Science Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s line lands like a lab-grade insult disguised as a research question. By pairing “trained” with “stuck,” he frames gullibility as either a fixable cognitive habit or an immutable trait, then spikes the dilemma with a taboo comparison: skin colour. That provocation isn’t an accident. It forces the reader to confront how often we treat credulity as destiny, the way we talk about “born suckers” and “natural marks,” while also daring us to notice how quickly we import the language of biology and identity into social behavior.

The intent is diagnostic, not polite. Henson is pushing on a scientist’s perennial worry: if a population can’t reliably update beliefs when evidence changes, the rest of civilization becomes a usability problem. “Trained” implies interventions - education in probabilistic thinking, media literacy, inoculation against misinformation - but the question’s second half is the knife twist. If gullibility is as fixed as pigmentation, then blaming individuals is pointless and designing systems that assume rational actors is negligent.

Subtextually, the quote also critiques a certain liberal faith in enlightenment-by-information. It hints that mere access to facts won’t do much if the underlying cognitive machinery is tuned for social belonging, narrative comfort, or authority deference. The skin-colour analogy is ethically combustible, and that’s part of its function: it dramatizes the stakes of misreading gullibility as moral failure rather than as a trait with constraints, distributions, and limits. In a culture saturated with persuasion tech and viral lies, the question isn’t just personal. It’s infrastructural.