Epistemic Vigilance

Epistemic vigilance is the set of cognitive mechanisms by which speakers selectively calibrate their trust in testimony without requiring full reductionist verification of each testifier's reliability. Proposed by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, it describes how humans — and possibly other social animals — manage the twin risks of credulity (accepting false information) and excessive skepticism (rejecting true information). Epistemic vigilance operates through sensitivity to source reliability, argument plausibility, and community consensus rather than through case-by-case independent verification.

The concept bridges evolutionary psychology and social epistemology: if social knowledge-transmission is the dominant mode of human learning, the pressure to evolve calibrated rather than uniform trust is strong. Epistemic vigilance is the answer to the question of how trust can be the default epistemic posture without collapsing into unlimited credulity. See also Misinformation and Epistemic Diversity.