assume that adults can tell the difference between fiction and reality?

There's never been a period when it the difference was always clear.

The obvious example is that almost every major religion tell stories that were widely accepted and which, to put it lightly, can't all be true.

But it went much deeper. Herodotus or Sima Qian were historians, doing their best to actually tell the truth. But all they can personally verify is what they saw with their own eyes; beyond that they're relying on what people said or wrote. They could be skeptical about some of their material, but the predicament of the premodern scholar is that there is no widely available, constantly updated, trustworthy assemblage of what is (likely to be) true. (Mark Elwin suggests that this is why the impressive achievements of Chinese science never took off as in Europe, where the Royal Society and other institutions provided just such an assemblage.)

It's harder (but not impossible!) to be wrong about everyday life, so the general pattern is to put the fabulous beasts and myth-like legends in the far past and in lands distant enough that your listeners or readers won't contradict you. But that distance in time and space may be small by modern standards.

On the more narrow question of whether people can tell that an entertainer's story is made up... I dunno, maybe? Recall that the Greeks literally maintained that their stories were dictated to them by the Muses. People believed till quite recently that the Iliad was sober fact (except maybe the parts about the gods...). At the same time e.g. Lucian of Samosata prefaces one of his fictions with the explicit statement that it's all lies, and writes about a minor prophet exposing him as a charlatan. If antiquity had to place its books into a modern library with Fiction and Non-Fiction sections, I think it'd have trouble.

[vlad]

Some people, including, I think, our host, have pointed out that some major right-wing conspiracy theories of our time basically take elements from science fiction movies of the past 60 years or so, like powerful people being replaced by clones, or microchips being injected into people in order to mind-control them, and pretend that these things are happening in the real world.

I don't think people can't tell fiction from reality. Nobody mistakes science fiction movies for documentaries.

Rather, what I think is happening is people take inspiration from movies to construct a reality they want to believe in. They know the movie's fake, but they think, "wouldn't it be cool if this was real?". And then they start believing it's real, because they're the kind of people who don't think evidence is necessary. This allows them to tweak elements from the movie to their liking, and to combine it with elements from other movies. E.g. "Obviously Keanu Reeves isn't actually The One, he's just an actor. The real One is me."

There's also a process where someone will make shit up, taking inspiration from science fiction for their lies and presenting it as if it's fact, and their audience swallows it not knowing its origins. The people who believe in these science fiction concepts don't necessarily even watch sci-fi movies. (Scientology is a prominent example of this.)

I also suspect that for at least some of these people, they don't actually believe the things they say the believe. They're just larping to make their lives more interesting.

[Torco]

we people can tell fiction from reality like we can survive a three meter fall: that is to say, for the most part. at the end of the day stories are, besides the things that we naturally tell ourselves and that give meaning to life blabla, powerful tools for powerful people to play around with. the case of science fiction and its intersection with conspiracy theory is interesting. from our perspective, scifi has morphed from literature to mythology, and from mythology to something not unlike a pluralistic, polytheistic, heterodoxical religion. those aren't even unheard of. But it's not unthinkable for a powerful group of people to exert control over the masses to their own benefit: ruling classes are real. and they do exert their power to influence what their subjects think in almost all historical societies, sometimes quite successfully! the jiziya worked.

I think at this point a lot of science fiction functions for us the same way other mythological/literary universes work for other societies. roman men probably liked to imagine themselves as achilles or odysseus. certainly plenty of people in our civ like to imagine themselves as agent whatshisface from the X-Files.