Why Facts Don’t
Change Our Minds
You and I are both rational beings who let facts drive our
thinking, but it seems our fellow humans are not so thoughtful. Or at least
that’s what the research says. It turns out that behavioral psychologists have
been undermining the bastions of human reasonability for decades, starting with
some nefarious characters in the Stanford University psych department back in
the ’70s, whose devilishly clever experiments were then taken a frightening
step further at that equally suspect institution over on the other coast:
Harvard. Don’t these mental types have anything better to do than conclusively
prove that nobody (but you and I) can think straight?
Apparently not. And then the Harvard guys had the temerity to
suggest that the human race’s muddleheadedness goes allllllll the way back to
the time we spent trotting around on the African savannah. Remember that? Lotsa
fun – if you didn’t get chewed up by a pack of hyenas or run down by a herd of
water buffalos. You see, we weren’t just sitting out there on the plain playing
checkers or debating the finer points of Cartesian philosophy. No, we were
hanging on by the skin of our teeth – even as our teeth got smaller so our
brains could get bigger. But it turns out that the most significant way our
brains got bigger – and the main reason we survived and evolved into the total
media animals we are today – was that we figured out how to cooperate.
Or at least that’s what the Harvard guys say. Their argument runs
more or less like this:
Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to
cooÌperate. CooÌperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to
sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action.
Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even
to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to
resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have
evolved for themselves,” [the Harvard guys] write. Habits of mind that seem
weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove
shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
It’s quite frustrating … when you think about it. But I guess it’s
better to face the truth about ourselves than to go along blindly, always
wondering over the irrational hijinks our fellow two-leggeds are forever
getting up to.
The whole sordid – but not entirely unhopeful – story is laid out
by Elizabeth Kolbert in a piece titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” in –
you guessed it – The New
Yorker … yes, the only rag in the greater English-speaking world
that insists on throwing an umlaut over the second o in cooperate
– like they wanted to make sure we knew how to pronounce the word or something.
This week’s Outside
the Box is truly one to make you think. And maybe meditate on how
you process data. So read on, and be relieved of your irrational bias against
the wisdom of the herd. (Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll want to help me figure
out how we’re going to save ourselves from ourselves this time.)
I find myself in Dallas, home alone while Shane is with her son
Dakota skiing in Colorado, which gives me some time to catch up with friends in
the evenings and work even harder at meeting deadlines.
And it is getting harder to meet deadlines, because I keep running
into fabulous new information that totally absorbs me, and then my friends call
me up and tell me about this or that latest innovation which is so utterly
compelling that I have to spend yet another hour listening to the story.
Even as I become increasingly alarmed at our global economic and
political process, I become more positive about the future of the human
experiment. In just the last few days Patrick Cox and I have had multiple
conversations about completely different technologies and research efforts that
have significant potential for extending not just our lifespans but our health
spans. If you are not receiving Patrick’s free letter, you are really missing out. And if
you are a serious biotech investor you should definitely be reading his subscriber letter.
We are finalizing the details on our 14th annual Strategic Investment Conference, which I guarantee you will
be the best conference I have ever put on. You need to go ahead and register
before we sell out. Once I have the last i
dotted I will give you a detailed outline of what to expect.
The weather in Dallas is absolutely fabulous. There are very few
days in Texas when I am comfortable simply turning off all the air conditioning
and/or heaters and just opening the doors and letting the house absorb the
ambience. Spring is evidently coming early almost everywhere in North America
and Europe.
You have a great week, and now let’s turn to the problems that
your and my neighbors have in dealing with facts.
Your looking for more hours in the day analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
Why Facts Don’t Change
Our Minds
New discoveries about the human mind show the
limitations of reason.
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have
more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates
to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of
suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual,
the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students
were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out
of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four
times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note
in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup
was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine – they’d been obtained
from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office – the scores were fictitious. The
students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no
more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The
students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their
responses to thinking
they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally,
the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually
categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get
right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the
high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well –
significantly better than the average student – even though, as they’d just
been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d
been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done
significantly worse than the average student – a conclusion that was equally
unfounded.
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are
remarkably perseverant.”
A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited
for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a
pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among
other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a
small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on
what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to
one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test,
almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also
chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on
report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study,
the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information
they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to
describe their own belief s. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a
successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet
thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d
embrace it.
Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally
refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the
researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since
two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.
The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of
academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think
straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments
have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the
research – or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today – knows, any graduate student
with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often
totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does
right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?
In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive
scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question.
Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now
based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is
an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the
savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese,
Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest
advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is
difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual,
freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable
us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from
unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living
in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have
evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem
weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove
shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency
people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject
information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that
have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the
subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of
these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers
rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital
punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred
crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on
crime.
The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided
data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that
called it into question. Both studies – you guessed it – were made up, and had
been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling
statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated
the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data
unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the
reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about
their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more
in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.
If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard
to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine,
Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse,
“bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be
dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence
of new or underappreciated threats – the human equivalent of the cat around the
corner – it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that
both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have
some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our
“hypersociability.”
Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they
point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument,
we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions
we’re blind about are our own.
A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European
colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to
answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain
their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified
mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than
fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.
In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems,
along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a
different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their
responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as
someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the
participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people
became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses
that they’d earlier been satisfied with.
This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the
task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting
screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of
hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social
standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives
on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage
in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.
Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were
the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a
firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake
news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us.
As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the
environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”
Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a
professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They,
too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps
more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion:
Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.
Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the
developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic
bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the
water – and everything that’s been deposited in it – gets sucked into a pipe
and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?
In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate
their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder
locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how
the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort
revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments
dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)
Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion
of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way
more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other
people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can
operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been
relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt
together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So
well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell
where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive
labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s
ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial
to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of
living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had
insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a
knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new
technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach,
is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without
knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration
ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey
conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of
Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also
whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were
about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention.
(Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was
wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying
results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep
understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other
minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act
is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to
Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now
that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we
all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion,
you get, well, the Trump Administration.
“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman
and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet
experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study
conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should
there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers?
Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they
agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain,
in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most
people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views,
they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less
vehemently.
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark
world. If we – or our friends or the pundits on CNN – spent less time
pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy
proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they
write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of
explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for
people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for
myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by
researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued,
is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be
dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science
moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.
In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save
Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a
public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what
we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not
just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that
vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s
why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the
triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many
scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between
immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on
their side – sort of – Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his
wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on t he timetable
recommended by pediatricians.)
The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem
self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate
many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological
component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine
pleasure – a rush of dopamine – when processing information that supports their
beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they
observe.
The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they
want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince
people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another
widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is
that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems
they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem
to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better,
but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science.
“The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to
figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to
the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they
anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it
can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological
experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would
be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature
is not reassuring.
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since
1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth
Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
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