The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary

Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions

and what you can do about them

Robert Todd Carroll

Copyright © 2013 by Robert Todd Carroll

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2013

www.skepdic.com

Also by Robert Todd Carroll

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions

Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

Becoming a Critical Thinker: A Guide for the New Millennium

Mysteries and Science: Exploring Aliens, Ghosts, Monsters, the End of the World and Other Weird Things

The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet 1635–1699

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. –David Hume

Homo rationalis— that species of human who carefully weighs all decisions through cold, hard logic and rational analysis of the data— is not only extinct but probably never existed. –Michael Shermer

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want. –Daniel Kahneman

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

ad hoc hypothesis

ad hominem fallacy

ad populum fallacy

affect bias

anchoring effect

anecdotal evidence (testimonials)

apophenia and pareidolia

appeal to authority

appeal to tradition

argument to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam)

attribution biases

availability bias

backfire effect

begging the question

bias blind spot

causal fallacies

change blindness

classical conditioning and placebo effects

clustering illusion

communal reinforcement

confabulation

confirmation bias

continued influence effect

control group study

critical thinking/critical thinker

debiasing

experimenter effect

fallacies

false implication

false memories

Forer effect

groupthink

halo effect

hindsight bias

ideomotor effect

illusion of control

illusion of justice

illusion of skill

illusion of understanding

inattentional blindness

intentionality bias

law of truly large numbers

magical thinking

motivated reasoning

negativity bias

Occam’s razor

optimistic bias

positive-outcome bias

post hoc fallacy

priming effect

recency bias

regressive fallacy

representativeness bias

selection bias

self-deception

shoehorning

straw man

subjective validation

suppressed evidence

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

wishful thinking

Appendix I: The Wisdom Of Not Thinking Too Much

Appendix II: Evaluating Personal Experience

Index of biases, fallacies, and illusions not listed in the Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the authors cited as sources in this book. I am particularly indebted to the work of Richard H. Popkin, Howard Kahane, Daniel Kahneman, Carl Sagan, Ray Hyman, and James Randi.

I would especially like to thank Harriet Hall for encouraging me to provide a more detailed account of the biases, fallacies, and illusions mentioned in my previous book Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Science, and Skepticism Exposed!

I also want to thank John Renish, whose many suggestions have made this book more readable and less inaccurate. Any errors remaining are my responsibility, of course.

Foreword

The reader will quickly discover that this is no ordinary dictionary. It does provide definitions and examples of usage, but it does not pretend to be neutral or to consider all viewpoints in controversial areas to be equally justified. This is a critical thinker’s dictionary, after all. Detailed examples are given that exemplify either high quality or seriously deficient critical thinking. Background information is also provided, which may make the dictionary entries seem more like encyclopedia articles or essays. No subject is considered sacred or off limits. Claims in religion or politics are treated no differently from claims in science or medicine. It is inevitable that most readers will find one of their sacred cows being held up as an example of uncritical thinking. On the other hand, most readers will probably find some delight in seeing ideas or beliefs they reject being exposed as unjustified. The goal of The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary is not to offend or to please, however. The goal is to provide a starting point for those interested in what is known about critical thinking and why it is so hard to achieve.

Robert Todd Carroll

Davis, California

November 6, 2013

Preface

The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary grew out of a suggestion made by Harriet Hall, M.D., in a review of my book Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! A guiding principle of that work and this one is that critical thinking does not come naturally. Not only must we work at becoming critical thinkers, doing so goes against our nature. Evolution has provided our species with a magnificent brain, capable of extraordinary things like self-consciousness, memory, facial recognition, and thousands of other “miracles.” But we evolved to think quickly, a necessity in the environments our species found itself during most of its 100,000-year history. There are times in our modern world where quick thinking is needed, but there are also many times when we should slow things down. Sometimes we are better off if, instead of relying on our instinctive, natural way of thinking about things, we take some time to do some research, to reflect, and to discuss before making a judgment.

Unnatural Acts is an introduction to critical thinking, focusing on the many difficulties we all face in trying to think critically. These difficulties are usually referred to by philosophers and psychologists as biases, fallacies and illusions. In the final chapter of Unnatural Acts, I recommend that the reader develop a plan to study the 59 affective, cognitive, or perceptual biases, fallacies, or illusions that I list there. Dr. Hall argued that providing a list of things to study was insufficient and disappointing. I needed to go into more detail on each of the 59 items on the list. So, I added a short paragraph about each of the 59 biases and fallacies. Why 59? Well, I had to stop somewhere!

After publishing the book, I decided to expand on the short paragraphs and set up a blog where every Monday for 59 weeks I would tackle one of the fallacies, biases, or illusions that hinder our ability to think critically and make good judgments. I called the blog Unnatural Acts That Can Improve Your Thinking. I’ve collected those articles, rewrote them, and put them together in alphabetical order to create The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary.

In Unnatural Acts I explain why critical thinking does not come naturally to us. Most of our evolutionary history did not require the kind of thinking we call “critical” thinking. We are not talking about thinking that makes criticisms. That kind of thinking comes all too naturally to us. We’re talking about thinking that is reflective and self-conscious, that considers alternatives carefully, and that is more concerned with getting it right than with not getting it wrong. Critical thinking is unnatural. Our natural way of thinking is instinctive and intuitive, often driven by feelings and desires we are unaware of. I view Unnatural Acts as an antidote to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In Blink, Gladwell argues that intuition or quick judgments can be just as valuable as well thought out and time-consuming evaluations of data. In Unnatural Acts, I try to make the case that while intuition works well enough in many cases, for most important matters there is a much better chance of making a fair and accurate judgment by doing the hard work of collecting, analyzing, and evaluating data in an impersonal, reflective, dispassionate way. Our natural instincts work well enough most of the time, but occasionally we would be better off engaging in the unnatural act of critical thinking.

Introduction

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) defined our species as being rational animals, yet he knew as well as we do that we are irrational much of the time. Rationality is an ideal, not a fact. For most of our history, many thinkers have believed that our emotions are the main hindrance to reaching the ideal of rationality. A rational person controls the emotions. An irrational person is controlled by the emotions. Some philosophers disagreed. David Hume (1711-1776), for example, saw the emotions as the only reasonable guide to moral behavior. Evolutionary psychologists would agree based on the fact that though we may consider ourselves the only moral animals, we share an evolutionary history with many animals whose emotional makeup largely resembles our own and which governs their behavior toward one another. Economists, until recently, have clung to the notion of the marketplace being filled with rational animals, animals who may be driven by their desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but who use reason to calculate what is in their best interest and act accordingly.

Recent research in the social sciences has firmly established that our irrationality is not limited to errors in reasoning and uncontrolled emotions. Many of the hindrances to rationality are rooted in our evolutionary history. Members of our species have evolved to think and act in certain ways. These ways come naturally to us. We feel comfortable with them. Social scientists in fields like behavioral economics refer to these hindrances as cognitive biases and illusions. Sometimes we are better off going against our natural instincts. Sometimes we need to slow down, study, discuss, and reflect before making a judgment or taking action. Today’s rational animal—what we call the critical thinker—must be a student of cognitive biases and illusions. It is no longer—in fact, it never has been—sufficient to avoid logical fallacies and control the emotions if one desires to be rational. It is our nature to be irrational animals, but it is not always in our best interest to do what comes naturally.

Critical Thinking is unnatural, but when making important decisions, it is almost always superior to natural, instinctive thinking. The following case study illustrates the superiority of critical thinking. For reasons that will become apparent if you finish the rest of this book, some people will find the case study illustrates the superiority of intuition and personal experience over critical thinking.

(Note: terms featured in The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary appear in boldface.)

Natural Thinking: A Case Study

This is a story about a mother trying to understand why her firstborn suffered from a neurological disorder and, after a short and miserable existence, died soon after his first birthday. It is the story of how a powerful emotional experience affected her judgment to the point where she became unable to see anything good in science-based medicine or anything bad in the anti-vaccination movement. I can’t say I have all the details right, but the general picture is clear enough from what information is available about the case.

Stephanie Messenger of Queensland, Australia, says she wrote the children’s book Melanie’s Marvelous Measles because vaccinations are ineffective, children should be taught to embrace childhood diseases, and getting a disease like measles helps build the immune system naturally. Messenger explains her reasoning on her website Nature Matters! She tells us that she had her first child vaccinated twice by the time he was four months old. In the U.S.A., the recommended vaccine schedule would include immunization against about a half dozen diseases during an infant’s first four months. Messenger writes of the initial vaccination for her son:

Within moments of my son receiving his immunisations he was screaming. This continued for most of the day and when he wasn’t screaming he was crying. This was unusual as he was a very happy, placid baby, who was already rolling over at 8 weeks and gooing and gahing at the first sight of his mother. The doctor told me his reactions were ‘normal’ and he’d be OK in a couple of days.

After the first day he had almost recovered with only some irritability and restlessness noticeable. As the weeks passed he continued to reach milestones and all appeared OK.

It would appear that her doctor was right. The infant stopped fussing and “continued to reach milestones.” Then he had his second round of immunization:

At 4 months of age I dutifully took him for his next round of vaccinations. This time he screamed louder and I could not console him at all. I would breastfeed him, only to have him projectile vomit it back up and still the screaming continued. He had never before vomited at all, ever. After he had vomited 2 feeds I called the doctor and told her what was happening and she said to stop breastfeeding and give him juice only. He kept some of it down but still vomited often.

The next day I called the doctor and told her I think the vaccines have done this and she told me ‘no, it’s just a coincidence’ but to bring him back in, which I did. She referred me to a specialist. While waiting for the specialist appointment in a few days, my baby boy started doing strange things. He started arching his back and crying out in pain. He was as stiff as a board. His eyes would roll into the back of his head. He didn’t have a temperature. He had also started shuddering but he wasn’t cold. (I later learnt from the doctor these were convulsions and seizures). The vomiting continued and I was convinced to give up breastfeeding by the clinic sister. He vomited up the formula also. I was getting very scared.

What parent wouldn’t be scared under those circumstances?

Messenger doesn’t say why she thought the vaccines had made her infant sick. She may have been influenced by the anti-vaccination movement in Australia and elsewhere. She may have been influenced by seeing Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn on the Phil Donahue show—being broadcast at that time on an Australian TV network—talking about the dangers of vaccination. In any case, her early judgment that vaccines caused her son’s convulsions and other problems was not based on scientific evidence. All she knew for sure at that point was that the infant showed signs of illness shortly after his vaccinations. Whatever the trigger, her initial judgment about the cause of her son’s seizures wasn’t based on research she had done. The research would come later. To her credit, she was skeptical of her doctor’s assurance that the connection between the vaccinations and the convulsions was coincidental. She was not afraid to challenge her physician or the medical community. She would not blindly accept what the health experts had to say about the value and safety of vaccinations. She set out to do her own research. That’s an admirable trait and is to be commended.

Unfortunately, what Messenger did next is what comes naturally to most people: she set out to find evidence in support of what she believed and to ignore evidence that was inconsistent with her belief. (This bias is called confirmation bias.) She apparently ignored the speculation of the specialists who were looking after her son that he might have a rare condition called Alexander Disease. The unnatural thing to do is to try to falsify one’s belief. Most of us don’t realize how easy it is to find confirming evidence for just about any belief, especially when we make no effort to disconfirm the belief. When Messenger did her research, she sought evidence to confirm her belief that vaccines caused her son’s seizures and eventual death. She seems to have ignored the possibility that he suffered from a genetic disorder or from a disease that had nothing to do with vaccinations. She had little trouble finding the confirmation she sought. She also found reinforcement from a community of like-minded people in the anti-vaccination movement.  (This bias is known as communal reinforcement.) She writes:

Vaccination killed him, I have no doubt. If he crawled under the sink and drank the same poisonous concoction of heavy metals, formaldehyde, foreign proteins, multiple viruses and a host of other toxins, the emergency room would have called it poisoning. Because it was injected into his body, it’s called ‘a coincidence’!

The reference to the “poisonous concoction” is straight out of the anti-vaccination campaign rhetoric. Each of the items Messenger lists has been a talking point in the anti-vaccination literature and each point has been addressed and refuted by scientists. She and two other members of the Australian Vaccination Network, Meryl Dorey and Susan Lindberg, published a book in 1998 called Vaccination Roulette: Experiences, Risks and Alternatives. In 1993, the Australian Health Care Complaints Commission issued a public warning about the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN). The AVN, the commission said, “provides information that is inaccurate and misleading.” The name of the organization itself is misleading since its main purpose is to advise not vaccinating children against diseases. In 2012, The New South Wales Office of Fair Trading ordered AVN president Meryl Dorey to change the network’s name because it is misleading and a detriment to the community. In May 2013, new AVN president Greg Beattie warned parents who vaccinate their children that they may be “jeopardizing their children’s health.” “Don’t trust the judgment of your GP,” said Beattie. “If you read one good book on vaccinations you’ll probably know ten times more than your average GP.” Beattie provided no support for these charges.

There is ample and compelling evidence that vaccinations do work and are safe, despite what contrarians might argue. Messenger’s determination that vaccines killed her son created a reverse halo effect around the concept of vaccination. She not only ignored other possibilities for her son’s misfortune, she demonized the entire pharmaceutical and science-based medical communities:

It saddens me to know there are thousands of babies out there being damaged, disabled or lost every year and they have no voice to stand up against the powerful drug companies and, what is now an industry, and scarcely a profession – medicine.

Finding support for her belief that vaccines kill was just the beginning of Messenger’s crusade. She now promotes the idea that getting diseases such as measles is a good thing for the reasons noted above, none of which have scientific evidence to support them. (She and her anti-vaccination friends claim that vaccinations are ineffective, children should be taught to embrace childhood diseases, and getting a disease like measles helps build the immune system naturally. Other anti-vaccinationists go even further and advocate “pox parties,” so that children can spread their diseases and help each other build up their immune systems.) Contrary to Messenger’s claims, vaccinations are effective and children may die if they get a disease such as measles or pertussis. Promoting diseases to build the immune systems of children “naturally” is dangerous.

According to the Institute of Child Health:

If you allow your children to catch the disease, they run the risk of being seriously ill or even dying. On the other hand, the vaccines only rarely cause serious adverse effects. It is true that vaccines do not give long lasting protection 100% of the time but then neither do many diseases. For example, you can catch whooping cough, Hib, meningococcal disease and rubella more than once. However, even if a child does catch the disease after they have had the vaccine, the disease is usually milder. By giving the vaccine most children are spared the effects of the disease. Even if immunity from the vaccine wears off, if enough people are immunized, there will be herd immunity and so this should not be a problem. This will protect people who have lost their immunity.

So, no, the odds are that your child will not be better off if she gets measles, mumps, or rubella. She might end up deaf, paralyzed, or dead. She might also pass on something like whooping cough to an infant too young to be immunized, which could be fatal to the infant.

Messenger’s research

What kind of research did Messenger do? She tells the following story:

A few years passed and I went on to have another child. This time I was not going to be complacent. I had over the years researched the vaccination issue at length. I read the product inserts and found the reactions all printed there so my suspicions were confirmed by the drug company (the makers of the product) even if not by the doctors.

I had been lied to and my concerns about his immunisations were never followed up in any way. They were met with denials and due to my blind faith in the medical profession I didn’t question.

I have since gone on to read hundreds of books, some written by very courageous doctors who have bothered to investigate this issue thoroughly, read medical journals and also watched some DVD’s done by doctors all to warn parents about the dangers of vaccination.

I have 3 healthy, totally unvaccinated children, who have never had a childhood disease. Unlike their vaccinated friends who have often succumbed to the diseases they have been vaccinated against. I kept these children fit and well using what is provided by nature – natural foods, clean water, sunshine, clean air, exercise, adequate sleep and a loving and nurturing environment.

Understandably, Messenger would like to believe that her son’s death could have been prevented. It is understandable that she sought someone or something to blame for her misfortune. Messenger, like most of us, would like to know what causes diseases. Like the rest of us, she would like to have control over preventing and curing illness. But these natural desires can lead us to the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Much of what happens to us is due to blind luck, including the getting or not getting of diseases or illnesses. Her son’s seizures and death may have been the consequence of something Messenger ingested while pregnant or it may have been due to a defect in the infant’s genetic makeup. Believing that vaccines caused her infant’s death makes for a more satisfying story than believing that such a tragedy could just happen because of some fluke of nature. That is not to say that things that Messenger promotes like clean water, clean air, exercise, and adequate sleep don’t have an effect on our health. They do, but clean living won’t prevent a gene from triggering a neurological disorder or a cascade of cell replication known as cancer. Eating natural foods can’t prevent the effects of a genetic defect.

Contrary to Messenger’s belief, the scientific evidence strongly supports the benefits of vaccinations. Recent tragic stories about the increase of measles cases and about infants dying of pertussis because others weren’t vaccinated go contrary to her belief that getting diseases “naturally” is a good thing.

It is good that Messenger has three healthy children, but I don’t think she gives enough credit to luck for their situation. Her negative feelings about vaccinations have blinded her not only to the benefits of vaccinations but to the benefits of scientific medicine. While her crusade is a natural one—given the interpretation she has made of her experiences—unnatural thinking about complex issues such as the safety and value of vaccines or the cause of death of an infant are preferable if fairness and accuracy are your goals.

The above story illustrates just a few of the natural hindrances to critical thinking that plague us all. If you read The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary from beginning to end, it should become apparent that nature did not design us to be critical thinkers and that we don’t know ourselves as well as we might think. Critical thinkers are not born; they’re made, not by others, but by themselves.

Sources

About.com - Growing Up Deaf – Rubella <deafness.about.com/cs/featurescauses/a/rubella.htm>, accessed 12/9/2012.

AdelaideNow - Australian Medical Association angered over claims by president of the Australian Vaccination Network <tinyurl.com/mkum4mc>, accessed 5/9/2013.

BBC News - First measles death for 14 years <news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/4871728.stm>.

Centers for Disease Control: For Parents: Vaccines for Your Children, <www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/index.html>, accessed 12/9/2012.

Centers for Disease Control Update: Measles --- United States, January--July 2008 <tinyurl.com/48cfyp >.

Institute of Child Health <tinyurl.com/byrcqtj>, accessed 12/9/2012.

Nature Matters! – Stephanie Messenger’s website <www.naturematters.info/>, accessed 12/9/2012.

NINDS Alexander Disease Information Page

<tinyurl.com/nm3gjv >, accessed 12/9/2012.

Quackwatch: A Few Notes on Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. <www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mendelson.html>, accessed 12/9/2012.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary – the anti-vaccination movement <www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html>, accessed 12/9/2012.

Stephanie Messenger’s Vaccination Story <www.antivaxxers.com/?p=3725>, accessed 12/9/2012.

Wikipedia – pox party <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pox_party>, accessed 12/9/2012.

ad hoc hypothesis

When confronted with evidence against something you believe, consider that it is possible you are wrong. When trying to refute the evidence against you, provide counter-evidence that is testable independently of your original belief. Try not to automatically begin rationalizing with claims that are not independently testable.

In science, an ad hoc hypothesis is an assumption made in response to facts that are inconsistent with a theory in order to prevent the theory from being falsified. By extension, an ad hoc hypothesis is any assumption made to save a claim from being refuted. What are often called ad hoc hypotheses might better be referred to as rationalizations.

One of the more important ways of testing a scientific theory is to deduce observations that should occur under specified conditions if the theory is correct. An experiment may create those conditions and if the predicted observations occur, the theory is said to be confirmed. Experiments that confirm a theory should be replicable. If the predicted observations do not occur and it is determined that the theory cannot be correct if they do not, then the theory is falsified. Likewise, if experiments fail to replicate confirmations and it is determined that the theory cannot be correct if replication doesn’t occur, then the theory is said to be falsified. If a new fact is discovered that is inconsistent with the theory, the fact must be accommodated. The theory might be tweaked or it may be preserved by hypothesizing another fact that would make the first fact consistent with the theory. Or, the fact might prove the theory false.

When William Hershel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 by telescopic observation, it was also discovered that the new planet’s orbit was different from what it should have been according to Newton’s laws. The orbit of Uranus was an anomaly: a phenomenon that apparently did not fit with the Newtonian paradigm. Some scientists may have thrown up their hands and said: “See, Newton was wrong! Hah!” Others may have offered the ad hoc hypothesis that the anomalous orbit was caused directly by Abrahams’s god. Uranus has a different kind of orbit than the other planets because Abraham’s god is working a miracle—suspending the laws of nature—perhaps to demonstrate his power and existence to us. But most scientists set to work to solve the puzzle without resorting to hypotheses that could not be independently tested.

The simplest solution was to posit another planet beyond the orbit of Uranus whose gravitational force was affecting the planet’s orbit. This hypothesis could be independently tested. Its size and orbit could be calculated based on how much it perturbed the motion of Uranus. Thus was Neptune discovered. When the math for Neptune’s orbit didn’t work in accordance with Newton’s laws, it was proposed that still another planet awaited discovery. The object known as Pluto gave astronomers the data to show that Neptune did, after all, orbit in accordance with Newton’s laws. Both of these hypotheses could be independently tested, albeit with some difficulty given the state of knowledge and technology at the time.

When Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift in 1912 against the prevailing theory that the Earth was formed by cooling from a molten state and contractions, he could not explain how continents move. It was suggested that gravity was the force behind the movement of continents, though there was no scientific evidence for this notion. In fact, scientists could and did show that gravity was too weak a force to account for the movement of continents. Alexis du Toit, a defender of Wegener’s theory, argued for radioactive melting of the ocean floor at continental borders as the mechanism by which continents might move. “This ad hoc hypothesis added no increment of plausibility to Wegener’s speculation,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould (1979: 163). The theory of plate tectonics was then proposed—the idea that the continents ride on plates which are bounded by areas where new crust is being created from within the planet and old crust is falling into trenches. This provided a mechanism that explains how continents drift. Continental drift, according to Gould, came to be accepted because it was a necessary consequence of the new theory of plate tectonics. Today, it is taken as a fact that continents move.

George Dillman claims that he and his top students can knock out people by manipulating some sort of subtle energy called qi (chi or ch’i, pronounced chee). When Leon Jay, 8th degree black belt and top student of Dillman, failed to move Luigi Garlaschelli with qi, Dillman offered the following ad hoc hypotheses: 1. Garlaschelli is a total non-believer and you must believe you can be knocked out by qi for the power to work. 2. Garlaschelli might have had one big toe pointing upward and the other pointing downward. If so, the power won’t work. 3. Maybe Garlaschelli wasn’t knocked out because his tongue was “in the wrong position.” While Dillman’s hypotheses seem like obvious rationalizations, they have the merit of being empirically testable to a degree. Qi remains undetectable by science’s most refined measuring instruments, but we can at least test the toe and tongue position claims. If the no-touch knockout doesn’t work even when the toes and tongue are aligned the way Dillman wants them, we’ll at least know that these hypotheses are false. On the other hand, if Jay or Dillman knocked over Garlaschelli without touching him when Luigi’s toe and tongue were aligned, we’d have evidence in favor of the qi hypothesis.

Defenders of alleged psychic Edgar Cayce provided a classic rationalization to explain away their hero’s failures. Cayce and a famous dowser named Henry Gross set out together to discover buried treasure along the seashore psychically detected by Cayce, but they found nothing. The defenders of Cayce and Gross suggested that their psychic powers were accurate despite their failure to find any treasure. Either there once was a buried treasure where they looked, but it had been dug up earlier, or there would be a treasure buried there sometime in the future. Such generosity in speculation seems like a classic example of being so open-minded your brains fall out.

Some scientists think they have evidence for the existence of ESP. They predict that in card-guessing experiments where there are five choices, guessing correctly 20% of the time is expected by random chance. Proponents of ESP maintain that if a person has psychic ability, she will select unseen cards correctly at a rate that is statistically significant, i.e., a rate not likely due to random chance. Rather than admit that an experiment could not be duplicated because the ESP it was supposed to confirm couldn’t be confirmed, experimenters have been known to blame the hostile thoughts of onlookers for unconsciously influencing the outcome. Of course, if this ad hoc hypothesis is taken seriously, then no experiment on ESP or PK (psychokinesis) can ever fail: Whatever the results, one can always say they were caused by paranormal psychic forces, either the ones being tested or the hostile ones not being tested. The “hostile energy” hypothesis can’t be independently tested. Some dowsers who fail tests of their art also appeal to the hostile energy of skeptics interfering with their powers.

Psi-missing is another ad hoc hypothesis invented by parapsychologists to explain away failures to demonstrate ESP. The tests usually involve trying to use ESP to identify various targets, such as Zener cards, pictures, etc. which are hidden from direct view of the subject. The failure to do better than would be expected by chance is explained away as due to unconscious direction to avoid the target by the subject being tested.

Another ad hoc hypothesis favored by parapsychologists is psychic drift, the entry of unintended non-target data into the psychic transmission or reception path during a psi experiment. Psychic drift, say the parapsychologists, may account for some telepathic subjects guessing the wrong card, photo, video clip, etc. The subjects are getting information inadvertently sent from a card game in Las Vegas, a psi experiment in Edinburgh, or a television program from an apartment in Moscow. It seems more likely that psychic drift is another ad hoc hypothesis used by parapsychologists to explain away psi failure.

Physicist John Taylor explained that the reason the children he was studying for their psychokinetic powers could bend forks and spoons with their minds only when nobody was looking was because of “the shyness effect.” The children weren’t shy; paranormal phenomena are, however. Taylor hypothesized that paranormal phenomena have an aversion to scrutiny.

When a psychic dowser was unable to distinguish bottles of regular water from those he claimed he had energized with healing properties, he hypothesized that his magic water had energized all the bottles of water in the room. You can view this rationalization on Nova’s “Secrets of the Psychics” with James Randi. The magic water hypothesis is reminiscent of the claim that several copies of the shroud of Turin exist because the original has the magical property of transferring its image to nearby cloths.

Ingo Swann, an advocate of remote viewing, claimed that he saw a 30,000 ft. mountain range on Jupiter on an astral voyage. When evidence was produced that showed there is no such mountain range on Jupiter, Swann claimed that astral travel is so fast that he probably wasn’t seeing Jupiter but another planet in another solar system! There really is a big mountain out there on some planet in some solar system in some galaxy.

Some practitioners of facilitated communication who fail scientific tests of their ability say they failed because the testing made them nervous and unable to get the communication from their clients. Facilitated communication, also known as supported typing, is a technique that allegedly allows communication by those who were previously unable to communicate by speech or signs due to autism, mental retardation, brain damage, or such diseases as cerebral palsy. The technique involves a facilitator who places her hand over that of the patient’s hand, arm or wrist, and guides a finger to letters, words, or pictures on a board or keyboard. The patient is allegedly able to communicate through his or her hand to the hand of the facilitator, which then is guided to a letter, word, or picture, spelling out words or expressing complete thoughts.

Dorothy Martin led a small UFO cult in the 1950s. She claimed to get messages through automatic writing from extraterrestrials known as The Guardians. Like the Heaven’s Gate cult forty years later, Martin and her followers—known as The Seekers or The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays—were waiting to be picked up by a spaceship. In Martin’s prophecy, her group of eleven would be saved just before the total destruction of Earth by a massive flood on December 21, 1954. When the day of reckoning came and went, it became evident that there would be no flood and that the Guardians were no-shows. Martin allegedly became euphoric. She claimed that she’d received a telepathic message from the aliens explaining that some god had decided to spare the planet as a reward for their great faith. All but two of her merry little band failed to recognize that this new revelation was rationalized rubbish. They not only stuck with her despite the absurd improbability of her claim; their devotion actually increased. (Some believers in faith healing and intercessory prayer claim that failures are due to people not having enough faith.)

Believers in biorhythms claim that our daily lives are significantly affected by rhythmic cycles overlooked by scientists who study biological rhythms. When confronted with cases that conflict with the predictions of biorhythms, defenders claim that some people are arrhythmic. Another favorite ad hoc hypothesis concerns the claim that biorhythms can predict with 95% accuracy the sex of an unborn fetus. Erroneous predictions are explained away as due to the fetus being homosexual and having an indeterminate sex identity!

One of my favorite ad hoc hypotheses comes from Philip Henry Gosse, who argued in Creation (Omphalos): An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857) that God created the world a few thousand years ago complete with fossils. Another favorite comes from a defender of Nostradamus, who argued that Nostradamus predicted the Challenger space shuttle disaster on January 28, 1986. The allegedly predictive quatrain reads, in part, “From the human flock nine will be sent away.” To account for the fact that there were only seven on board, it was posited that Christa McAuliffe was pregnant with twins.

Another example of providing a whopper of a rationalization involves Uri Geller. In 1973 Geller appeared on the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show” and was supposed to demonstrate his ability to bend spoons with his thoughts and identify hidden objects, but he failed to even try. He squirmed around and said something about how his power can’t be turned on and off, and that he didn’t feel strong right then. Actually, James Randi had worked with Carson’s producer to change the spoons and metal items that Geller planned to use and Geller recognized that his equipment had been messed with by someone other than himself.

Psychologist Ray Hyman provides the most dramatic example of rationalization that I’ve ever come across. A chiropractor hypothesized that randomized, double-blind, controlled tests of causal claims “don’t work” rather than admit that his belief in applied kinesiology had been falsified by such a test.

Offering alternative explanations for something is not the same as proposing an ad hoc hypothesis. If I say of someone who recovers from an illness after going to an energy healer that she might have recovered had she not consulted any healer and that the illness might have resolved itself on its own, I am not trying to save my hypothesis that energy healing is placebo medicine by offering an ad hoc hypothesis. Offering plausible alternatives is not the same as rationalizing to save a belief, especially when the plausible alternative has been demonstrated in many independent tests.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. The Skeptic’s Dictionary <www.skepdic.com>, accessed 11/27/2013 (entries on applied kinesiology, biorhythms, chi, ESP, facilitated communication, psi, psychic drift, remote viewing, Uri Geller, and Zener cards).

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1979. Ever Since Darwin, W.W. Norton & Company.

ad hominem

Don’t reject an argument just because you don’t like the arguer or you question his motives. Even people you dislike and think are closed-minded might be right and you might be wrong.

The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one mentions things about a person in an attempt to show that the person’s argument is flawed.  An argument stands or falls on whether its premises adequately support its conclusion. (The premises are the reasons given as evidence; the conclusion is the claim the arguer is defending.) Personal characteristics, associations, past history, motives, and the like of the one making the argument are irrelevant to whether premises support a conclusion.

Fallacies are errors in reasoning. The error in the argumentum ad hominem is in attacking the person making an argument in an attempt to undermine that person’s argument. No argument is refuted by showing that the arguer is flawed or biased. Good people with good intentions can argue fallaciously and bad people with evil motives can argue cogently.

The ad hominem fallacy has nothing to do with trying to undermine the credibility of a witness by providing evidence of his untrustworthiness. Testifying is not arguing. It is reasonable and relevant to question the motives or character of someone who is testifying. Testimony stands or falls on whether the claims made are believable. Jurors may draw conclusions based on testimony, but the one testifying is making claims not arguments. The ad hominem fallacy occurs only when one attempts to refute another person’s argument by focusing on the arguer rather than the argument.

Perhaps the most common ad hominem fallacy is to attack the motives of the person making the argument. Critics of judicial decisions often cite suspected motives of a judge that might bias his or her decision, as if the judge’s motives were relevant to the cogency of the judge’s argument for making the decision. Even a biased judge can make a cogent argument in defense of a ruling. In any case, you can’t refute an argument by accusing the arguer of being biased. The bias of the arguer is irrelevant to whether the premises support the conclusion. People with good motives sometimes make fallacious arguments, and people with bad motives sometimes make good arguments.

Another common ad hominem is to try to refute an argument by claiming that the arguer stands to profit from others accepting the argument. For example, pointing out that physicians are paid for giving vaccinations or that pharmaceutical firms profit from the sale of vaccines is irrelevant to refuting the argument that children should get vaccinated according to a standard recommended vaccination schedule because of the health benefits to both the children and others.

A favorite ad hominem of those who do not like the arguments of defenders of scientific medicine against the use of such practices as distant healing, homeopathy, or acupuncture is to claim that those who practice scientific medicine oppose alternative medicine because it cuts into their profits. So what? The arguments can be cogent, even if it is true that those making them are, in some sense, competitors in the same market. The same fallacious appeal is often made by opponents of so-called alternative health practices. Presumably, anyone who makes a living from providing health care expects to profit from it. So what?

There are times when it is relevant to refer to a person’s character, associations, occupation, hobbies, motives, mental health, likes or dislikes, but refuting an argument isn’t one of them. If I make an argument defending the claim that 9/11 was not an inside job by the Bush administration but the work of a conspiracy by a group of Islamic jihadists associated with the international terrorist group al-Qaeda, you do not refute my argument by making claims about me. It doesn’t matter whether your claims are true. I may be a supporter of Bush’s foreign policy, I may be an old man who wants to believe his pension is secure, and I may not be an engineer or an explosives expert. None of that matters when trying to refute my argument. To refute my argument, you must show that my evidence is insufficient, that it is based on false or questionable assumptions, that the evidence I present is irrelevant, that I’ve omitted important evidence, or that I’ve given improper weight to various pieces of evidence. An argument’s cogency depends on the evidence presented for the claims defended, not on the character, associations, interests, motives, beliefs, or anything else about the person making the argument.

It may be true that I’m a skeptic, an Atheist, and a liberal, but none of those facts are relevant to whether any argument I make is a good one. Pointing out what one considers negative personal matters poisons the well; it suggests the argument is defective because the arguer is flawed. But even the most evil or stupid person in the world can make a good argument: it all depends on the premises presented and the conclusion defended. No argument ever became a good argument simply by putting it in the mouth of a good person. When attacking arguments, personal matters should be ignored.

A favorite form of poisoning the well is to sprinkle value judgments throughout one’s rebuttal. For example: “I can’t believe they let you teach critical thinking. Your standards are so low that you are a danger to your students.”

I once publicly criticized a scientist’s published paper that claimed his experiments had provided good evidence that a parrot he tested has psychic abilities. (He discarded 40% of his data because the parrot said nothing during those sections of the test.) The scientist in question did not respond to a single criticism I made of his methodology or reasoning. Instead, he reverted to several ad hominem comments. Here is a sampling of those comments:

“Carroll is a committed skeptic who is strongly motivated to try and discredit the positively and statistically significant results of these tests, which imply some form of unexplained communication between Aimee and N’kisi.”

Carroll is “a committed ideologist who wants to censor what the public gets to know.”

“Of course he is free to dismiss with contempt any research he doesn’t like, but he is wrong to mislead his readers by pretending to be scientific.”

“Carroll’s comment is deliberately misleading.”

“Carroll has no scientific credentials, and he gets carried away by his strong beliefs and dogmatic zeal. His style of analysis is amateur and pretentious; his intentions are polemical.”

All of the above claims may be true—I don’t think they are; that is a separate issue—but they are irrelevant to whether my criticisms of the scientist’s work are cogent.

One of the more deceptive ad hominem attacks is to accuse another arguer unjustly of the ad hominem while you make an ad hominem attack yourself.  In response to criticisms I made of Steven F. Hayward’s analysis of the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in 2009, an anonymous critic wrote:

Your defense of ‘Climategate’ (I HATE THAT TERM) wandered off into ad hominem attacks on conservatives. Science is in trouble when your political beliefs determine your scientific opinion…. A skeptic goes into denial when we need honesty.

I had accused Hayward of being politically motivated, but I was not trying to refute his claims. Rather I was trying to explain why he seemed not to care about the science at all and why he might distort and exaggerate the material in the emails to fit his preconceived ideas about climate change and the scientists whose data support anthropogenic global warming. Hayward titled his piece to include reference to “a corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists.” That bit of poison in the well was a reference to the scientists who hold the consensus view regarding anthropogenic climate change. Hayward refers to the hacking and theft of the East Anglia emails as a “document leak” and recklessly speculates that the documents may have been “leaked” by a “whistleblower from the inside.” My real concern, though, was with Hayward’s argument against the consensus view on climate change and his characterization of the stolen emails as revealing a conspiracy by corrupt scientists. I offered reasons for my criticisms. I didn’t rely on my charge of his being politically motivated to make my case.

Another ploy used to divert attention away from criticism is the false charge of ad hominem. Dr. Francine Shapiro responded to criticism of her eye movement desensitization processing therapy (EMDR) by claiming that the criticisms were ad hominem and without merit. One of the criticisms she considered an ad hominem was that the therapy worked with blind people and so there must be something going on besides the trick of having the patient move her eyes back and forth while following a light or pencil held by the therapist. The criticism is substantive and about her therapy; it is not about her.

I have an entry in The Skeptic’s Dictionary that is critical of EMDR. I don’t claim the therapy doesn’t help anyone. I claim that the packaging of the therapy is deceptive. It is actually a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has a track record of empirical validation. EMDR makes claims about some sort of magical transformation of the brain by having a person follow with her eyes the movements of the therapist’s hand. A patient who found EMDR helpful responded to my article, but said nothing of substance about my criticisms. She asked the rhetorical question: “Are all of your books critical about things you know nothing about?” She also wrote: “There are also exercises to do with your mind between the sessions. But, hey, you never took the training to learn that, did you? You never had PTSD so bad that every waking moment was agony, did you?” True enough, but irrelevant to my argument that Shapiro is offering cognitive behavioral therapy, which is not new with her. In fact, the patient/critic supports my point by noting that the therapy includes exercises “with your mind” between sessions. My critic continued with more ad hominem claims: “I should have known you’d be a philosophy PhD, a breed of smarty that typically enjoys criticizing more than learning.” For good measure, she got in one more jab: “Good grief, man. Your logic skills are atrocious. How on earth did you ever get a professorship in philosophy?” In addition to her ad hominem cascade, this critic also committed the straw man fallacy. She wrote: “You don’t benefit anyone by trying to convince people that EMDR doesn’t work.” As noted, I never claimed that EMDR doesn’t work. She’s attacking a position I do not hold.

When Dr. Mary Lefkowitz, who argues against Afrocentrism in her book Not Out of Africa, tried to debate the issue with some college students, the moderator asked her: “How many times have you been to Africa, Professor Lefkowitz?” Whether Lefkowitz has been to Africa is irrelevant to the cogency of her arguments against the idea that African-Americans should trace their roots back to ancient Egypt because it was dominated by a race of black Africans.

Another favorite rhetorical ploy of those who use the ad hominem fallacy is to completely ignore the arguments made against something they believe in and call the one criticizing their belief “closed-minded.” Whether I’m closed-minded or open-minded, my arguments stand or fall by the reasons I give for my conclusions. Even a closed-minded person can make a cogent argument. He may even make money from it and he may be making the argument only because he thinks the homeopath he is refuting is the ugliest person he has ever met. So what? Do the reasons he gives provide adequate support for the conclusion of his argument? That’s all that should matter in evaluating arguments.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2005. Becoming a Critical Thinker. Pearson.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2009. “Keeping a cool head about global warming,” <www.skepdic.com/skeptimedia/skeptimedia62.html>, accessed 12/10/2012.

ad populum fallacy

Don’t accept a claim just because everybody else does, and don’t try to defend a claim by appealing to how many people believe it. The quantity of believers is irrelevant to the truth of a claim.

The ad populum fallacy is the appeal to the popularity of a claim as a reason for accepting the claim. The number of believers is irrelevant to the truth of the claim. Fifty million people might believe the Sun revolves around an Earth that is only a few thousand years old, but how many people believe or don’t believe something is not relevant to whether what they believe is true. Five billion people might believe an invisible spirit created and governs the universe, but the belief could still be false. The ad populum fallacy is also referred to as the bandwagon fallacy, the appeal to the mob, the democratic fallacy, and the appeal to popularity.

It is not always irrelevant to identify how many people make a claim. When the majority of experts in a technical field, such as climate change, agree on something that the average citizen does not understand, it is not a fallacy to accept the consensus viewpoint. Of course the majority of scientists could be wrong about an issue, but it is not irrelevant to cite the consensus viewpoint of experts in a technical field as a good reason for accepting a claim. Presumably, the scientists agree because of the overwhelming evidence for their position. This is quite different from the case where non-experts agree on something traditional, such as the existence of devils or ghosts. Claiming that ghosts or devils must exist because millions of people believe they exist would be an ad populum fallacy.

Advertisers are fond of this fallacy. So are defenders of alternative health practices (aka complementary and alternative medicine [CAM]). Apparently the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) thinks that CAM becomes more respectable if large percentages of people use one or more of its modalities. In 2007, NCCAM claimed that 38% of American adults used some form of CAM. Some of the modalities it considers as CAM are a bit odd. The NCCAM lists dieters, exercisers, and people who meditate or practice Yoga as using CAM. At one time, NCCAM included prayer as a CAM modality. (The fact is that CAM is not that popular: most American adults don’t use acupuncture, energy healing therapy, reiki, naturopathy, qigong, Tai chi, or homeopathy.) NCCAM exaggerates the popularity of CAM to validate not only the various modalities it lists, but to validate its own existence. The fact that nothing worthwhile has issued from NCCAM despite the 2.5 billion tax dollars it has spent in its more than two decades of existence might make a citizen question the continued funding of the agency. The fact is that CAM modalities do not become validated by how many people use them, but by whether they have been shown to have a positive effect on health that is superior to doing nothing or to placebo effects.

Politicians are also fond of the ad populum fallacy. They love to point out that their views are popular or to point out that their opponents are out of step with public opinion. The fact is that public opinion is often out of step with reality.

Sources

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, “The Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States,” <nccam.nih.gov/news/camstats/2007/camsurvey_fs1.htm#about>, accessed 12/11/2012.

NBCNEWS.com, “$2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures found: Big, government-funded studies show most work no better than placebos,” <www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31190909/#.UMdFtHfNkYB>, accessed 12/11/2012.

Szwarc, Sandy. 2009. Junkfood Science, “ad populum,” December 8 <junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/12/ad-populum.html>, accessed 12/11/2012.

affect bias

Before making a decision, reflect on your feelings and emotions regarding the subject of your decision.

The affect bias refers to our tendency to make judgments based on feelings of liking or disliking something, with little input from deliberative reasoning.

Our judgment regarding the costs and benefits of items is often significantly influenced by a feeling evoked by pictures or words not directly relevant to the actual cost or benefit. For some, the good or bad feeling they have just prior to making a decision is a bias that influences that decision and renders it irrational. For example, many people are willing to pay more for airline travel insurance that covers death from just terrorist acts than they would pay for insurance that covers death from all possible causes (Gardner 2008:  73). The expression “terrorist acts” has strong negative emotive content, which apparently leads many people to an irrational willingness to pay more for less coverage.

“The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world” (Kahneman 2011: 103). The affect bias hinders our ability to see the potential negative consequences of our own position and the potential positive consequences of an opponent’s position. Slovic has found that people underestimate the lethality of all diseases except cancer, which is overestimated (Gardner: 72). This misperception may be due in part to the strong negative emotive content that the word ‘cancer’ carries, compared to the emotive meaning of less-charged words like ‘diabetes’ and ‘asthma.’

The affect bias is at work in attracting people to detoxify their bodies with colonic irrigations and other unnecessary “cleansings” of organs and body parts that do not need special cleansing. The idea of poison arouses fear and leads many people to undergo pointless detoxification treatments. Similar tactics are used in the advertising of “feminine hygiene” products to remove “offensive odors” from “down there.”

Advertisers bank on affect bias when they pay top dollar to beautiful celebrities to hawk their products. When Michael Jackson was young and famous as a singer and dancer he was in demand as a branding icon. I once overheard a young man say to a clerk: “Give me a Michael” instead of “Give me a Pepsi.” Jackson was once a spokesman for Pepsi-Cola.

Pollsters should understand that affect bias will affect the responses they receive. They should know that they will get different results depending on whether they ask people if they favor preferential treatment of women and minorities (rather than affirmative action) or if they are against abortion (rather than for freedom of choice).

Anyone who has taken a speech class knows that the best way to get an audience on your side—besides packing the room with family and friends—is to tell a joke or a funny story. Laughing usually makes people feel good. An audience that feels good is more likely to be receptive to your message than one that is in a bad or indifferent mood. The best sales people are often the ones who know how to get a customer to relax and feel good.

Clever speakers can manipulate the unwary with words that arouse positive or negative feelings. On one side are what Jamie Whyte calls hurrah words: peace, love, victory, happiness, security, safety, protect, innocent, freedom, liberty, justice, democracy, courage, confidence, and tax relief. If you’re trying to arouse sympathy to your viewpoint, no matter how obnoxious, deceptive, or pernicious that viewpoint might be, sprinkle your speech with plenty of hurrah words. On the other side are the boo words. If you’re trying to arouse opposition to others be sure to include several boo words in your speech: hate freedom, hate liberty, terrorize, attack, barbarity, murdered, threat, cowards, evil, kill, extremists, radical, tyranny, dictator, arrogant, socialist, woo-woo, pseudoscience, and liberal. Boo words arouse sympathy by provoking contempt. Of course, different audiences respond differently to the same words. The word socialist, for example, may arouse either positive or negative feelings, depending on the audience. Lately, it seems that many Republicans use the word government as a boo word. Both Republicans and Democrats seem to use create jobs as a hurrah expression. The expression as used in political debates has a definite positive aura but seems to have little cognitive meaning.

Political columnist David Brooks captured the power of the affect bias when he wrote: “Most people just want somebody who can articulate their hatreds and [Republican presidential candidate Newt] Gingrich is demagogically happy to play the role.” Gingrich has been providing this service for many years.

When Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, wanted to arouse sympathy for the Republican Party prior to the 2006 November elections he created a new political enemy: “San Francisco left-wing activists.” If you haven’t heard of these folks, they are the ones who have “San Francisco left-wing values.” These are people with liberal values who run with the elite media. They want to raise taxes and either “cut and run” or “run and hide” from Iraq. They represent “the failed policies of higher taxes, more regulation and bloated bureaucratic structures of the past.” They support policies of appeasement and defeatism. According to Mr. Gingrich, “If you think you have too much money in your family budget, then you have a party to vote for, because Democrats will gladly raise your taxes shifting your money from your family to Washington bureaucrats.” And, “if you want to go back to high taxes, high interest rates, high inflation, slower economic growth, more unemployment, fewer savings, shorter vacations and more bureaucracy, then you have a party in the Democrats.” Shorter vacations? Yes, according to Mr. Gingrich, the Democrats can even shorten your vacation if elected. That’s how evil and powerful those San Francisco liberal, radical, left-wing Democrats are (Carroll).

Finally, music is one of the great mood changers. Changing someone’s mood is often the quickest way to get them to agree to an idea they might otherwise find boring or unpleasant. If I am in a grouchy mood and you want to bias me in the direction of some plan of action, playing Mark Knopfler’s “Wild Theme” from Local Hero or Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert will usually do the trick. And those of us with some life experience have known a few Proustian moments involving agreeable odors or tastes that not only triggered pleasant memories and feelings but also made us susceptible to accepting an irrational proposition or two.

Sources

Carroll, Robert. 2011. Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!  James Randi Educational Foundation. Kindle Edition.

Brooks, David. 2011. “The Gingrich Tragedy,” The New York Times, December 8, <www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/opinion/brooks-the-gingrich-tragedy.html?_r=0>, accessed 12/11/2012.

Gardner, Daniel. 2008. The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. Dutton.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Whyte, Jamie. 2004. Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders. McGraw-Hill.

anchoring effect

In quantitative matters—such as the price of an item or the amount of a settlement—try not to be influenced by some arbitrary, irrelevant number to be surpassed or undercut.

Our judgment regarding the frequency, probability, or value of items is often determined by comparing the item to an anchor point. Often, the anchor is an irrational bias that determines a decision. The bias can be measured and expressed in percentages. For example:

In an experiment conducted some years ago, real-estate agents were given an opportunity to assess the value of a house that was actually on the market. They visited the house and studied a comprehensive booklet of information that included an asking price. Half the agents saw an asking price that was substantially higher than the listed price of the house; the other half saw an asking price that was substantially lower. Each agent gave her opinion about a reasonable buying price for the house and the lowest price at which she would agree to sell the house if she owned it. The agents were then asked about the factors that had affected their judgment. Remarkably, the asking price was not one of these factors; the agents took pride in their ability to ignore it. They insisted that the listing price had no effect on their responses, but they were wrong: the anchoring effect was 41%. (Kahneman 2011: 124)

That is, the difference in lowest asking price between the low anchor group and the high anchor group was 41%.

Are you as annoyed as I am when told by a grocery cashier how much money you just saved? In your head, you know you didn’t save anything. In your heart, though, you want to believe that that bottle of wine you paid $12 for was really worth the $16 that was posted as the price for non-members of the “Savings Club.” If there were just one or two items on sale, you might believe you really did save some money. But when just about everything in the store has two prices—one for the “members” and another higher price for the “others”—you probably realize something fishy is going on. You’re right. The grocery markets are using anchoring points to make us think we’re saving money. If we save money, we’ll like them and come back. But it’s all a con. Each one of the higher prices that the non-members pay is an anchor point that the grocer is hoping you will use to buy things that you did not plan on buying. But, at such a bargain, how can you pass it up? You can tell your friends that you saved $4 on a bottle of wine you didn’t intend to purchase in the first place. Isn’t that great?

If you’re like me, you have no idea what the true value of a bottle of wine is. There may be twenty zinfandels on the shelf priced from $5 to $50. Given a few variables—such as the year of harvest, the size of the winery, and the distance to the source—you would think the cost of producing the various bottles on the shelf does not differ all that much. You might think that the price is set by some rational standard, such as supply and demand. The higher-priced wines are rarer than the lower-priced wines. Maybe the higher-priced wines have some superior quality that makes demand for them very strong. Maybe the lower-priced wines have an inferior taste and so the demand is low.

On the other hand, maybe the pricing isn’t rational at all. The seller picks a number, the retailer adds whatever profit he thinks the market will bear, and that is either the number you are given or, in the case of the “savings club” markets, you’re given two numbers: one as an anchor point, the other as the price of the wine. In either case, there will be other bottles of wine priced from high to low near the one you’re considering. Those other prices can serve as anchor points. Some of us will focus on the higher priced wines and pick the highest priced wine, thinking it is probably the best since it costs the most. Of course, we have no information that would validate this thinking. Or, we might use the top price as an anchor point and choose a wine that is marked down 20% from a price near the top. Again, we have no rational basis for this choice. Or, we might pick a medium-priced wine just because it is a medium-priced wine. Or, we might pick a wine that is one notch above the lowest-priced wine on the shelf on the grounds that it will probably be a better tasting wine for the value. For all we know, the retailer prices his cheapest and least attractive wine one notch above the lowest-priced wine to entrap thinkers like you. In any case, it seems like the only rational consumer of wine is the one who buys a wine he or she likes.

My experience has been, both in the market and in the restaurant, that there is little correlation between the price of the wine and whether I’ll like it. Some restaurants are pretty sophisticated at using anchor points in wine-list pricing, leaving me to conclude that maybe a rational person shouldn’t buy wine. Let somebody else buy it for you.

If the label on a coat in a clothing store has a price tag with three different prices, the two highest of which are crossed out, you may think you are getting a bargain if you accept the highest price on the tag as an anchor.

Mentalists can exploit anchoring by knowing that when asked to pick a number “people tend to pick one close, or anchored on, any number with which they are initially presented or in the case of a scale one close to the midpoint” (Sutherland, 1992:  168).

Robert Levine gives an example of how a cable company that was raising its rates used the anchoring effect to make it appear that they were saving people money. They announced that the rumor that rates were going to go up by $10 a month were completely bogus. “You can relax. It’s not going to happen. The great news is...the rate for basic cable is only increasing by $2 a month” (Levine 2003: 100-101).

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely reports on experiments he and colleagues have done that demonstrate how the power of suggestion combined with our tendency to try to be consistent leads us to establish arbitrary values of goods and services as anchors. Ariely explains how we are easily manipulated into patterns of arbitrary coherence. Once we have an anchor price in our mind, it will shape not only how we view present prices but future prices as well. In one experiment, he has the subjects write down the last two digits of their social security number. He then asked them if they would pay that amount (say $79 or $12) for a bottle of Côtes du Rhône 1998. Not only did the social security number affect the price the subjects were willing to pay, it also affected the price they were willing to pay for a bottle of 1996 Hermitage Jaboulet La Chapelle. The subjects were not wine experts but the lower their social security digits, the lower the price they were willing to pay for the wine. The correlation for both bottles of wine between social security number and price they’d pay for the wines was 0.33. (A value of 0 would mean there was no relationship. A value of 1 would mean the items were perfectly correlated, i.e., as one went up the other would go up to the same degree.) Not only did the arbitrary social security number affect what value they put on the first bottle of wine, it affected the value they put on a completely different bottle of wine. The experiment covered six different items and the results were similar for all items.

The implication of arbitrary coherence is that it calls into question one of the basic assumptions of a free market and free trade. If we can be manipulated to value things in arbitrary ways, the alleged benefits of a free market are called into question. If values aren’t simply matters of supply and demand evaluated by rational creatures who know what they want and need and how much they are willing to pay for it or charge for it, then it is the manipulators who stand to benefit from free trade. Traditional economics has defended a free market economy on the assumption that human beings are generally rational in their market behavior and choices. More and more, scientists like Ariely are establishing that our market behavior is more irrational than rational. Think of the anchoring effect the next time you are tempted to purchase something labeled “limited to 12 per person.”

The following example might convince you that the anchoring effect can have some serious consequences.

The power of random anchors has been demonstrated in some unsettling ways. German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence her to 5 months; the anchoring effect was 50%. (Kahneman 2011: 125-126)

At least the judges who sentenced the shoplifter weren’t affecting any real people by their decisions, but it makes you wonder if the time of day might affect a judge’s judgment. If you are sentenced at 9 a.m., you may get a stiffer sentence than if you are sentenced at 2 p.m. Who knows? We do know, however, that whether a judge is hungry or tired can affect judgment. Again, the example comes from Daniel Kahneman via a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks—morning break, lunch, and afternoon break—during the day are recorded as well.) The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. (2011: 43-44)

In another study, “accomplished trial judges with an average of more than 15 years of experience were influenced by sentencing demands, even if the demands were made by non-experts.”

Judges who considered a high demand of 34 months gave final sentences that were almost 8 months longer than judges who considered a low demand of 12 months. A difference of 8 months in prison for the identical crime. Notably, this influence occurred although both demands were explicitly made by a non-expert: In our study they were given by a computer science student in the role of the prosecutor. (Englich & Mussweiler)

These finding make me wonder what else is influencing human judgment that we are unaware of and what should be influencing judgment but isn’t.

Sources

Ariely, Dan. 2008. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, HarperCollins.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Englich, Birte. Thomas Mussweiler and Fritz Strack. 2001. “Anchoring Effect,” <social-cognition.uni-koeln.de/scc4/documents/PsychPr_04.pdf>, accessed 12/11/2012.

Sutherland, Stuart. 1992. rev. 2nd ed. Irrationality, Pinter & Martin Ltd.

Levine, Robert. 2003. The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold. Wiley & Sons.

anecdotal evidence (testimonials)

As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. Anecdotes can be persuasive but they are no match for scientific studies using proper controls to mitigate self-deception and bias.

Testimonials and anecdotes are used to support claims in many fields. Advertisers often rely on testimonials to persuade consumers of the effectiveness or value of their products or services. Others use anecdotes to drive home the horror of some alleged activity or the danger of widely-used electronic devices like cell phones. In the mid-90s, there were many people, some in law enforcement, claiming that Satanists were abducting and abusing children on a massive scale. The anecdotes involved vivid descriptions of horrible sexual abuse, even murder of innocent children. The anecdotes were quite convincing, especially when they were repeated on nationally televised programs with popular hosts like Geraldo Rivera. A four-year study in the early 1990s found the allegations of satanic ritual abuse to be without merit. Researchers investigated more than 12,000 accusations and surveyed more than 11,000 psychiatric, social service, and law enforcement personnel. The researchers could find no unequivocal evidence for a single case of satanic cult ritual abuse.

There have also been scares fueled by anecdotes regarding such disparate items as silicone breast implants, cell phones, and vaccinations. In the 1990s many women blamed their cancers and other diseases on breast implants. Talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Jenny Jones presented groups of women who were suffering from cancer or some other serious disease and who had been diagnosed after they’d had breast implants. The stories tugged at the heartstrings and brought tears to many sensitive eyes, but the scientific evidence did not exist that there was a causal connection between the implants and any disease. That fact did not prevent lawyers from extorting $4.25 billion from implant manufacturers. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, brought the wrath of feminist hell upon herself in 1992 when she wrote an editorial challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to ban the manufacture of silicone breast implants. The scientific evidence wasn’t there to justify the ban. She eventually wrote a book describing the fiasco: Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case. The scientific evidence is now in. The implants don’t cause cancer or other diseases, and the FDA has lifted its ban. When the data were collected, they showed that women with silicone breast implants did not suffer cancer or any other disease at a significantly higher rate than women who had not had implants.

The public fear that cellphones might be causing brain tumors was first aroused not by scientists but by a talk show host. On January 23, 1993, Larry King’s guest was David Reynard, who announced that he and his wife Susan had sued NEC and GTE. The Reynards claimed that the cellphone David gave Susan caused his wife’s brain tumor. There was nothing but junk science to back up the claim and the fact that the tumor appeared near where she held the phone to her ear. She was diagnosed seven months after receiving her phone and died a few months after filing the suit. The suit was dismissed in 1995. A dozen similar lawsuits followed; all were dismissed. For those who think scientists and industries don’t take anecdotes seriously, consider this: soon after Susan’s lawsuit was dismissed the cellphone industry committed $25 million for safety studies. Many studies have been conducted since 1995 and so far no evidence of a causal link between cellphones and brain cancer has been found.

The vaccination rate in many places has dropped significantly in many parts of the world. In my northern California university town, two-thirds of the kindergartners at the Davis Waldorf School were not up-to-date on their vaccinations in 2013. In the Sacramento area, there has been a 34% increase in “personal-belief exemptions” from state-required vaccinations for kindergartners over the past several years. Statewide, the increase in waivers has been 37% over the same period. The greatest decline in vaccination rates has occurred among the wealthier and more educated segments of society (“Child vaccine rates fall,” Sacramento Bee, 1/6/2013), not because of scientific evidence that vaccines are harmful but mainly because of fear caused in large part by anecdotes of children getting autism and other neurological disorders from vaccinations. Oprah Winfrey, for example, responded to a systematic letter campaign from parents of kids with autism by featuring on her show the actress Jenny McCarthy, who claims she cured her son of autism that was diagnosed after he got vaccinated. This kind of post hoc reasoning is common among those who believe anecdotes are more trustworthy than scientific studies. Scientific studies have repeatedly found no causal connection between vaccines and autism or serious neurological disorders. The benefits to members of society from universal vaccination against communicable diseases such as measles, mumps, polio, and diphtheria far outweigh the speculation of potential harm to somebody somewhere under some unknown circumstance.

The fear of vaccines has led to outbreaks of measles and deaths to infants from whooping cough, events that should not be happening in this day and age. In Japan, when the vaccination rate for pertussis (whooping cough) dropped 70% from 1974 to 1976, the number of cases of pertussis went from 393 to more than 13,000 and the number of deaths from pertussis went from 0 to 41.

Testimonials and vivid anecdotes are unreliable for various reasons. Stories are prone to contamination by beliefs, later experiences, feedback, selective attention to details, and so on. Most stories get distorted in the telling and the retelling. Events get exaggerated. Time sequences get confused. Details get muddled. Memories are imperfect and selective; they are often filled in after the fact. People misinterpret their experiences and are biased and selective in what interpretations they include and exclude from consideration. Experiences are conditioned by biases, memories, and beliefs, so people’s perceptions might not be accurate. Most people aren’t expecting to be deceived, so they may not be aware of deceptions that others might engage in. Some people make up stories. Some stories are delusions. Sometimes events are inappropriately deemed improbable when they might not be that improbable after all. In short, anecdotes are inherently problematic and are usually impossible to test for accuracy.

Some fields rely almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence and testimonials, e.g., alternative medicine, the paranormal, the supernatural, and the pseudoscientific. Stories of personal experiences with acupuncture, mediums, ghosts of relatives, or free energy machines have little scientific value. Sincere and vivid accounts of one’s encounter with an angel or the Virgin Mary, an alien, a Bigfoot, a child claiming to have lived before, purple auras around dying patients, a miraculous dowser, a levitating guru, or a psychic surgeon are of little value in establishing the reasonableness of believing in such matters. If others cannot experience the same thing under the same conditions, then there will be no way to verify the experience. If there is no way to test the claim made, then there will be no way to tell if the experience was interpreted correctly. If others can experience the same thing, then it is possible to make a test of the testimonial and determine whether the claim based on it is worthy of belief. Parapsychologist Charles Tart once said after reporting an anecdote of a possibly paranormal event: “Let’s take this into the laboratory, where we can know exactly what conditions were. We don’t have to hear a story told years later and hope that it was accurate.” Another parapsychologist, Dean Radin, also noted that anecdotes aren’t good proof of the paranormal because memory “is much more fallible than most people think” and eyewitness testimony “is easily distorted” (Radin 1997: 32).

Testimonials are of little use to science because confirmation bias and self-deception can’t be controlled for or mitigated in randomly experienced events as they must be in scientific observations and experiments. Most psychics and dowsers, for example, do not even realize that they need to do controlled tests of their powers to rule out the possibility that they are deceiving themselves. They are satisfied that their experiences provide them with enough positive feedback to justify belief in their paranormal abilities. It is common for psychics, dowsers, and their admirers to remember their apparent successes and ignore or underplay their failures. Controlled tests can also determine whether other factors such as cheating might be involved.

If testimonials are scientifically worthless, why are they so popular and why are they so convincing? There are several reasons. Testimonials are often vivid and detailed, making the coincidental seem meaningful and giving a causal interpretation more credibility than it deserves. They are often made by enthusiastic people who seem trustworthy and honest and who seem to lack any reason to deceive us. Sometimes a testimonial is given soon after an experience while one’s mood is still elevated from the desire for a positive outcome. The experience and the testimonial it elicits are given more significance than they deserve and are of little value in establishing the probability of the claims they are put forth to support. Testimonials are often made by people with a semblance of authority, such as those who wear a uniform or hold a Ph.D. or M.D. degree. Testimonials are often made by popular figures given a bully pulpit on widely viewed television programs. For example, when Diane Sawyer of ABC news reported on a new study that found no effect on autism from special diets, she didn’t interview any scientists. She interviewed Jenny McCarthy. In the interview, McCarthy said that scientists need to take anecdotes seriously, that she and other parents have used special diets for their autistic children and know they work. Her profound ignorance of how science works—and that science uses randomized controlled trials to overcome just the bias that McCarthy exhibits—was not challenged by Sawyer. Scientist Phil Plait commented:

First of all, scientists did take the anecdotes seriously. That’s why they investigated any possible links between GI disorders, diets, and autism. What they found was that there is no link.

Second, McCarthy confuses anecdotes with data. As I have said before, anecdotes are where you start an investigation, not where you finish one. That’s the difference between science (aka reality) and nonsense. You can convince yourself of all manners of silliness through personal experience.

To some extent, testimonials are believable because people want to believe them. Testimonials accompanied by claims of government or Big Pharma conspiracies to stifle a new cancer cure or free energy device are popular among those who believe (without much evidence) that the government and various industries have stifled the work of lone geniuses who’ve discover the cure for all cancers, a cheap natural cure for most other diseases, and devices that would allow us to have free electricity and cars that run on air and water.

Testimonials and anecdotes are used to support claims in many fields, including medical science. Giving due consideration to such testimonials is considered wise, not foolish. A physician will use the testimonies of his or her patients to draw conclusions about certain medications or procedures. For example, a physician will take anecdotal evidence from a patient about a reaction to a new medication and use that information in deciding to adjust the prescribed dosage or to change the medication. This is quite reasonable. But the physician cannot be selective in listening to testimony, listening only to those claims that fit his or her own prejudices. To do so is to risk harming one’s patients. Nor should the rest of us be selective when listening to testimonials regarding some experience.

sources

Angell, Marcia. 1997. Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case. W. W. Norton & Company.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! James Randi Educational Foundation.

Carroll, Robert Todd. “satanic ritual abuse,” The Skeptic’s Dictionary. <www.skepdic.com/satanrit.html>, accessed 1/7/2013.

Carroll, Robert Todd. “anti-vaccination movement,” The Skeptic’s Dictionary. <www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html>, accessed 1/7/2013.

Giere, Ronald, 1998. Understanding Scientific Reasoning, 4th ed., Holt Rinehart, Winston.

Kahane, Howard. 1997. Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life. 8th edition. Wadsworth.

Philip Plait. 2010. “ABC News Embraces the Nonsense,” Bad Astronomy blog <blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/06/abc-news-embraces-the-nonsense/#.Um2RMhDheac>, accessed 1/9/2013.

Radin, Dean. 1997. The Conscious Universe - The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperCollins.

Religious Tolerance. “Geraldo Rivera: Satanic Ritual Abuse & recovered memories,” <www.religioustolerance.org/geraldo.htm>, accessed 1/7/2013.

Ternus-Bellamy, Anne. 2013. “Low vaccination rates at some schools raise concerns.” Davis Enterprise. October 10, p. A1.

apophenia and pareidolia

Accept the fact that sometimes coincidences happen. Clouds sometimes look like horses and clocks sometimes stop for no reason. Resist the urge to find meaning and significance everywhere you look.

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term is used in psychiatry to describe the abnormal meanings or significance psychotic people find in random experiences. The term has found a place outside of psychiatry and is used to describe the natural tendency of human beings to find meaning and significance in random, coincidental, or impersonal data. Apophenia may be described as the tendency to find personal information in noise, e.g., happening upon an open safety pin and seeing the arms as a sign indicating 2 p.m., the time your son committed suicide.

Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus. Or one sees the image of Mother Teresa in the folds of a cinnamon bun or Vladimir Lenin in the soap scum of a shower curtain.

Apophenia and pareidolia can occur simultaneously as in the case of seeing a birthmark pattern on a goat as the Arabic word for Allah and thinking you’ve received a message from a god. Likewise, not only seeing the Virgin Mary in tree bark but also believing the appearance is a divine sign brings together apophenia and pareidolia. Seeing an alien spaceship in a pattern of lights in the sky is an example of pareidolia, but it becomes apophenia if you believe the aliens have picked you as their special envoy. Seeing Satan in the smoke of a burning building slips from pareidolia to apophenia when the viewer starts thinking that Satan is giving the world a sign that he is alive and well.

Under ordinary circumstances, apophenia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based on sense perception. For example, it explains many UFO sightings, as well as the hearing of sinister messages on records played backwards. Pareidolia explains Elvis, Bigfoot, and Loch Ness Monster sightings. Pareidolia and apophenia explain numerous religious apparitions and visions. And they explain why some people see a face or a building in a photograph of the Cydonia region of Mars.

According to Peter Brugger of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Zurich, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity ... apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” Some of the most creative people in the world, then, must be psychoanalysts and therapists who use projective tests like the Rorschach or who see patterns of child abuse behind every emotional problem. Brugger notes that one analyst thought he had support for Freud’s notion of penis envy because more females than males failed to return their pencils after a test. Another spent nine pages in a prestigious journal describing how sidewalk cracks represent vaginas and feet represent penises; the old saw about not stepping on cracks is actually a warning to stay away from the female sex organ.

Soon after his son committed suicide, Episcopalian Bishop James A. Pike (1913-1969) began seeing meaningful messages in such things as a stopped clock, the angle of an open safety pin, and the angle formed by two postcards lying on the floor. He thought they were conveying the time his son had shot himself (Christopher 1975: 139).

Brugger gives examples of pareidolia and apophenia from August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, the playwright’s own account of his psychotic break:

He saw “two insignia of witches, the goat’s horn and the besom” in a rock and wondered “what demon it was who had put [them] ... just there and in my way on this particular morning.” A building then looked like an oven and he thought of Dante’s Inferno.

He sees sticks on the ground and sees them as forming Greek letters which he interprets to be the abbreviation of a man’s name and feels he now knows that this man is the one who is persecuting him. He sees sticks on the bottom of a chest and is sure they form a pentagram.

He sees tiny hands in prayer when he looks at a walnut under a microscope and it “filled me with horror.”

His crumpled pillow looks “like a marble head in the style of Michelangelo.” Strindberg comments that “these occurrences could not be regarded as accidental, for on some days the pillow presented the appearance of horrible monsters, of Gothic gargoyles, of dragons, and one night ... I was greeted by the Evil One himself....”

Brugger’s research indicates that high levels of dopamine affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns, and significance where there is none, and that this propensity is related to a tendency to believe in the paranormal.

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where there are none. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia and pareidolia, e.g., ghosts and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible code, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.

One particular area where apophenia plays a significant role is in the subjective validation that occurs in a cold reading by an alleged psychic, astrologer, palm reader, tarot reader, or medium. Readers throw out words and expressions, sitters find meaning and significance in them. Even if the words are random and impersonal, sitters strive to find personal meaning in them.

It is well known that apophenia and pareidolia are related to the human instinct to see patterns and find meaning; both are rooted in our evolutionary history. Our species has stupendous pattern-recognition abilities, so stupendous, in fact, that we often see patterns where there are none. We’ve evolved to find meaning in patterns and infer causal relationships from coincidences. “Our understanding of our world is systematically biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause rather than coincidence. And we are usually completely unaware of these biases” (Chabris and Simons). Consider how automatic some of these brain processes are:

….visual areas of your brain can be activated by images that only vaguely resemble what they’re tuned for. In just one-fifth of a second, your brain can distinguish a face from other objects like chairs or cars. In just an instant more, your brain can distinguish objects that look a bit like faces, such as a parking meter or a three-prong outlet, from other objects like chairs. Seeing objects that resemble faces induces activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus that is highly sensitive to real faces. In other words, almost immediately after you see an object that looks anything like a face, your brain treats it like a face and processes it differently than other objects.

Add a little religious or political zeal to the brain’s natural disposition to recognize faces in just about anything with a shape and a few shadows and you’ve got the recipe for a dozen tortillas with the “face of Jesus” imprinted on them or a single toasted cheese sandwich that reminds people of President Obama or Marilyn Monroe.

It seems likely that our associations of shapes, lines, and shadows are related to our current desires, interests, hopes, and obsessions, even though associative thinking is rooted in our evolutionary history. Most people recognize illusions for what they are, but some become fixated on the reality of their perceptions and turn illusions into delusions. A little bit of critical thinking, however, should convince most reasonable people that a potato that looks like the Hindu god Ganesh, a cinnamon bun that looks like mother Teresa, or a burnt area on a tortilla that looks like Jesus are accidents and without significance. It is more likely that the Virgin Mary one sees in the reflection of a mirror or on the floor of an apartment complex or in the clouds has been generated from one’s own imagination than that a person who has been dead for 2,000 years should manifest herself in such a fashion.

Since most of us are innumerate, we often find significance in purely coincidental events. If you think of all the pairs of things that can happen in a person’s lifetime and add to that our versatility at finding meaningful connections between things in ambiguous situations, it seems likely that most of us will experience many meaningful coincidences, but we are the ones who give them meaning. Given the fact that there are billions of people and the possible number of meaningful coincidences is millions of billions, it is inevitable that many people will experience some very weird and uncanny coincidences every day. Put another way, with a large enough sample size, just about any possible weird coincidence will happen. This is sometimes called the law of truly large numbers. Those who believe that these meaningless coincidences are truly meaningful call it synchronicity, an expression coined by psychologist Carl Jung.

Sources

Brugger, Peter. 2001. “From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought,” Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. edited by J. Houran and R. Lange. McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown.

Christopher, Milbourne. 1975. Mediums, Mystics & the Occult. Thomas Y. Crowell Co.

Leonard, Dirk M.A. and Peter Brugger, Ph.D. 1998. “Creative, Paranormal, and Delusional Thought: A Consequence of Right Hemisphere Semantic Activation?” Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology. Vol. 11, No. 4 pp. 177-183.

appeal to authority

Don’t believe something just because some Ph.D., M.D., or Nobel laureate says you should. Base your beliefs on evidence, not on the say-so of authorities.

The irrelevant appeal to authority is a fallacy in reasoning in which one argues that a practice or belief is justified because some authoritative person or text asserts it.

If a practice or belief is justified there must be good reasons for it and those reasons should explain why the practice is a good one or why the authoritative person or text supports it. The irrelevant appeal to authority differs from the appeal to an irrelevant authority. An example of an irrelevant appeal to authority would be to claim that vaccines are not safe because Dr. Jay Gordon, a pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA Medical School, says they’re not. Quoting Gordon’s reasons does not make the appeal to his belief relevant to whether vaccines are safe. The following claims don’t become true just because Dr. Gordon (2009) asserts them.

Studies showing that vaccines and their many constituents do not contribute to this problem [of triggering autism] are flawed, filled with specious reasoning and, for the most part funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Even articles in reputable medical journals are often written by doctors with an economic interest in continuing the vaccination program’s status quo. This does not invalidate all of these studies but it certainly makes them suspect and a poor foundation for an argument excluding vaccines from the list of environmental influences on the increase in autism in America and elsewhere.

Since there could be nothing more relevant than scientific studies to the issue of whether vaccines trigger autism, it begs the question to dismiss scientific studies as “suspect.” To cite Dr. Gordon in support of not considering scientific studies when trying to determine whether vaccines trigger autism is irrelevant. A proper approach would be to analyze and evaluate the studies that defenders of the safety of vaccines put forth as the best ones showing there is no association between vaccines and autism. That is the approach Dr. Gordon should take and it is the approach anyone citing him to support the belief that vaccines aren’t safe should take. Dr. Gordon may be an expert in medicine, but the value of the studies on the association between vaccines and autism depends on the nature of those studies, not on his say-so. In any case, there are many other experts, just as qualified as Dr. Gordon, who disagree with him. The fact that Gordon and other experts disagree with each does not make the issue controversial, however. Gordon is out of step with the consensus of medical experts that vaccines are safe and are not associated with autism. Finding an outlier who disagrees with the scientific consensus does not mean you’ve established that there is a controversy over an issue. Some in the mass media present outliers in a feeble attempt at fairness, a practice called pseudosymmetry by Christopher Toumey. To be controversial, there must be widespread disagreement among the experts about the issue.

(As an aside, I have looked at many of the scientific studies.  My opinion is that there is no compelling evidence of an association of vaccines with autism or of pharmaceutical firms corrupting the research process in this area. Don’t take my word for it, though. Read what I have to say about the studies (2002) and then check them out for yourself.)

An example of the appeal to an irrelevant authority would be appealing to the advice of an actress with no education or background in medicine to justify seeking some offbeat cancer treatment or for claiming that common vaccines would be harmful to children. Citing actress Jenny McCarthy on scientific or medical issues is to cite an irrelevant authority. Being a mother of a child who you declare is autistic does not make you an expert, no matter how many conversations you’ve had with supporters like Dr. Jay Gordon.

It’s often the case that arguers combine the irrelevant appeal to authority with the irrelevant appeal to popularity. If it is irrelevant to appeal to one authority to prove a point, then it is irrelevant to appeal to many authorities to prove the same point. However, it is not always irrelevant to appeal to authorities. If you know nothing about medicine and your physician goes over the results of a medical test with you and recommends a course of action, you are not committing the fallacy of irrelevant appeal to authority when you justify taking that action because your physician recommends it. You might consult another physician for a second opinion, but you would be foolish to consult, say, the janitor, an actress, or the local newspaper astrologer.

We must rely on experts sometimes, but experts don’t always agree with each other. If, for example, your medical test involved some back problems you’ve been having, you might get five different opinions from five equally competent physicians on what course of action would be best for you. Why? Recommendations for back problems are notoriously controversial. It would obviously be silly to claim that one recommendation must be the best one since it was made by an expert when there are five different recommendations from five equally competent experts. Ultimately, you should consider all the pros and cons of each of the recommendations and select the option that seems best to you. On the other hand, if four of five equally competent physicians recommend the same course of action, unless you can find a compelling reason for rejecting their position, it would seem that the reasonable course of action would be to follow their advice.

When the majority of experts in a field agree on something, we say there is a consensus. Such is the case with climate experts on the issue of anthropogenic global warming. There are many people, some of them scientists, who do not agree with the consensus that human activities such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels that result in more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are causing changes in our planet’s climate that may prove devastating and irreversible. One tactic of the climate change deniers is The Petition Project, which features over 31,000 scientists signing a petition stating “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere.” It is true that 31,000 scientists is a large number, but it is irrelevant to the issue of whether humans are largely responsible for climate change or whether the increase in carbon dioxide will lead to catastrophic heating of our atmosphere. Most of these 31,000 scientists aren’t experts in climate science and, in this case, that matters because when anyone speaks outside his or her own area of expertise their view carries no more weight than that of any other non-expert. What makes it reasonable to accept anthropogenic climate change is not the fact that almost all climate scientists agree. It’s why they agree. Even non-experts can figure out that the experts agree: a survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change’ published between 1993 and 2003 showed that not a single paper rejected the position that global warming is largely caused by human behavior. Climate scientists are not arguing about whether global warming is happening. They’re not arguing about whether humans are largely responsible for global warming. They may be arguing about what action to take. In that case, they should be considered as advisers by those who make policy. Unfortunately, many of those who make policy seem to be ignoring the climate scientists in favor of beliefs pushed by gas, oil, and other corporate interests. Those interests should be considered, but not to the exclusion of the science experts.

A similar tactic has been taken by a group of religious scientists who believe that the scientific fact of evolution is inconsistent with their interpretation of the Bible. The Discovery Institute—an anti-evolutionary, pro-creationist organization—ran an advertisement in 2001 with the heading “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” (“Darwinism” is not a scientific term but a polemical one used by anti-evolutionists to mean evolution.) The ad had over 700 signatures of “doctoral-level scientists and engineers” and stated that “Darwinism,” i.e., evolution, isn’t sufficient to account for the complexity of life. According to the Discovery Institute, only an intelligent designer, viz., a god, could account for the complexity of life. Even if that were true, appealing to a group of scientists and engineers who agree with it isn’t relevant to the claim’s truth.

(As an aside, I find it interesting that The National Center for Science Education has recently expanded its mission to include climate change education in addition to evolution education. The tactic of trying to get creationism taught in public schools under the guise of fairness and “teach the controversy” [where there is no controversy, except among the creationists!] is now being used by climate change deniers.)

Relevance should not be confused with significance or sufficiency. It’s relevant to bring up the fact that shortly after a vaccination your child was diagnosed with autism. Having your child diagnosed with autism is significant to you. But in terms of evidence, the many scientific studies that have found no association between vaccinations and autism carry more weight than a single personal experience of one thing happening after another (see the post hoc fallacy). Your intuition that a vaccine caused your child’s autism is not sufficient evidence to justify that claim, no matter how confident you are of the connection.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2002. “All Posts on Autism and Thimerosal,” <www.skepdic.com/autismthimerosal.html>, accessed on 12/12/2012.

Gordon, Jay M.D. 2009. “Autism and Toxins,” The Huffington Post. June 15 <www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-gordon/autism-and-toxins_b_215461.html>, accessed 12/12/2012.

National Center for Science Education. 2012. Oklahoma bill attacks evolution and climate change, January 20 <ncse.com/news/2012/01/oklahoma-bill-attacks-evolution-climate-change-0013847>, accessed 12/12/2012.

Toumey, Christopher P. 1996. Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life. Rutgers University Press.

appeal to tradition

Don’t believe something just because it’s been around for a long time. Many superstitions have been around for thousands of years. That doesn’t make them reasonable to believe.

The irrelevant appeal to tradition is a fallacy in reasoning in which one argues that a practice or belief is justifiable simply because it has a long and established history. An example of this fallacy can be found in an article by Valerie Reiss on how to choose a psychic:

Christianity sees divination as going against the Bible’s mandate not to seek “soothsayers,” because that would be expressing a lack of faith in God as omnipotent and all-knowing. Yet many ... of the world’s religions and cultures have woven it into their fiber—Hinduism uses Vedic astrology to match marriage partners; in Chinese culture, an expert is consulted on the most mundane to crucial life matters—from when to get married to where to live. Wanting to know what will happen is not just a result of our modern brains grasping for control and answers; it’s been the human condition for millennia, people have been seeking prophecies since Greeks took often long journeys to consult the Oracle at Delphi.

Reiss argues that since divination has been practiced for millennia in various cultures, it must be good despite what some Christians might say is forbidden by the Bible. The fact that some cultures have been engaging in magical and superstitious thinking for thousands of years does not justify the practice, any more than thousands of years of slavery or abuse of women justify those practices. Humans have been beating each other to death in boxing matches for millennia, but that hardly justifies the practice.

The fact that Vedic astrology is still practiced in Hinduism isn’t a good reason for thinking that this is a good thing. In fact, it’s a bad thing. There is no compelling evidence that any kind of astrology is useful for divining the future, and the belief in this superstition is an open door to fraud and corruption in India. Ms. Reiss might consider how she would feel if her marriage was arranged by an astrologer. There might be a better way. (In Guru Busters, a documentary film by the Eagle Brothers, a corrupt godman/astrologer asks his followers on national television to kill those who exposed his scamming of young couples wishing to marry. India is renowned for the bizarre feats performed by holy men, who hang themselves on hooks, walk through fire, and materialize objects from thin air to demonstrate their divine status. Guru Busters shows how these apparently magical acts can be performed by ordinary people and are no more than trickery.)

Reiss doesn’t mention what kinds of experts are consulted in Chinese culture, but it is apparent that she is referring to various kinds of soothsayers. These “experts” bank on the ignorance and superstition of their clients. Perhaps one doesn’t need any kind of expert to advise them on when to get married or where to live.

Surely Ms. Reiss is not advising 21st century people to return to the ways of the ancient Greeks. I doubt if too many modern Greeks consult temple oracles for advice on anything, but if they did they might consider that there are much better ways of getting information about the future. We’ve come a long way since the days of Cassandra. We have a bit more knowledge than the ancient Greeks did about how things happen and why. Using that knowledge to reason about the future, guided by techniques that have been refined over many centuries, has proven to be vastly superior to any form of divination provided by psychics, intuitives, or other soothsayers.

The number of years that something has been practiced, in itself, does not justify that practice. The fact that magical thinking persists in many areas of modern life does not mean that magical thinking is superior to other methods. Rather than be guided by the inferior methods of our ancestors, we would be better off if we tried to understand why these primordial ways of evaluating experience persist and what we might do to overcome the tendency to think like our ignorant predecessors. Rather than rejoicing in ancient errors, we might do better to train ourselves in ways of overcoming our tendencies to fallacious thinking.

Finally, one wonders why Ms. Reiss doesn’t see that even though the Christians base their aversion to soothsaying on an appeal to authority, their counter-tradition nullifies her appeal to tradition. Or is Ms. Reiss arguing that three traditions trump one tradition? If she is, she’s also committing the ad populum fallacy.

Sources

Reiss, Valerie. 2009. “5 Things to Know Before Going to a Psychic,” <blog.beliefnet.com/freshliving/2009/06/10-things-to-know-before-going-to-a-psychic.html>, accessed 12/12/2012.

argument to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam)

Don’t accept something as true just because you can’t prove it’s false. And don’t think something is false just because it hasn’t been proven true.

The expression argumentum ad ignorantiam (usually translated from the Latin as argument to ignorance) was apparently first used by the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) to describe a debater’s tactic:

Locke described the argumentum ad ignorantiam as a way that ‘men ordinarily use to drive others and force them to submit their judgments and receive the opinion in debate.’ Locke defined this type of argument as the kind of move where one party in such a debate requires the other party to admit what the first party alleges as a proof or assign a better. In other words, what the arguer is saying is, ‘I offered you what I think constitutes a proof, so we have to tentatively accept it unless you can offer a proof to the contrary.’ In other words, the arguer is saying he has a right to put this proposition forward as a judgment that both parties should receive or accept, at least tentatively, until the other party can disprove it, or put some proposition in its place that is proved. (Douglas Walton)

The expression argumentum ad ignorantiam has morphed to mean something very different from what Locke intended. Some of the various uses of the expression that have sprung from the Latin expression can be seen in the various ways it has been translated into English: argument to ignorance, argument from ignorance, and appeal to ignorance. One will also find closely related discussions regarding the evidence of absence and the absence of evidence. Also, some writers have associated the argumentum ad ignorantiam with the idea of proving, or not being able to prove, a negative.

Many logic texts list the argumentum ad ignorantiam as a fallacy of reasoning. Examples vary, but some of the more popular ones refer to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s justifying a name remaining on a list of suspected Communists because “there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.” I used to call this the “Mike Wallace fallacy” when I was teaching logic courses. I named it after a tactic Mr. Wallace frequently used on “60 Minutes.” He would show up unannounced, confront a surprised person with accusations of some sort of wrongdoing, and then the scene would cut to a slamming door or a grainy film of a car driving out of a parking lot. Wallace would then announce something to the effect: Mr. X refuses to answer our questions and still has not shown any signs that he is innocent of the charges we’ve made.

It should be obvious that not having proof that someone is not a Communist is not proof that he is and not defending yourself against charges is not the same as admitting they are true.

Another common example given in text books is from the Salem witch trials of 1692 where some of those testifying claimed that they could see specters or auras around the accused, but these specters were visible only to the witnesses. Such claims are impossible to disprove. They’re in the same class as the claims of mediums who say they are getting messages from the dead. One would assume that a reasonable person would require more evidence than just the word of a witness or medium when judging either the cause of the perception or the veracity of the sensations reported. Furthermore, the fact that an accused witch could not prove that she didn’t have a demon’s specter around her or that a skeptic cannot prove that John Edward is not getting messages from someone’s departed Aunt Sadie does not imply that the accused is a witch or that Edward is really psychic.

I remember, and hope I am remembering accurately, a televised speech by Ronald Reagan where he defended the notion that a fetus is a person by noting that scientists haven’t proved that the fetus isn’t a person. It is true that scientists haven’t proved that a fetus isn’t a person, but being a person in this context is not a matter of discovery but of definition. There is no imaginable discovery any scientist could make that would be proof that a fetus is or isn’t a person. It is irrelevant to the issue of whether a fetus is a person to point out that scientists haven’t proved that fetuses are not persons. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons. One day perhaps dolphins and chimpanzees will be declared persons by lawmakers somewhere. You can’t turn a corporation into a biological human being by definition, but you can put them both in the class of persons by definition.

Clearly, there are times when not knowing whether something exists does not mean that something does not exist. The fact that the U.S.A. or other international agents did not discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of that country did not prove that there weren’t any such weapons in Iraq. Now, several years after the invasion and having had plenty of time to locate such weapons, it seems highly unlikely that Iraq possessed such weapons.

Given all the time to find evidence for Biblical stories like the universal flood that the god of the Hebrews allegedly inflicted on Earth, it is reasonable to reject the story as a myth. Scientists know what kinds of evidence there should be on the planet had such a universal flood ever occurred. The lack of such evidence and the appeal to such things as the Grand Canyon as evidence of The Flood make belief in this story rather absurd. To appeal to miracles or divine intervention to clean up the evidence makes the belief even less defensible. Such appeals are clearly ad hoc and have no basis in reality. Nobody can prove that The Flood didn’t occur, but no reasonable person can believe that it did without giving up the basis of reasonable belief: considering all the available evidence rather than speculating about miracles and question-begging interventions from supernatural forces. Often, a tactic of Bible defenders who are challenged to provide positive evidence for some story or belief respond by trying to shift the burden of proof by challenging an opponent to prove the supernatural speculations are wrong. Here it seems appropriate to bring in Bertrand Russell’s famous illustration involving a celestial teapot:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Religion isn’t the only arena where these kinds of battles take place, of course. The fact that Nessie has not been discovered in Loch Ness, even though there have been numerous expeditions that have scoured that lake from one end to the other, does not prove that Nessie doesn’t exist, but it does make it highly unlikely. No solid evidence for her existence has ever been found, but something should have been found by now if the creature exists. I can’t prove Bigfoot doesn’t exist, but I can demonstrate that it is very unlikely given all the time and energy spent trying to establish his existence with nothing to show for it except a few questionable sightings, photos, and imprints. I can’t prove psi doesn’t exist, but I can demonstrate that the evidence for psi is below the threshold any reasonable person should demand given the time, effort, intelligence, and energy put into finding proof of paranormal phenomena. I can’t prove that the experience you had yesterday was not clairvoyance, but my inability to prove it wasn’t clairvoyance is irrelevant to whether it was. I can’t prove that what you saw in the sky last night was not an alien spacecraft, but that doesn’t mean it was. Furthermore, there is an abundance of independent evidence that makes it more probable that whatever you saw was something other than a spacecraft from another planet. If we’re interested in what is reasonable to believe rather than what is possibly true, we take into account all the evidence.

You may find some logic texts referring to the following kind of argument as an argument to ignorance: I’m justified in believing that a god exists because neither you nor anyone else can prove he doesn’t. It is irrelevant to the truth-value of the statement “A god exists” to note that nobody has proven that a god does not exist. I may not be able to prove that a god does not exist, but my inability to do so is irrelevant to the truth-value of the claim “A god does exist.” Likewise, we don’t know whether there is life on other planets, but our ignorance is irrelevant to whether such life exists. In any case, for many of the existence claims brought up regarding arguments from ignorance, the issue isn’t so much whether something like a god, a plesiosaur, or something psychic certainly exists or not but whether the evidence is sufficient to warrant tentative assent to the claim that gods do or don’t exist, that Nessie does or doesn’t exist, or that psychic phenomena do or don’t exist. The fact that it is possible that a god, a sprite, a leprechaun, a Nessie, or a Bigfoot exists isn’t of much interest in the quest to determine whether the evidence warrants assent one way or the other. The fact that it is possible that a subtle energy (qi) exists and that we can’t prove that qi does not permeate all things isn’t much of a reason for believing such energy exists and affects our well-being. Maybe we can’t prove that it was the chemotherapy rather than the reiki and the coffee enemas that led to your cancer’s remission, but we can point to a strong body of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of the chemotherapy you received. You may be able to point to several anecdotes in favor of reiki and coffee enemas, but the mere fact that we can’t prove they had any effect does not mean that they did. Furthermore, the anecdotal evidence pales in comparison to the scientific evidence regarding cancer treatment.

Creationists such as Michael Behe have defended their belief in what they call intelligent design by claiming that scientists don’t know how certain biochemical processes at the cellular level evolved. They then assume scientists will never discover a natural explanation for the evolution of these processes and conclude that an intelligent designer is responsible for them. Rupert Sheldrake and other dualists seem to think that an argument in favor of believing that consciousness is non-physical is the fact that scientists do not know how or what brain processes bring about consciousness. The fact that scientists do not yet have a consensus explanation for the nature of consciousness in terms of physical and chemical brain processes does not provide support for the immaterialist hypothesis any more than the fact that dualists cannot explain how an immaterial reality could have material effects provides support for the brain=consciousness hypothesis.

Nobody can prove that a god didn’t kill thousands by directly creating an earthquake and tsunami, but people who make such claims should know that not being able to disprove this claim doesn’t provide any support for it. Also, if one is willing to accept such claims there is no end to the list of unsupported speculations one could make about the invisible causes of things happening in the visible world. Some readers will be aware of the mockery made of this kind of presumption by the ideas of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Another topic frequently visited by those writing about the argument to ignorance is the idea of proving a negative. I can prove I have no money in my pocket by turning the pocket inside out and showing you. I can prove nobody else is in the other room by taking you to the room and inspecting it with you. I can’t prove that there’s not an invisible dragon in your garage, but I can prove that -5 plus +3 equals -2. Is that proving a negative? When I make plans for tomorrow, I am being directed by what does not exist...yet. Is this absence of what I plan to do a negative that I can prove by doing it?

More to the point, a lab test that comes back negative for signs of cancer does not mean you do not have some cancer cells still active in your body. An X-ray may show no sign of fracture, but you might still have a fracture. (Perhaps we should rather say that just because a radiologist sees no sign of a fracture on the X-ray, does not mean you don’t have a fracture.)

Finally, there are examples involving ignorance, lack of evidence or proof, and argumentation in our courtrooms. Just because a prosecutor can’t prove to a jury that the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean that the accused didn’t do what he is accused of. The absence of the victim’s blood on the arrested person’s clothes does not mean he didn’t commit the bloody crime. The inability of the accused to prove that he didn’t commit the crime he is accused of does not mean that he committed the crime. The fact that the accused can’t account for his whereabouts at the time a crime was committed does not mean that it is reasonable to assume he was at the scene of the crime. On the other hand, the inability to locate the body of a suspected victim is not sufficient to prevent a person from being charged and convicted of murder. All the evidence must be considered; not just the absence of one—albeit important—piece of evidence.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Walton, Douglas. 1999. “Appeal to Ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam),” Argumentation 13: 367-377, <dougwalton.ca/papers%20in%20pdf/99ignorantiam.pdf>, accessed 12/12/2012.

Wikipedia. “Russell’s Teapot,” <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot>, accessed 12/12/2012.

attribution biases

Don’t be too quick to attribute ill motives to others and don’t be too quick to discount the influence of the situation on your own actions.

Human behavior can be understood as issuing from “internal” factors or personal characteristics—such as motives, intentions, or personality traits—and from “external” factors—such as the physical or social environment and other factors deemed out of one’s personal control. Self-serving creatures that we are, we tend to attribute our own successes to our intelligence, knowledge, skill, perseverance, and other positive personal traits. Our failures are blamed on bad luck, sabotage by others, a lost lucky charm, and other such things. These attribution biases are referred to as the situational attribution bias and the dispositional attribution bias. They are applied in reverse when we try to explain the actions or beliefs of others. Others succeed because they’re lucky or have connections and they fail because they’re stupid, wicked, or didn’t try hard enough.

We may tend to attribute the beliefs and behaviors of others to their intentions because it is cognitively easier to do so. We often have no idea about the situational factors that might influence another person or cause them to do what they do. We can usually easily imagine, however, a personal motive or personality trait that could account for most human actions. We usually have little difficulty in seeing when situational factors are at play in affecting our own behavior. In fact, people tend to over-emphasize the role of the situation in their own behaviors and under-emphasize the role of their own personal motives or personality traits when things go bad. Social psychologists refer to this tendency as the actor-observer bias.

One lesson here is that we should be careful when interpreting the behavior of others. What might appear to be laziness, dishonesty, or stupidity might be better explained by situational factors of which we are ignorant. Another lesson is that we might be giving ourselves more credit for our actions than we deserve. The situation may have driven us more than we admit. Maybe we “just did what anybody would do in that situation” or maybe we were just lucky.

Michael Shermer and Frank Sulloway identified another kind of attribution error while doing a survey on why people believe in a god. They found that most people attributed their own belief in a god to rational inference, while the majority attributed the belief of others to emotional need. The intellectual attribution bias finds a rational basis for one’s own beliefs, while the emotional attribution bias finds an emotional basis for the beliefs of others. There is also an implicit value judgment here: having a rational motive is superior to having an emotional one. Shermer claims these biases are also found in political beliefs. On gun control, for example, both liberals and conservatives think their own positions are rationally based. Liberals see their opponents’ beliefs as due to their heartlessness and emotional attachment to weapons; conservatives see liberals’ beliefs as due to their bleeding heart softheadedness.

Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris, building on the work of Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider, called the tendency of people to attribute another person’s behavior to personal characteristics—even when the person’s behavior is most likely the result of situational demand—correspondence bias. Social psychologist Lee Ross coined the expression fundamental attribution error to describe the tendency to see the behavior of others in terms of personal characteristics rather than considering that the situation they are in may have been more significant in determining their actions.

Ross is also known for his work with Robert Vallone and Mark Lepper and their discovery that people with strong biases toward an issue perceive media coverage as biased against their opinions even when the bias cannot be attributed to bias in the media report. They discovered this by presenting the same news reports to people with strong, but opposing, biases and finding that both sides considered the media reports biased against their side and biased in favor of the other side. They called this the hostile media effect. Something similar happens in sporting events: fans on both sides attribute bias to the referees. We might call this the hostile referee effect.

Sources

Heider, Fritz. 1958. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Wiley.

Jones, Edward E. and Victor A. Harris. 1967. The Attribution of Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 3, 1-24.

Shermer, Michael. 2011. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Times Books.

Vallone, Robert P., Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper. 1985. The hostile media phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the “Beirut Massacre.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 577-585.

availability bias

Don’t assume that the first thing that pops into your head when considering what to do is probably the right thing.

When I read that Judy Collins would be performing at the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley, California, I didn’t hesitate to order tickets. After I’d shelled out more than $100 for two tickets, I began to question my judgment. Judy Collins was born in 1939. This is 2012. My memories of her are of recordings I own, most of them dating from the 1960s and 70s. She had a beautiful voice and wrote some fantastic songs. My impulsive act is an example of the availability bias at work. The first thing that popped into my mind on reading about her upcoming appearance at The Freight was of her singing songs like “Both Sides Now,” “My Father,” and “Someday Soon.” (Those memories are very pleasant; there was affect bias involved in this decision, as well.) My decision to drive 150 miles (round trip) to see and hear Judy Collins was not based on any knowledge I had of what her voice or her performances are like these days. I should have investigated a bit before investing time and money that I might later regret. After the fact, I checked out TicketMaster fan reviews. The first one goes like this:

Not only did we enjoy the show entirely. The non-stop performance that she did was just unbelievable. She did not even drink water. Judy is 71, and her voice has remained the same for all these years! She did a vast array of songs ranging from Christmas Carols to children’s lullabies and, of course, the standard favorites. I would go and see her again. Audience participation was great!

Favorite moment: When she replaced the pianist, who was extraordinary, and played six songs back to back without stopping. She is just an amazing pianist herself!

Wonderful! Now confirmation bias can kick in! The glowing review was a couple of years old, however. The next review on the list was dated just a few days ago and it read: “Beautiful, talented and ever elegant. I saw Judy in 1969 and she is just as good now. It was a terrific night all around.” There were six more highly positive reviews, all dated within the last couple of weeks. (There were over 150 reviews and very few were totally negative.)

Now I think I’ve made a good decision, but not for a very rational reason. I based my decision to go to a Judy Collins concert on the first thing that popped into my mind and the pleasantness of the memories aroused. Other things should have been considered before making the decision. I’ve heard other singers performing past their prime and it wasn’t pretty. She’s over 70 and her voice is unlikely to be what it was forty years ago. I feel better now that I’ve found some recent positive reviews. However, for all I know these positive reviews are written by shills or people who are easily pleased. I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible. If I were a thorough investigator I’d seek out reviews by professional reviewers, but one of them might be really negative and say things about her recent performances that would make me second-guess my decision. Since I’ve already made the decision, why look for a wound and some salt to rub in it? (When I told a friend that I had tickets to see Judy Collins, he told me that he had heard her on a PBS program recently and her voice was cracking. She was no longer a solid soprano and her voice was cigarette-rough. But he’s old and his hearing is going and ....)

The availability bias involves making quick judgments based on the speed with which memories are aroused and become available to the conscious mind. The main factors influencing the speed with which memories present themselves are recent frequency of similar experiences or messages, or the salient, dramatic, or personal nature of experiences.

In our culture, the mass media play an important role in affecting what comes to mind quickly when we think of the frequency, importance, or causes of things. Rational judgments should be made on the basis of a consideration of all the relevant evidence, but many judgments we consider rational are made based on the ease with which they come to us. For example, a person might decide not to take a cruise to Alaska that she was about to book when she heard about the cruise ship Costa Concordia striking a reef near the Tuscan island of Giglio, killing more than 20 passengers. The safety of a cruise to Alaska has not diminished because of what happened off the coast of Italy, but the news reports and videos immediately bring to mind the horror of dying on a capsized cruise ship. The decision not to take the planned cruise has been biased by the news of the Costa Concordia. Likewise, many people refuse to fly on a commercial airliner because someone they love died in an airplane crash, yet these same people will drive thousands of miles every year rather than fly, even though they are more likely to be killed in an automobile crash than in an airliner crash.

When asked for your opinion on teenage drug use, premarital sex, morals of politicians, good stocks to invest in, the incidence of violent crime, or any other subject that mass media outlets are likely to cover, the odds are that your answer will be based on what comes immediately to mind and that will be heavily influenced by what you’ve read, seen, or heard recently in the mass media. Or, your answer will be heavily influenced by personal experience. What is unlikely is that your opinion will be based on objective or scientific knowledge of the subject. This tendency to make judgments by the ease with which ideas come to mind is called the availability heuristic.

Consider, for example, how people think of violent crime in the United States. During a five-year period in the 1990s, the homicide rate nationwide dropped by 20 percent, but coverage of murders on the national evening news programs at ABC, CBS, and NBC went up by 721 percent  (Vincent Schiraldi, cited in Carroll 2005, p. 62). What do you think had more influence on people’s perception of the incidence of homicide in our country?

The crime rate decreased all through the 1990s, and for the last decade crime rates have remained steady. Yet, between 52% and 89% of Americans every year since 1990 have thought that crime is on the rise. It’s not just the excessive coverage of crime by the news media that influences our judgments about crime; entertainment programs also play a part in contributing to our misinformed minds. Consider this press release from Purdue University:

People who watch forensic and crime dramas on TV are more likely than non-viewers to have a distorted perception of America’s criminal justice system, according to new research from Purdue University.

“These kinds of shows, such as ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ ‘Law & Order,’ ‘Cold Case,’ and ‘The Closer’ are some of the most popular programs on television today, so it’s important that we understand how they might influence people,” says Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication who studies mass media effects. “We know they have inspired people to pursue careers in forensic science and law enforcement, but what are some of their other effects? We found that people who watch these shows regularly are more likely to overestimate the frequency of serious crimes, misperceive important facts about crime, and misjudge the number of workers in the judicial system.”

Heavy TV-crime viewers estimated two and a half times more real-world deaths due to murder than non-viewers. Lawyers and police officers each make up less than 1 percent of the work force, but those surveyed estimated the percentage of the work force in those professions at more than 16 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

My local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, contracts with the Mervin Field polling agency to do an annual poll on what issues Californians are concerned about. Two things stand out about this poll. 1. Those surveyed must select from a fixed list of issues, all of which are the kinds of things newspapers report on, e.g., crime and law enforcement, the state’s economy, public schools, controlling the spread of AIDS, unemployment, creating more jobs in new industries, illegal drug use, health care, taxes, inflation, illegal immigration, and toxic waste. The issues are selected, according to Field, because they are public policy issues. 2. The results vary from year to year based on what stories have been in the news shortly before the poll is taken. After the Chernobyl nuclear accident, guess what topped the list of Californians’ concerns? If the economy is the topic of daily mass media coverage, guess what tops the list? If politicians have been coming down heavy on the issue of immigration, guess what happens in the poll? Anyway, when I read a headline that states Californians’ top worry is crime, I interpret it to mean that there has been a lot of media attention given to crime stories lately and that Californians’ top worry may actually be about keeping their home from being taken by the bank, finding a job, or how they’re going to pay for their children’s education.

The concept of availability as a bias grew out of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky:

One of our projects was the study of what we called the availability heuristic. We thought of that heuristic when we asked ourselves what people actually do when they wish to estimate the frequency of a category, such as “people who divorce after the age of 60” or “dangerous plants.” The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.” The statement seemed clear when we formulated it, but the concept of availability has been refined since then. (2011:  129)

One of the refinements came about by distinguishing natural and automatic thinking from reflective thinking and by seeing that availability plays a role in both. In their early work they focused on natural, automatic thinking—what Kahneman calls System I thinking. (System II thinking is deliberative and reflective, rather than automatic.)

The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.

Eventually, Kahneman, Tversy, and other researchers expanded the concept of availability to include more than just estimating size of a class or frequency of an event. In How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman gives several examples of bad judgments in diagnosis made by physicians because they were made on the basis of the ease with which the diagnosis came to mind due to recent experience rather than on a careful consideration of all the patient’s symptoms. One of Dr. Groopman’s examples was of a doctor who had treated “scores of patients” over a period of several weeks with “a nasty virus” causing viral pneumonia. Then a patient presented herself with similar symptoms except that her chest x-ray “did not show the characteristic white streaks of viral pneumonia.” The doctor diagnosed her as being in the early stages of the illness. He was wrong. Another doctor diagnosed her correctly as suffering from aspirin toxicity. The diagnosis of viral pneumonia was available because of the recent experience of many cases of the illness. Had his recent experience not included so many cases of viral pneumonia it is likely the doctor would have made the right diagnosis. After he realized his mistake, he said “it was an absolutely classic case—the rapid breathing, the shift in her blood electrolytes—and I missed it. I got cavalier.”

One famous study on the availability heuristic was done by Norbert Schwarz and a group of German psychologists in the 1990s. They tested people to see what effect requiring them to list a specific number of instances of an event would have on their impression of the frequency of that event. You might think that the greater the number of instances you could list, the higher you’d estimate the frequency, but the results didn’t work out that way. Why? Because it’s easier to come up with few instances of something than a larger number of instances and the harder it is to complete the task the less frequent we think the instances are. This finding opens the door to manipulators. If you want to have a group of people, say, rate your speech favorably, then begin the evaluation form with a request that they list ten ways the speech could have been improved. The difficulty of the task might lead them to think that your speech couldn’t have been improved very much and so they might evaluate you more favorably than if you just asked them to rank your speech on a scale of 1 to 5. Schwarz et al. also found that if they provided an explanation for the fluency of retrieval, even a spurious explanation, they could mitigate the difference in effect between the easier and more difficult retrieval tasks. This discovery led Kahneman to suggest that rather than call this the availability heuristic, it might be better to call it the “unexplained unavailability heuristic.”

One professor found that teachers might increase favorable course ratings by first asking students to list ten ways the course could be improved (a relatively difficult task). He showed that the ratings were improved by replacing the word ‘two’ with the word ‘ten’ in the standard course evaluation form. It didn’t matter that those asked to come up with ten ways to improve the course averaged about two suggestions; just asking them to come up with ten made the task harder and apparently motivated them to rate the course more favorably than those asked to come up with just two ways (Fox).

Another study on the availability heuristic was done by Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, et al. They found that people’s judgments about the frequency of death from various causes was biased by media coverage which itself is biased toward novelty (death by botulism or some rare virus is going to get more coverage than death by lung cancer) and drama (big accidents or dramatic events like airplane crashes will get much more coverage than, say, the annual death toll of those killed in railroad accidents in India which, by the way, was more than 15,000 in 2011, which, by the way, is about the same number of people killed by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan). The researchers found, for example, that 80% of the 660 adults surveyed thought that there are more deaths from accidents than from strokes. Strokes actually account for about twice as many deaths per year than death from accidents. The majority of respondents thought that death from tornadoes is greater than deaths from asthma, even though the latter accounts for about twenty times as many deaths as the former. Schwarz and his group, however, found that personal involvement in an issue will make a person less likely to go to fluency or whatever pops into one’s mind automatically when making judgments and more likely to consider the number of instances they can retrieve from memory.

They recruited two groups of students for a study of risks to cardiac health. Half the students had a family history of cardiac disease and were expected to take the task more seriously than the others, who had no such history. All were asked to recall either three or eight behaviors in their routine that could affect their cardiac health (some were asked for risky behaviors, others for protective behaviors). Students with no family history of heart disease were casual about the task and followed the availability heuristic. Students who found it difficult to find eight instances of risky behavior felt themselves relatively safe, and those who struggled to retrieve examples of safe behaviors felt themselves at risk. The students with a family history of heart disease showed the opposite pattern—they felt safer when they retrieved many instances of safe behavior and felt greater danger when they retrieved many instances of risky behavior. They were also more likely to feel that their future behavior would be affected by the experience of evaluating their risk. (Kahneman 2011: 135)

Knowledge and personal experience, however, are often of little help in overcoming the strong emotional reaction people have to vivid scary stories in the media. On an intellectual level, one may know that the chances of the cruise ship to Alaska sinking are slim, but the fear that has been aroused by the media accounts of the sinking of a cruise ship in another part of the world may be impossible to overcome when making the decision to go ahead as planned or cancel the trip.

Ask yourself how much the mass media has influenced your beliefs about such things as torture, the polygraph, ghosts and haunted houses, psychics, taxes, the government, Nostradamus, pharmaceutical firms, and other topics. What we think about many things is often due to how much exposure we’ve had to mass media portrayals of those things.

The way to mitigate the availability bias is to be aware of it and to take the necessary steps to get good data before making a judgment. Unfortunately, scientific studies have shown that certain kinds of personality traits make one more susceptible to the availability bias. Schwarz et al. found that people who have great faith in intuition and people who are powerful (or made to feel powerful) tend to be affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieve. I leave it to the reader to find the research showing that when the first thing evoked in memory is a stereotype or is accompanied by very pleasant feelings, it becomes more difficult to overcome the availability bias.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2005. Becoming a Critical Thinker. Pearson.

Fox, Craig R. 2006. “The availability heuristic in the classroom: How soliciting more criticism can boost your course ratings,” Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 1, No. 1, July, pp. 86–90, <journal.sjdm.org/jdm06020.pdf>, last accessed 12/12/2012.

Groopman, Jerome. 2008. How Doctors Think. Mariner Books.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lichtenstein, Sarah, Paul Slovic et al. 1978. Judged frequency of lethal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4 (6) November, 551-578.

Telhami, Shibley. n.d., “From the Gut: Decisions without Reflection,” a review of Decision Points by George W. Bush (Crown Publishers, 2010), <www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=40>, accessed 12/12/2012.

backfire effect

When somebody presents evidence against something you believe, take the time to consider the evidence. Don’t automatically dig in and try to rationalize or explain away the evidence.

The backfire effect is a curious response many people have to evidence conflicting with their beliefs: instead of becoming open to the possibility that the evidence might be correct and one might have to change one’s mind, many people become more convinced that they were right in the first place. Yes, that’s right. Some people’s beliefs get stronger when evidence against their belief is presented to them. You would think that a rational person would base his beliefs on the strength of the evidence and that evidence against his belief should weaken rather than strengthen his belief, but there is a growing body of scientific evidence that has found most of us are not that rational when it comes to dealing with evidence that conflicts with beliefs we already hold.

Journalist David McRaney sums up the backfire effect nicely: “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined the term “backfire effect” to describe this irrational response of coming to hold one’s original position even more strongly when confronted with evidence that conflicts with one’s belief. For journalists and anyone engaging in debate and argument who hopes to persuade others and change their minds or correct misinformation, the backfire effect is more than annoying: it indicates our goals are largely pointless and we are almost surely guaranteed to fail. Why bother to provide evidence for global warming or point out the errors of the climate change deniers if the better our arguments are the more the deniers will dig in and be encouraged in their continued errors? Why bother explaining evolution to young Earth creationists and rebutting their inane arguments when the likely effect is to strengthen their erroneous beliefs? Why waste time explaining to anti-vaccinationists the benefits of vaccinations and the harm done by not vaccinating children when all we are likely to accomplish is to fuel their hostility toward the truth? It becomes a futile exercise to argue with people who believe Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in Hawaii. Not only will no amount of evidence change their minds, but the more evidence we provide to show they’re wrong, the stronger their conviction becomes that they’re right.

Is there any hope, then, of debunking myths such as the birther myth that President Obama was not born in Hawaii, the creationism myth that a magical being created all species at once and there has been no evolution, or the anti-vaxxer myth that vaccinations are chock full of harmful substances that cause everything from mental retardation to autism to death? According to John Cook of the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, and Stephan Lewandowsky, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, there is a way of debunking myths that shows some promise:

...an effective debunking requires three major elements. First, the refutation must focus on core facts rather than the myth to avoid the misinformation becoming more familiar. Second, any mention of a myth should be preceded by explicit warnings to notify the reader that the upcoming information is false. Finally, the refutation should include an alternative explanation that accounts for important qualities in the original misinformation.

Sounds simple, eh? Anyway, I think there is little dispute among those of us who frequently engage in public arguments that all we need to do is provide good information and we will change the hearts and minds of those we argue against. On some issues, the propaganda machinery is a Goliath that no army of independent Davids can hope to take down. For example, Donald Prothero reports that “the day that the 2007 IPCC report was released (Feb. 2, 2007), the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the conservative American Enterprise Institute (funded largely by oil companies and conservative think tanks) had offered $10,000 plus travel expenses to scientists who would write negatively about the IPCC report.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides an abundance of solid information that journalists, government officials, and citizens alike can look to for reliable information about climate change. The propaganda machine of the self-interested oil and coal companies and the conservative think tanks and media outlets can easily outpace the flow and influence of scientific data, however.

There’s an old saying “if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true.” Of course, repeating something has no effect on the truth-value of any claim, but familiarity with a claim does increase the chances of accepting it as true. If propaganda machines are good at anything it is at getting the same misinformation repeated again and again in various media outlets. Combating the misinformation by providing accurate information may have the undesired effect of strengthening the belief in the misinformation. So, what’s a critical thinker to do? Sounds like one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.

The fact is, though, that those of us who do battle with 9/11 deniers, astrologers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, climate change deniers, evolution deniers, Holocaust deniers, homeopaths, parapsychologists, and the like aren’t really hoping to change the minds and hearts of those we confront. We’re hoping that many of those who read our arguments, attend our debates, hear our presentations, or watch our videos are not fully committed to the beliefs of those we challenge. The hope is that among the bystanders, the audience, the viewers, and the readers there will be many who will be influenced by the information and arguments we provide. The goal of combating the tobacco companies’ propaganda about smoking, for example, was not to change the minds of tobacco executives, but to provide good information that the general public, public health officials, and even politicians, might consider in making decisions about smoking and regulations governing the sale of tobacco products. The goal of debunking the myth that the world would end in 2012 as allegedly predicted by the Maya centuries ago was not to change the minds of those writing books or posting on websites promoting this ridiculous idea. The goal was to provide some counterpoints to the myth mongers that might alleviate some of the unnecessary fear and anxiety they’ve created.

Are we justified in believing that we can influence some people by providing good arguments for accepting evolution, anthropogenic climate change, science-based medicine, etc.? If we’re not, then we may as well abandon education altogether. People do change their minds about many things and all of us have learned new things from time to time. Still, it is worthwhile to know that our brains may not be the unbiased truth-seeking missiles we imagine them to be. Knowing our own weaknesses can help us in our attempts at persuading others. For example, studies have shown that people are more receptive to ideas that conflict with their worldviews when they’re in a good mood. We might try priming a hostile audience with some affect bias by getting them to think about how wonderful they are or about some time in the past when they felt really great because they acted on a value that was important to them (self-affirmation). Once they’re feeling good about themselves maybe they won’t feel so threatened by information that conflicts with their beliefs. This might work, but I wouldn’t count on it.

One area where the backfire effect occurs with some regularity is the area of cult behavior. Marian Keech (real name: Dorothy Martin) was the leader of a UFO cult in the 1950s. She claimed to get messages from extraterrestrials, known as The Guardians, through automatic writing. Like the Heaven’s Gate folks forty years later, Keech and her followers, known as The Seekers or The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, were waiting to be picked up by flying saucers. In Keech’s prophecy, her group of eleven was to be saved just before Earth was to be destroyed by a massive flood on December 21, 1954. When it became evident that there would be no flood and the Guardians weren’t stopping by to pick them up, Keech “became elated. She said she’d just received a telepathic message from the Guardians saying that her group of believers had spread so much light with their unflagging faith that God had spared the world from the cataclysm” (Levine 2003: 206). More important, the Seekers didn’t abandon her. Most became more devoted after the failed prophecy. Only two left the cult when the world didn’t end. “Most disciples not only stayed but, having made that decision, were now even more convinced than before that Keech had been right all along....Being wrong turned them into true believers.”

The Seekers would not have waited for the flying saucer if they thought it might not come. So, when it didn’t come, one would think that a competent thinker would have seen this as falsifying Keech’s claim that it would come. However, the incompetent thinkers were rendered incompetent by their devotion to Keech. Their belief that a flying saucer would pick them up was based on faith, not evidence. Likewise, their belief that the failed prophesy didn’t count against their belief was another act of faith. With this kind of irrational thinking, it may seem pointless to produce evidence to try to persuade such people of the error of their ways. Their belief is not based on evidence, but on devotion to a person. That devotion can be so great that even the most despicable behavior by one’s prophet can be rationalized. There are many examples of people so devoted to another that they will rationalize or ignore extreme mental and physical abuse by their cult leader (or spouse or boyfriend). If the basis for a person’s belief is irrational faith grounded in devotion to a powerful personality, then the only option that person has when confronted with evidence that should undermine her faith would seem to be to continue to be irrational, unless her faith was not that strong to begin with. What was it about Keech that led some people to have faith in her and what was it about those people that made them vulnerable to Keech? And what was different about the two who left the cult? I have no idea, but Keech and other cult leaders share some characteristics with many non-cult folks who are in the persuasion business.

“Research shows that three characteristics are related to persuasiveness: perceived authority, honesty, and likeability” (Levine). Furthermore, if a person is physically attractive, we tend to like that person and the more we like a person the more we tend to trust him or her. Research also shows that “people are perceived as more credible when they make eye contact and speak with confidence, no matter what they have to say.”

According to Robert Levine, “studies have uncovered surprisingly little commonality in the type of personality that joins cults: there’s no single cult-prone personality type.” This fact surprised Levine. When he began his investigation of cults he “shared the common stereotype that most joiners were psychological misfits or religious fanatics.”  What he found instead was that many cult members are attracted to what appears to be a loving community. “One of the ironies of cults is that the craziest groups are often composed of the most caring people.” Levine says of cult leader Jim Jones that he was “a supersalesman who exerted most every rule of persuasion.” He had authority, perceived honesty, and likeability. It is likely the same could be said of Marian Keech. It also seems likely that many cult followers have found a surrogate family and a surrogate mother or father or both in the cult leader.

It should also be remembered that in most cases people have not arrived at their irrational beliefs overnight. They have come to them over a period of time with gradually escalated commitments. Nobody would join a cult if the pitch were: “Follow me. Drink this poisoned-but-flavored water and commit suicide.” Yet, not everybody in the Jonestown cult drank the poison and two of Keech’s followers quit the cult when the prophecy failed. How were they different from the others? The explanation seems simple: their faith in their leader was weak.

Even people who erroneously think their beliefs are scientific may come by their notions gradually and their commitment may escalate to the point of irrationality and irreversibility. Psychologist Ray Hyman provides a very interesting example of the backfire effect involving testing a belief in applied kinesiology that some chiropractors in California share. (Applied kinesiology is a diagnostic method created by chiropractor George Goodheart. It uses manual muscle resistance testing to determine various aspects of healthiness of people and things.)

Some years ago I participated in a test of applied kinesiology at Dr. Wallace Sampson’s medical office in Mountain View, California. A team of chiropractors came to demonstrate the procedure. Several physician observers and the chiropractors had agreed that chiropractors would first be free to illustrate applied kinesiology in whatever manner they chose. Afterward, we would try some double-blind tests of their claims.

The chiropractors presented as their major example a demonstration they believed showed that the human body could respond to the difference between glucose (a “bad” sugar) and fructose (a “good” sugar). The differential sensitivity was a truism among “alternative healers,” though there was no scientific warrant for it. The chiropractors had volunteers lie on their backs and raise one arm vertically. They then would put a drop of glucose (in a solution of water) on the volunteer’s tongue. The chiropractor then tried to push the volunteer’s upraised arm down to a horizontal position while the volunteer tried to resist. In almost every case, the volunteer could not resist. The chiropractors stated the volunteer’s body recognized glucose as a “bad” sugar. After the volunteer’s mouth was rinsed out and a drop of fructose was placed on the tongue, the volunteer, in just about every test, resisted movement to the horizontal position. The body had recognized fructose as a “good” sugar.

After lunch a nurse brought us a large number of test tubes, each one coded with a secret number so that we could not tell from the tubes which contained fructose and which contained glucose. The nurse then left the room so that no one in the room during the subsequent testing would consciously know which tubes contained glucose and which fructose. The arm tests were repeated, but this time they were double-blind—neither the volunteer, the chiropractors, nor the onlookers was aware of whether the solution being applied to the volunteer’s tongue was glucose or fructose. As in the morning session, sometimes the volunteers were able to resist and other times they were not. We recorded the code number of the solution on each trial. Then the nurse returned with the key to the code. When we determined which trials involved glucose and which involved fructose, there was no connection between ability to resist and whether the volunteer was given the “good” or the “bad” sugar.

When these results were announced, the head chiropractor turned to me and said, “You see, that is why we never do double-blind testing anymore. It never works!” At first I thought he was joking. It turned it out he was quite serious. Since he “knew” that applied kinesiology works, and the best scientific method shows that it does not work, then—in his mind--there must be something wrong with the scientific method. (Hyman)

What distinguishes the chiropractor’s rationalization from the cult member’s is that the latter is based on pure faith and devotion to a guru or prophet, whereas the former is based on evidence from experience. Neither belief can be falsified because the believers won’t let them be falsified: they will accept nothing as evidence against their beliefs. Those who base their beliefs on experience and what they take to be empirical or scientific evidence (e.g., astrologers, palm readers, mediums, psychics, the intelligent design folks, and the chiropractor) make a pretense of being willing to test their beliefs. In actuality, their goal is to defend their beliefs against all challenges. They are apologists, not critical thinkers.

Sources

Cook, John and Stephan Lewandowsky. 2011. The Debunking Handbook. <www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf>, accessed on 12/12/2012.

Hyman, Ray. 1999. “The Mischief-Making of Ideomotor Action,” in The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 3 (2):34-43.

Levine, Robert. 2003. The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold. John Wiley & Sons.

McCraney, David. 2012. “The Backfire Effect,” on the blog You Are Not So Smart, A Celebration of Self-Delusion, <youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ >, accessed on 12/12/2012

Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior. 32 (2):303-330.

Prothero, Donald. 2012. “How We Know Global Warming is Real and Human Caused,” e-Skeptic <www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-02-08/#feature>, accessed 12/12/2012.

begging the question

Look out for people who assume what they should be proving, especially those you agree with.

(Note: Many people use the expression “begs the question” to mean something like “raises the question.” This usage has nothing to do with the logical fallacy of begging the question.)

Begging the question is a fallacy in reasoning whereby one assumes what one claims to be proving. An argument is a form of reasoning in which one gives a reason or reasons in support of some claim. The reasons are called premises and the claim one tries to support with them is called the conclusion. If one’s premises entail one’s conclusion, and one’s premises are questionable, one is said to beg the question. The following argument begs the question:

We know a god exists because we can see the perfect order of creation, an order that demonstrates supernatural intelligence in its design.

The conclusion of this argument is that a god exists. The premise assumes a creator and designer of the universe exists, i.e., that a god exists. In this argument, the arguer should not be granted the assumption that the universe exhibits intelligent design, but should be made to provide support for that claim. The following argument also begs the question.

Abortion is the unjustified killing of a human being and as such is murder. Murder is illegal. So, abortion should be illegal.

The conclusion of the argument is entailed in its premises. If one assumes that abortion is murder then it follows that abortion should be illegal because murder is illegal. Thus, the arguer is assuming abortion should be illegal (the conclusion) by assuming that it is murder. In this argument, the arguer should not be granted the assumption that abortion is murder, but should be made to provide support for this claim. (Since murder is the unjustified killing of a human being, the arguer must prove that every abortion is an unjustified killing of a human being. Even if one grants that every abortion is the killing of a human being—which many would not grant, of course—it does not follow that every abortion is an unjustified killing.) The following is another example of begging the question.

Paranormal phenomena exist because I have had experiences that can only be described as paranormal.

The conclusion of this argument is that paranormal phenomena exist. The premise assumes that the arguer has had paranormal experiences, and therefore assumes that paranormal experiences exist. The arguer should not be granted the assumption that his experiences were paranormal, but should be made to provide support for this claim. Here is another example of begging the question.

Past-life memories of children prove that past lives exist because the children could have no other source for their memories besides having lived in the past.

The conclusion of this argument is that past lives exist. The premise assumes that children have had past lives. The arguer should not be granted the assumption that children have had past lives but should be made to support the claim. (Saying the memories could have no other source than a past life is to assume that past lives exist. This should not be granted, but argued for.) Another example of begging the question is provided by Perry Marshall:

1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code ... and an information storage mechanism.

2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.

3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.

Marshall assumes what he should be proving, namely, that all codes are created by a conscious mind.

Source

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Perry Marshall. “If you can read this, I can prove God exists,” <www.cosmicfingerprints.com/read-prove-god-exists/>, accessed 12/13/2012.

bias blind spot

Have you ever wondered why others are blind to their own biases, yet they can identify your biases handily? It’s probably because, unlike you, they’re not better than average at detecting biases in themselves.

The bias blind spot was described by Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues (2002) as the tendency to perceive cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves. The bias blind spot is a metabias rather than a cognitive bias since it refers to a pattern of inaccurate judgment in reasoning about cognitive biases.

In one study, Pronin et al. (2002) found that people tend to rate themselves as less subject to biases than others. In another study, “participants … who showed better-than-average bias” were instructed in how biases operate on us at the unconscious level. Nevertheless, 63% insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective. Participants in another study “reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias.” Better-than-average bias is the tendency of individuals to rank themselves as better than average on just about anything. For example, 74% of all managers think they are better than average at managing. (As Dilbert’s boss noted: this means that 26% of managers don’t know that they’re better than average. To which Dilbert replied: you’re all in the top 110%. See Scott Adams’s cartoon for January 18, 2013.)

In another study, Pronin and Matthew Kugler (2006) argue that the bias blind spot “involves the value that people place, and believe they should place, on introspective information (relative to behavioral information) when assessing bias in themselves versus others. Participants considered introspective information more than behavioral information for assessing bias in themselves, but not others.” A consequence of the bias blind spot is that people tend to believe their own beliefs are accurate and their sources trustworthy, but those who hold different views are biased and their sources are not trustworthy (Ehrlinger et al. 2005).

Finally, a study by Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich found that “being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases.” They also found that higher cognitive ability did not correlate with a smaller bias blind spot. (Note: West et al. did not find that “smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors,” as Jonah Lehrer claimed in New Yorker article [“Why Smart People Are Stupid,” June 12, 2012]. In fact, the opposite is true: Most cognitive biases are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, as West et al. note in their article.)

Sources

Ehrlinger, Joyce, Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross. 2005. Peering Into the Bias Blind Spot: People’s Assessments of Bias in Themselves and Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 5, 680-692

Pronin, E. & Matthew B. Kugler. 2006. Valuing thoughts, ignoring behavior: The introspection illusion as a source of the bias blind spot. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Vol. 43, Issue 4, 565-578.

Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. 2004. Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others. Psychological Review, 111, 781–799.

Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. 2002. The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369-381.

Shermer, Michael. 2011. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Times Books.

West, Richard, Russell Meserve and Keith Stanovich. 2012. Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. September; 103 (3): 506-19.

Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., & Brekke, N. 2002. Mental contamination and the debiasing problem. In D. Griffin & T. Gilovich (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge University Press, pp.185–200.

causal fallacies

Correlation does not imply causation. And just because one thing comes after another does not mean there is a causal connection between them.

A causal fallacy involves making the claim that something (call it ‘x’) causes something else (call it ‘y’) when the evidence presented is insufficient to establish either that x is a necessary condition for y or that x is a sufficient condition for y. Causal fallacies usually involve either post hoc reasoning or jumping to a conclusion based on finding a correlation between x and y. The post hoc fallacy (that x causes y because x came before y) is discussed elsewhere. Here I’ll focus on errors due to misapplied correlation.

Let’s start with an example of some good causal reasoning. The claim that smoking causes lung cancer is based on data that demonstrate to a high degree of probability that had a person with a particular type of lung cancer not smoked he would not have the kind of cancer he has today. In other words, smoking is a necessary condition for his particular lung cancer. Expressing it this way can be misleading though, so some explanation is required. Certainly, people who have never smoked can get lung cancer, so in that sense it is not necessary to smoke in order to get lung cancer. When we say that smoking is a necessary condition for a particular case of lung cancer we mean that smoking was necessary for that particular cancer in that particular person. In simpler and more obvious terms this means that had the person not smoked she would not have gotten the kind of lung cancer that is caused by smoking. This may seem trivially true until you remember that this way of putting it leaves open the possibility that others may smoke and not develop the lung cancer caused by smoking.

How would one go about showing that smoking causes cancer, i.e., is a necessary condition for cancer? You begin by making predictions and testing them. For example, if smoking causes cancer then you would expect that if you randomly selected 100,000 people, divided them into smokers and non-smokers and observed them over a 20-year period, you should find a significantly greater number of lung cancer cases in the smoking group. Significance is measured by a statistical formula that basically says that it is highly unlikely that the difference between the two groups is due to chance. Many more predictions should be tested before jumping to the conclusion that smoking causes lung cancer. These predictions might take into account how long people have smoked, how many cigarettes a day they smoked, how long it has been since they quit smoking, and the like.

Establishing causality requires more than just finding a statistic that is consistent with the hypothesis that x causes y, however. For example, you might find that 30 out of 30 men in a West Virginia lung cancer ward all worked in the coal mines. From that you might infer that coal dust causes lung cancer. But what if you also find out that all 30 were smokers? That makes the issue a bit more complicated. Perhaps coal dust contributes to lung cancer or perhaps smoking alone can account for these cancers. Further predictions would have to be tested to try to tease out the role, if any, of coal dust in lung cancer.

A correlation between x and y must exist if x and y are causally related. That is, it must be the case that x is generally followed by y or that y is generally preceded by x, or that as x increases or decreases so does y. A correlation between x and y, however, does not mean they are causally related. There is a very good correlation between age and shoe size, hat size, height, and weight, but age doesn’t cause any of these things.

One problem with claiming a causal relationship based solely on a strong correlation is that in addition to a causal connection there are at least three other plausible explanations for the correlation. One, it could be a fluke. Two, there might be a causal relationship, but the correlation can’t tell you which is the cause and which is the effect. For example, you might find a good correlation between the increase in sex education classes for high school students and an increase in teenage pregnancies. But you have no way of knowing just from the correlation whether this is a coincidence, whether the sex ed classes stimulated interest in sexual activity (which lead to increased pregnancies), or whether the increase in pregnancies prompted school officials to add more sex education classes.

Three, there might be a causal relation involved but not x causes y or y causes x. Rather, it might be the case that z causes both x and y, or that z and x cause y (or z and y cause x). For example, there might be a good correlation between taking birth control pills and developing blood clots in women of a certain age group, but when controlled for smoking the correlation between taking birth control pills and developing blood clots might go away. In a study on this issue, it was found that smoking plus taking birth control pills increased the chances of blood clots more than just smoking did, while those who did not smoke but took the pill had no greater frequency of blood clots that women in general (Giere 1996: 297-303).

On the other hand, if x and y are causally related there should be a good correlation between them, which allows us to make predictions that test the hypothesis x causes y. For example, if cell phone use causes brain tumors then we should find a significantly greater number of brain tumors among cell phone users compared to those who don’t use cell phones. No data yet has supported this claim, which strongly indicates that cell phone use isn’t a significant causal factor for brain tumors. However, had we found a strong correlation between cell phone use and brain tumors our hypothesis would be confirmed, but it would not be enough evidence to establish a causal connection. Before jumping to the conclusion that cell phones cause brain tumors we would need to do two more things: one, we must rule out other plausible causes for the correlation and two, we would need to make more testable predictions that ideally would be more rigorous than the original test.

Many people consider the randomized control group study to be the gold standard in science, especially in medicine. But since there are many variables that can affect the outcome of a controlled study, it is important that we not put too much faith in a single study, especially if the study is small and involves multiple outcomes. For example, the Sicher-Targ distant healing study involved only 40 subjects and looked at 23 possible outcomes for AIDS patients, some of whom were prayed for and some of whom weren’t prayed for by a special group of praying people. Finding a significant correlation between a few of the 23 possible outcomes, even for a small experimental group of 20 subjects, is expected by the laws of chance and should not be taken to indicate any kind of causal relationship between the praying and the few outcomes that correlated significantly.

Probably the most common causal error is to conclude that because test results confirm a hypothesis, the hypothesis is established to a significant degree of probability. As long as other plausible explanations can’t be ruled out, finding that an experimental result is just what you predicted if your hypothesis is correct means only that your hypothesis can’t be ruled out. A prime example of this kind of faulty reasoning permeates more than a century of experimentation by parapsychologists in their quest to prove ESP and psychokinesis. This particular kind of faulty reasoning is called the psi assumption. Briefly, the psi assumption is the assumption that any significant departure from the laws of chance in a test of psychic ability is evidence that something anomalous or paranormal has occurred. Departure from the laws of chance would be consistent with the psi hypothesis, but until all other plausible explanations have been ruled out, it is hasty to conclude that evidence for psi has been found. There are several plausible explanations for the data in psi experiments. Cheating by subjects is commonplace. Fraud by experimenters is rare, but it has happened (e.g., the Soal-Goldney experiment [1941-1943]). Methodological errors and sloppiness have occurred in experiments that have been hailed as slam-dunk proof by parapsychologists like Dean Radin. For example, Susan Blackmore was appalled when she visited the lab of Carl Sargent, whose work played a major role in the ganzfeld studies of Bem and Honorton that have been touted by many as solid proof that telepathy or clairvoyance exist.

....I went to visit Sargent’s laboratory in Cambridge where some of the best ganzfeld results were then being obtained. Note that in Honorton’s database nine of the twenty-eight experiments came from Sargent’s lab. What I found there had a profound effect on my confidence in the whole field and in published claims of successful experiments.

These experiments, which looked so beautifully designed in print, were in fact open to fraud or error in several ways, and indeed I detected several errors and failures to follow the protocol while I was there. I concluded that the published papers gave an unfair impression of the experiments and that the results could not be relied upon as evidence for psi (Blackmore).

Other errors, such as sensory leakage and experimenter effects, questionable methodologies such as displacement and psi missing, and misapplication of statistics must all be considered before jumping to the conclusion that a statistic that is unlikely due to chance according to some arbitrary formula is proof of anything paranormal. (Displacement is a term used by parapsychologists to describe lack of synchronization between the sender and subject in ESP card tests. It is claimed that the receiver is one or two cards behind or ahead in his clairvoyance or telepathy. Psi missing is an ad hoc hypothesis used by some parapsychologists to explain away failures to demonstrate ESP. When a subject does significantly worse than chance, his performance is said to support the psi hypothesis because his missing the target is due to his negative attitude toward psi or the parapsychologist.)

Another area where it is common to mistake correlation for causation is in medicine. Two examples stand out; both involve using MRIs. When the MRI became widely available in the late 1980s, doctors began using them on patients complaining of severe back pain. The MRIs showed many things, including spinal discs that appeared degenerated in people with severe back pain. Doctors concluded that the pain was being caused by the abnormalities in the discs. Prior to the use of the MRI, the most common treatment for back pain was no treatment at all. Most back pain goes away on its own. After the introduction of the MRI, various kinds of surgical procedures were done to alleviate the pain assumed to be caused by the bulging or herniated disc. Before jumping to the conclusion that the abnormal discs were causing the back pain, scientists should have done MRIs on people who don’t have any back pain. This was finally done in 1994 on ninety-eight people. They went to the doctor, got an MRI, and two-thirds of them had abnormalities in their discs. Maybe the bulging discs had nothing to do with the pain (Lehrer 2010: 160-163). MRIs, it turns out, “find abnormalities in everybody” (Groopman).

The other example involves the overuse of MRIs for injured athletes. Baseball pitchers with injured arms are often advised to have surgery based on an MRI that finds abnormalities. Dr. James Andrews, a widely known sports medicine orthopedist in Gulf Breeze, Florida, wanted to test his suspicion that MRIs might be misleading. He scanned the shoulders of 31 perfectly healthy professional baseball pitchers. The pitchers were not injured and had no pain. But the MRIs found abnormal shoulder cartilage in 90 percent of them and abnormal rotator cuff tendons in 87 percent. This finding strongly indicates that the abnormalities seen in the MRIs were not causing the pitchers’ pain.

Epidemiologists are particularly prone to making hasty judgments about causal connections based on correlations. An epidemiologist describes the problem:

...there is an ongoing national study of a chemical in plastic that is in EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. It is ubiquitous and it is a chemical, so something bad may be happening to us. So epidemiologists are asking what diseases might be associated with this chemical. And true to form, they are looking at every disease possible…exploring hundreds of diseases known to man to see if there is a statistical link to the chemical. Even before they start, we know they will find one or many links. If one disease is found that appears to be linked and the calculated statistic of p < or = to 0.05 is present, then the press release goes out that the chemical causes some horrible cancer or some toes to fall off. Everyone panics and goes to REI to buy chemical free plastic water bottles. Of course, the call will be for further studies. Those studies show the findings can’t be replicated. But those follow-up negative studies don’t get published and only make page 15 in the newspaper rather than page one. AND the damage is already done as the plastic industry tanks, the toe falling off attorneys are lining up and everyone starts limping for effect (Robinson).

Finally, there are some parapsychologists who have found correlations between what they consider to be important events that catch the attention of many people (such as the death of a princess) and blips on random number generators (RNGs). These folks call their work the “global consciousness project” and they are led by Dean Radin and Roger Nelson. Radin and Nelson think that when groups of people focus their minds on the same thing, they influence “the world at large” and this influence is shown by blips on RNG machines. In addition to basing a causal connection on nothing but a correlation, these fellows are guilty of selection bias, a problem that plagues epidemiologists as well.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. Global Consciousness in The Skeptic’s Dictionary. <www.skepdic.com/globalconsciousness.html>, accessed 12/12/2012.

Blackmore, Susan. 1987.  “A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent’s Laboratory,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 54 186-198, <www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JSPR%201987.htm>, accessed 12/12/2012.

Giere, Ronald. 1996. Understanding Scientific Reasoning. Wadsworth.

Groopman, Jerome. 2008. How Doctors Think. Mariner Books.

Kolata, Gina. 2011. “Sports Medicine Said to Overuse M.R.I.’s,” The New York Times, October 28, <tinyurl.com/acwcekp>, accessed on 12/13/2012.

Lehrer, Jonah. 2010. How We Decide. Mariner Books.

Robinson, Ward. 2010. Problems in Epidemiology Land. <www.askguilfordhealth.com/?p=475>, accessed 12/13/2012.

change blindness

Don’t be so sure about how attentive you are of things right before your eyes.

Change blindness is the failure to detect non-trivial changes in the visual field. The term ‘change blindness’ was introduced by Ronald Rensink et al. in 1997, but research in this area has been going on for many years. Experiments have shown that dramatic changes in the visual field often go unnoticed whether they are brought in gradually, flickered in and out, or abruptly brought in and out at various time intervals. The implication seems to be that the brain requires few details for our visual representations; the brain doesn’t store dozens of details to which it can compare changes (Simons and Levin). The brain is not a video recorder and it is not constantly processing all the sense data available to it but is inattentive to much of that data, at least on a conscious level.

Change detection in videos is notoriously poor when the change occurs during a cut or pan, as demonstrated by the color-changing card trick video (Wiseman) and a number of other videos where a different actor appears after a cut, without the change being noticed by most viewers. Some experiments have shown that a person may be talking to someone (behind a counter, for example) who leaves (bends down behind the counter or exits the room) and is replaced by a different person, without the change being noticed.

Apparently, change blindness is due to the efficient nature of our evolved visual processing system, but it also opens the door to being deceived, much to the delight of magicians, conjurers, and sleight-of-hand con artists.

Sources

Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown.

Rensink, Ronald A., J. Kevin O’Regan, and James J. Clark. 1997. To see or not to see: the need for attention to perceive changes in scenes, Psychological Science 8 (5): 368-373.

Simons, Daniel J. & Daniel T. Levin. 1998. Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5: 644-649.

Wiseman, Richard. The color-changing card trick video: <tinyurl.com/c7gbwvg>, accessed October 28, 2013.

classical conditioning and placebo effects

Before believing that the cause of relief from pain or illness is miraculous or magical, consider that it might be a matter of classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a form of learning or physiological change. It is based on forming an association between a stimulus and a response. The association is remembered and affects future similar experiences. Some physiological responses to stimuli are unconditioned: they happen naturally and involuntarily, like blinking, flinching, or the salivation response to the taste or odor of food. Other physiological responses are conditioned: for example, a dog can be conditioned to salivate when a bell is rung because the dog has been taught to associate the bell with food (Pavlov’s famous experiment). A shot of morphine will make a dog salivate. Later, shots of saline solution will cause the dog to salivate. Humans can be conditioned to release chemical substances such as endorphins, catecholamines, cortisol, and adrenaline.

Relief from pain is often attributed to the placebo effect when no active pain-killer has been administered and the patient reports that the pain has lessened. A more accurate description in some cases of pain relief might be that the patient has learned to associate pain reduction with pushing a button that releases morphine or with getting a morphine injection. I know from experience that self-monitored morphine injection devices are designed to prevent an unsafe amount of morphine from being taken. The patient may push the button and feel relief but after a certain amount of morphine has been released, pushing the button does not release morphine despite what the patient might think or feel. People who have been injected with saline solution but think they are getting morphine may feel relief from pain because they are conditioned to expect relief after an injection.

Conditioning and associative learning—along with owner or practitioner expectation and self-deception—might explain why some animals appear to get relief from reiki, acupuncture, or other forms of so-called energy medicine. Reiki involves waving one’s hands over an injured, diseased, or sore area of the body. Some people report feeling better after a reiki treatment. A woman who does reiki on horses told me that I was wrong to attribute the positive changes in health or well-being after receiving reiki to the placebo effect. “Animals have no preconceived ideas about reiki; no expectations about a treatment. There is no placebo effect with animals.” However, what is sometimes called the placebo effect is actually a conditioned response to a stimulus. It is a well-known fact that animals respond to conditioning. Conditioning does not have to be done consciously, nor does it have to involve acts like clapping or ringing a bell. Nor does it have to involve belief. The rituals a vet or pet owner goes through with an animal when it is injured or ill can have a conditioning effect.

In defense of her claim that the placebo effect cannot explain the positive results she’s seen from reiki therapy, she provided two anecdotes about horses recovering from disabilities after she treated them with reiki. The first horse had been treated by a veterinarian with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. I suggested that it was possible that this treatment kicked in after the vet had given up and that the reiki was given credit because the horse showed improvement soon after the reiki. The conventional treatment had been going on for several weeks, and it seems more plausible that medicine we know works much of the time kicked in here than that some subtle energy was manipulated and somehow magically healed the horse. I also suggested that there might be some unknown factor that could account for, at least in part, the horse’s recovery at the time it recovered. Or, the horse may have healed spontaneously and naturally. Since there is no plausible mechanism by which reiki would work, it would be imperative to look to blinded well-designed studies that strongly suggest reiki works better than sham reiki. I consulted the work of Edzard Ernst, R. Barker Baussell, and the Cochrane Collaboration but was unable to find any evidence of a single large-sample, high quality, blinded study on reiki. Such studies are needed to support the idea that reiki might be a plausible healing method. There are studies, to be sure, that have found positive things to say about reiki, but there has not been a large, well-designed, controlled study, much less any replication of such studies. Until such studies have been published in reputable journals, I think we are right to remain skeptical.

I offered an alternative explanation for the second horse she thinks she healed with reiki by wondering whether the horse had been tested before the reiki treatments. The horse hadn’t been ridden in several years because of fear of injuring it. She may have ridden the horse after the reiki, but the surgery done several years earlier may have healed the horse. Perhaps nobody had actually tested the horse’s leg prior to the reiki treatment. (She did not respond to my suggestion. Make of that what you will.) Anyway, until there is some plausibility to the claim that there is a subtle energy that affects health and can be manipulated by trained reiki professionals, we should remain skeptical. To those who say I’m closed-minded, I say: sometimes we don’t change our minds when confronted with evidence contrary to what we believe because the evidence isn’t very good.

Conditioning can involve much more than obvious factors like getting an injection, taking a pill, or being kissed where it hurts. Conditioning can involve the theater of the medical setting and medical rituals, including the medical uniforms worn, medical jargon spoken, and medical gadgetry used. These conditions affect the patient’s expectation of relief from the treatment, as does the manner of the healer. Patient expectation, it turns out, plays a significant role in the effectiveness of many kinds of treatment. Classical conditioning is “hypothesized to be the primary triggering mechanism for the placebo effect ... which must be learned before it can manifest itself....” (Bausell 2007: 131). When conditioning is combined with desire and motivation for relief, the placebo effect is boosted for both active and inert substances.

A common misunderstanding regarding placebos is that a placebo must be a dummy pill that tricks the patient into thinking he’s been given an active substance. Many people think that the placebo effect is “all in the head,” but that is no more true than that people’s physiological and behavioral responses to what they think is alcohol or a drug are only in their head. People can be conditioned to respond physiologically and behaviorally “to placebos through repeated administrations of active drugs” (Bausell 2007: 132) and to hypnosis through learned expectation.

Antonella Pollo et al. demonstrated that placebos can help people with serious pain and Martina Amanzio et al. demonstrated that “at least part of the physiological basis for the placebo effect is opioid in nature.” That is, we can be conditioned to release such chemical substances as endorphins, catecholamines, cortisol, and adrenaline. One reason, perhaps, people report pain relief from both acupuncture and sham acupuncture (where needles don’t puncture the skin) is that both are placebos that stimulate the opioid system.

Donald D. Price, an expert on pain, has demonstrated that conditioning and expectation significantly affect the experience of pain and pain reduction. R. Barker Bausell speculates that since complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners’ greatest asset is their nourishment of hope, “such therapies may be engendering nothing more than the expectation that they will reduce pain by elaborate explanations, promises, and ceremonies” (2007: 149). He also notes that the analgesics prescribed by our physicians receive a boost in efficacy based on our past experience and expectations. Many advocates of energy medicine mistake the effects of classical conditioning, expectation of relief that leads to reduction of anxiety and stress, and beliefs about the effectiveness of energy medicine as being consequences of manipulating a mythical subtle energy.

Dr. Harriet Hall tells the story of a vasectomy patient who underwent the surgery without anesthesia because he was mistakenly injected with saline solution rather than lidocaine. She also tells the story of a woman whose severe headaches went away after being injected with saline. The latter swore that only Demerol worked for her, but she had been conditioned to feel relief when she got a shot.

So, the next time you are wondering how healers can cure people with a simple touch or by waving their hands in the air over a body part or by uttering some ineffable incantation, think that maybe, just maybe, some sort of conditioned response is going on. You don’t have to call it a placebo response, but if you do, don’t assume that classical conditioning is the only explanation for placebo effects. There may be other explanations for some placebo responses and the issue may be more complicated than you think. It is unlikely that the healer unblocked chi, was assisted by a supernatural being, transferred her animal magnetism, unleashed a vital force in the memory of water, or erased memories of pain by tapping your tummy. Remember the old saying: when you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras. Well, when you hear of magical healing, think classical conditioning, natural regression, misdiagnosis, symptom fluctuation, patient politeness and subordination, or a host of other things. Your first inclination might be to think magic or miracle, but first inclinations may be responses to the availability bias. Intuition is often a good guide, but if it is truth you’re after, you might want to consider alternative explanations to what your intuition tells you.

Sources

Amanzio Martina et al. 2001. Response variability to analgesics: a role for non-specific activation of endogenous opioids. Pain. Feb. 15; 90 (3):205-15.

Bausell, R. Barker. 2007. Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Oxford University Press, USA.

Ernst, Edzard and Simon Singh. 2008. Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. W. W. Norton & Company.

Hall, Harriet M.D. 2008. Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon. iUniverse.

Pollo, Antolla et al. 2001. Response expectancies in placebo analgesia and their clinical relevance. Pain. July 93 (1):77-84.

Price, Donald D., Damien G. Finniss, and Fabrizio Benedetti. 2008. A Comprehensive Review of the Placebo Effect: Recent Advances and Current Thought. The Annual Review of Psychology. 59:565–90 <pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebarticle.pdf>, accessed 12/13/2012.

clustering illusion

Most of us are not very good at estimating probabilities. There really are coincidences. Don’t assume something is statistically significant when you don’t know anything about statistics. Don’t assume there’s something causal going on just because you think you’ve identified a correlation.

In 2003, the mother of a child with leukemia in the Sacramento area thought it odd that there were several other people with cancer in her neighborhood. She did a survey and found what seemed to her to be an excessive number of cancers in the area. I can understand the woman’s desire to find something to blame for her child’s illness. I can also understand how the average person might be led to think that there must be something in the local environment that is causing the cancers. However, several things should be considered.

The woman’s boundaries extended to wherever she arbitrarily decided to draw them. She included all kinds of cancers in her survey, not just leukemia. She included people who had lived in the area for various amounts of time, ranging from having been born there to having moved into the area in adulthood.

Epidemiologists tried to explain that when you looked at the numbers, they weren’t that unusual and didn’t warrant an investigation into an environmental cause. The data showed no difference in the leukemia rates in her area than in the rest of the Sacramento region. The Sacramento Bee took up her cause and eventually there was an official government analysis of the water supply that found no environmental toxins in the water. The Bee persisted and identified tungsten found in tree rings as the probable culprit (December 28, 2003), even though tungsten is not a known human carcinogen and the connection between tungsten in trees and cancer in humans is speculative.

What the Bee and their experts were calling “a cancer cluster” is considered an example of the clustering illusion by epidemiologists: the intuition that random events that occur in clusters are not really random events. To some, the occurrence of a number of cancers in a defined space cries out for a causal explanation in terms of some unknown environmental hazard. To others, familiar with the data and knowledgeable of proper statistical analysis, the same number of cancers occurring within the same defined space is expected by the laws of probability.

The Centers for Disease Control investigated 108 cancer clusters between 1961 and 1990. None could be linked with environmental causes. It may seem improbable, but the chances are better than even that a given neighborhood in California will have a statistically significant cluster of cancer cases.

The clustering illusion is due to selective thinking based on a counterintuitive but false assumption regarding statistical odds. For example, it strikes most people as unexpected if heads comes up four times in a row during a series of coin flips. However, in a series of 20 flips, there is a 50% chance of getting four heads in a row. In any short run of coin flips, a wide variety of probabilities are expected, including some runs that seem highly improbable.

Sometimes a subject in an ESP experiment or a dowser might be correct at a higher than chance rate over a limited period of time. However, such results do not indicate that an event is not a chance event. In fact, such results are predictable by the laws of chance. Rather than being signs of non-randomness, they are actually signs of randomness. ESP researchers are especially prone to take streaks of “hits” by their subjects as evidence that psychic power varies from time to time.

A classic study done on the clustering illusion demonstrates just how hardheaded we are when it comes to facing facts that don’t support our beliefs. The study was done by Thomas Gilovich and some colleagues. It centered on the belief in the “hot hand” in basketball. It is commonly believed by basketball players, coaches, and fans that players have “hot streaks” and “cold streaks.” A detailed analysis was done of the Philadelphia 76ers during the 1980-81 season. It failed to show that players hit or miss shots in clusters at anything other than what would be expected by chance. Gilovich et al. also analyzed free throws by the Boston Celtics over two seasons and found that when a player made his first shot, he made the second shot 75% of the time and when he missed the first shot he made the second shot 75% of the time. Basketball players do shoot in streaks, but within the bounds of chance. It is an illusion that players are ‘hot’ or ‘cold’. When presented with this evidence, believers in the “hot hand” are likely to reject it because they “know better” from experience.

The clustering illusion is sometimes called the Texas-sharpshooter fallacy. The term refers to the story of the Texas sharpshooter who shoots holes in the side of a barn and then draws a bull’s-eye around the bullet holes.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Gawande, Atul. 1999. “The Cancer-Cluster Myth,” The New Yorker, February 8, pp. 34-37.

Gilovich, Thomas; Tversky, A. and Vallone, R. 1985. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive psychology 3 (17): 295–314.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1993. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press.

communal reinforcement

Ask yourself how many of your beliefs have been uncritically passed on to you by your family, teachers, friends, and popular culture. You may believe many things only because they are—in the words of Daniel Kahneman—”sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”

Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by evidence significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people. Often, the mass media contribute to the process by uncritically supporting the claims. More often, however, the mass media provide tacit support for untested and unsupported claims by saying nothing skeptical about even the most outlandish of claims, such as that a ballroom dance instructor or a telephone operator hears clips from another dimension that are messages from ghosts. Combine the availability bias with communal reinforcement and you have a recipe for uncritical belief of many things that are, in the words of H. L. Mencken, “palpably not true.”

Communal reinforcement explains how entire nations can pass on ineffable gibberish about virgin births, godmen, resurrections, and other miracles from generation to generation. It also explains how testimonials reinforced by other testimonials within the community of therapists, psychologists, theologians, politicians, talk show hosts, etc., can supplant and be more powerful than scientific studies or accurate gathering of data by disinterested parties. When communal reinforcement joins forces with the tendency to defer to authority, the result can be deadly. Recall the history of quack “cures,” bogus causes of mental illness, and “harmless” paints laced with radioactive material that were popular in the early part of the 20th century. Recall also the history of the belief in and treatment of witches, as well as the belief in demonic possession and exorcism. Yes, I know; belief in quack cures, witches, demons, and exorcism continues today and not just in “backward” countries.

Communal reinforcement explains, in part, why about half of all American adults deny evolution occurred and believe that Abraham’s god created the universe in six days, that this god made the first man and woman out of clay, and that a snake talked the woman into disobeying an order, and that’s why we get sick and die. Every cult leader knows the value of communal reinforcement combined with isolating cult members from contrary ideas.

If you find yourself continually praising people who agree with you and who are more articulate than you are at expressing your hatreds and criticizing and ridiculing those who disagree with you, you may be addicted to communal reinforcement, which can be a mood enhancer for people who are too lazy or brainwashed to think for themselves.

Sources

Beyerstein, Barry L. 1997. “Why Bogus Therapies Seem to Work,” Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 21.5, September /October.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Mullner,  Ross. 1999. Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy. American Public Health Association.

Spanos, Nicholas P. 1996. Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective. American Psychological Association.

confabulation

Don’t believe everything you say. You may be making stuff up and not even be aware of what you are doing.

Have you ever told a story that you embellished by putting yourself at the center when you knew that you weren’t even there? Or have you ever been absolutely sure you remembered something correctly, only to be shown incontrovertible evidence that your memory was wrong? No, of course not. But you probably know or have heard of somebody else who juiced up a story with made-up details or whose confidence in his memory was shown to be undeserved by evidence that his memory was false.

Confabulation is an unconscious process of creating a narrative that is believed to be true by the narrator but is demonstrably false. The term is popular in psychiatric circles to describe narratives of patients with brain damage or a psychiatric disorder who make statements about what they perceive or remember. The narratives are known to be either completely fictional or in great part fantasy, but they are believed to be true by the patients.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks writes of a patient with a brain disorder that prevented him from forming new memories. Even though “Mr. Thompson” could not remember who Sacks was, each time Sacks visited him he created a fictional narrative about their previous encounters. Sometimes Sacks was a butcher Thompson knew when he worked as a grocer. A few minutes later, he’d recognize Sacks as a customer and create a new fictional narrative. Sacks described Thompson’s confabulations as an attempt to find meaning in what remained of the fellow’s long-term memories.

You might think: poor fellow; he has to construct his memories and fill in the blank parts with stuff he makes up. Yes, he does. But so do you, and so do I. There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

There is a body of growing scientific research that shows confabulation is not something restricted to psychiatric patients or gifted fantasizers who believe they were abducted by aliens for reproductive surgery. The evidence shows that many of the narratives each of us produce on a daily basis to explain how we feel, why we did something, or why we made a judgment that we made are confabulations: mixtures of fact and fiction that we believe to be completely true.

This research should give us pause. Many of us accuse others of making stuff up when they present arguments that are demonstrably full of false or questionable claims, but it’s possible that people who make stuff up aren’t even aware of it. They might really believe the falsehoods they utter.

For example, Paul Ryan was accused of lying and deception in a speech he gave at the Republican National Convention in 2012. Here is what Ryan actually said:

My home state (Wisconsin) voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.”  That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year.  It is locked up and empty to this day.  And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

What was Ryan’s point? What are the facts? Was he lying or trying to be deceptive? Was his point that the economic recovery under Obama isn’t working and the closure of the Janesville plant is just one example of what’s happening in many towns where the recovery isn’t happening? Was he implying that he and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney supported the idea of the government bailing out plants so they don’t have to close, while Obama says he supports the idea but doesn’t actually do it? Those who called Ryan a liar or deceptive thought his point was that Obama is a hypocrite and a failure because Obama implied that he (i.e., the government) would support the workers but in fact Obama closed the plant down. (Ten months after his speech and three months before Obama became president, the Janesville factory ceased manufacturing SUVs and nearly all the plant’s employees had been laid off; 50 stayed in the massive plant until late April, a few months after Obama became President. The plant is now—late 2012—considered “idle.”) As far as I can tell, everything Ryan said is true. Was what he said deceptive? Ryan took Obama’s words out of context. Candidate Obama went on in his speech at the Janesville plant to praise the development of hybrids and energy efficient vehicles. His speech was focused on retooling plants that close to support creating millions of jobs around clean, renewable energy. Obama gave an example from a nearby town where workers in a manufacturing plant that had closed and moved to Mexico were retrained to produce wind turbines. Obama has promised economic recovery. So did George W. Bush. Both emphasized that nobody can predict with accuracy how long the recovery will take. Since the Janesville plant is “idle” rather than completely closed down, there is still a chance that someday it will re-open, perhaps with a different product along the lines that Obama supports.

I think what Ryan said is deceptive, but not for the reasons given by journalists like Eugene Robinson who attacked his speech. I think it is deceptive because it is selective and ignores examples where recovery is in sight. At the same convention that Ryan made his comments, New Jersey governor Chris Christie called California governor Jerry Brown  an “old retread,” but in California 365,000 jobs were gained in the 12 months ending in July, 2012. California grew jobs twice as fast as the nation – 2.6 percent vs. 1.3 percent. “Professional, scientific, technical and information services added 60,000 jobs....In the second quarter of 2012, more venture capital was invested in California-based companies than in the other 49 states combined” (Schrag 2012). California and the nation are a long way from full recovery, but to imply that recovery is “nowhere in sight” in some places means that there’s no recovery under Obama is false. On the other hand, I don’t think Ryan made stuff up so much as he left stuff out. I don’t think he confabulated so much as engaged in false implication.

Studies on what is called choice blindness demonstrate that often people who make stuff up aren’t even aware of it and really believe the falsehoods they utter. Researchers showed males two pictures of female faces and asked them which one they found more attractive. The photos were then turned face down and a trick was played on the subjects. One of the photos was turned over and sometimes the photo turned over was not the one the male selected. The men were then asked why they chose the one they did. In a majority of the trials the subject didn’t even notice the switch and proceeded to provide details as to why he selected the one he didn’t actually select. The majority of subjects are known to have confabulated. But it is possible that they all did.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are famous for having discovered that many of us answer an easier question than the one that is posed to us. The subjects in the choice blindness study were asked which female face they found more attractive. As far as I know, there was no attempt on the part of the researchers to discover what criteria the subjects used to determine how they measure attractiveness in females. It is likely that most of us have no problem deciding whether we find a person attractive, but how many of us have ever reflected on the criteria we use in making that decision? If there is just one photo to look at, most of us would instantly decide whether the face is attractive. But would we know why we feel the way we do? Our brain must have gone through some sort of decision-making process in an instant. What data our brain was using to arouse our feelings is unknown to us at the moment we decide that the face is or isn’t attractive. The same would be true for making a comparison between two faces. We might do it instantly and there is no way we could be conscious of the criteria our brain is using to drive our feelings. So, when asked why we find face A more attractive than face B, we make stuff up.

For all we know, when asked which face is more attractive, we answer not that question but another one such as “which girl would I want to kiss” or “which girl looks friendlier” or “which girl would be more likely to find me attractive.” Yet, when we give our reasons for our choice to the experimenter, we may say things like “She has a lovely smile. Her hairdo is very nice. She looks like she’d be fun to party with. She reminds me of an actress I like.” The actual reasons for our choice may or may not coincide with what we say, and we usually have no way of knowing whether we’re telling the truth even though we believe we are. We might state what we think a man should say when describing a woman as attractive rather than state or even know why we really find one face more attractive than another.

The researchers who did the study on face choices also did a study called “Magic at the Marketplace: Choice Blindness for the Taste of Jam and the Smell of Tea.” Many people had no problem explaining why they favored a jam even though when given a second taste of what they thought was the one they’d selected, it wasn’t the one they’d selected. Several other studies have found that confabulation is rather common among us ordinary folk who have not yet been diagnosed with a brain disorder.

Perhaps we make up stories that seem plausible to us, even though we don’t really have a clue as to their accuracy, for the same reason that Mr. Thompson did. We confabulate to make sense out of our experience, our feelings, our perceptions, and our memories. Unlike Mr. Thompson, though, most of us have undamaged brains that can access vast quantities of data in an instant, but these brain processes are taking place below the level of consciousness. We’re often not really aware of why we’re constructing the stories we do.

It may be hard to believe but the evidence is overwhelming: we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown.

Kahneman, Daniel. Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. eds. 1982. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press.

Mlodinow, Leonard. 2012. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Random House.

Robinson, Eugene. 2012. “Ryan’s Diet of Whoppers,” August 31, <www.truthdig.com/report/item/ryans_diet_of_whoppers_20120831/>, accessed on 12/14/2012.

Schrag, Peter. 2012. “California bashers are missing the real story,” Sacramento Bee. Aug. 31, p. 15A. <tinyurl.com/98kc2mg>, accessed 12/14/2012.

The Choice Blindness Lab, Lunds University <www.lucs.lu.se/choice-blindness-group/>, accessed 12/14/2012.

confirmation bias

Try to find evidence against what you believe; try to falsify your belief.

Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and look for what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts or is inconsistent with one’s beliefs. For example, if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will take notice of admissions during a full moon but you will be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month. A tendency to do this over time unjustifiably strengthens your belief in the relationship between the full moon and accidents and other lunar effects.

This tendency to give more attention and weight to data that support our beliefs than we do to contrary data is especially pernicious when our beliefs are little more than prejudices. If our beliefs are firmly established on solid evidence and valid confirmatory experiments, the tendency to give more attention and weight to data that fit with our beliefs should not lead us astray as a rule. Of course, if we become blinded to evidence truly refuting a favored hypothesis, we have crossed the line from reasonableness to closed-mindedness.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that people generally give an excessive amount of value to confirmatory information, that is, to positive or supportive data. The “most likely reason for the excessive influence of confirmatory information is that it is easier to deal with cognitively” (Gilovich). It is much easier to see how data support a position than it is to see how they might count against the position. Consider a typical ESP experiment or a seemingly clairvoyant dream: successes are often unambiguous or data are easily massaged to count as successes, while negative instances require intellectual effort to even see them as negative or to consider them as significant. The tendency to give more attention and weight to the positive and the confirmatory has been shown to influence memory. When digging into our memories for data relevant to a position, we are more likely to recall data that confirm the position.

Researchers are sometimes guilty of confirmation bias by setting up experiments or framing their data in ways that will tend to confirm their hypotheses. They compound the problem by proceeding in ways that avoid dealing with data that would contradict their hypotheses. For example, some parapsychologists used to engage in optional starting and stopping in their ESP research, i.e., not counting early or late data in a trial if the data didn’t support the ESP hypothesis. ESP experimenters might avoid or reduce confirmation bias by collaborating in experimental design with colleagues who hold contrary hypotheses, as Richard Wiseman (skeptic) and Marilyn Schlitz (proponent) have done. We have to continually remind ourselves of this tendency and actively seek out data contrary to our beliefs. Since this is unnatural, most of us are doomed to be buried with our biases on.

To counteract the natural tendency to try to confirm our beliefs, science has developed methods of testing claims that involve trying to falsify them, rather than trying to confirm them. Paranormal investigators who set out to prove ghosts haunt some hotel or ancient castle aren’t being very scientific, no matter how many electronic gizmos they carry in their toolkit. The scientific paranormal investigator approaches an investigation with an open mind, collects and examines as much relevant evidence as is reasonable for the claim being investigated, develops hypotheses (alternative explanations), and tries to falsify them. Yes, a scientist tries to falsify, not verify, his hypothesis. If you set out to verify your hypothesis you are very likely to be misdirected by confirmation bias. You will look for those things that confirm what you believe and you will systematically ignore those things that might disconfirm your belief. To keep an open mind, the scientist—like a good detective—must not form hypotheses too early in the investigation, as the tendency of all of us is to confirm, not disconfirm, our hypotheses. Unless you are lucky and your first guess happens to be the right one, you run the risk of building up a convincing case for a false claim. The study of criminal profilers, psychics, and psychic detectives offer examples of how confirmation bias works: colleagues, the media, and gullible law enforcement officers focus on anything that seems to confirm the profile the investigator is working with or the prediction of the psychic, while ignoring all the claims that were irrelevant to that profile or made no sense in light of the prediction. The importance of trying to collect data that is relevant to the investigation in such a way that one’s biases don’t lead one to ignore important avenues of investigation cannot be overemphasized.

Those who favor their interpretations of personal experience over the results of double-blind, randomized, control group studies are doomed to die with their biases on. One way to counteract confirmation bias is to consciously seek out literature that opposes your beliefs and hang around with people who don’t share your cherished opinions. To do so, however, is so unnatural that very few people will do it. I can attest that one of the most tedious tasks I ever set for myself was to read the works of Dean Radin, Gary Schwartz, Charles Tart, L. Ron Hubbard, and the like. On the other hand, my graduate training in philosophy required me to read the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Bishop George Berkeley, and many others whose ideas I could never agree with. Had I been allowed to read only Hume or other philosophers I agreed with, my education would have been an impoverished one.

Source

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1993. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press.

continued influence effect

Don’t trust your memory to weed out false claims.

The continued influence effect is short for ‘the continued influence of misinformation.’ The term refers to the way false claims enter memory and continue to influence beliefs even after they have been corrected. Unfortunately, many people do not understand how memory works. Worse, they have little interest in the science of memory. If a false claim fits with beliefs that more-or-less define a person’s worldview and has a strong emotional component, they instinctively accept the false claim rather than investigate it as a critical thinker would. For example, a few people—whose motives we need not explore here—were able to manipulate the mass media to make a story out of the claims that Barak Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim. Despite the presentation of overwhelming evidence that President Barack Obama is a Christian and was born in Hawaii, many Americans continue to believe otherwise. On March 12, 2012, the results of a poll in Alabama and Mississippi found that among Republican voters about half still believe Mr. Obama is a Muslim. The importance that emotion and worldview have in affecting this erroneous belief is indicated by the fact that about 25% of those who think Obama is a Muslim also believe that interracial marriage should be illegal. (Obama’s father was Kenyan, while his mother traced her roots to Ireland.) In 2011, a national poll found that one-fourth of all Americans think President Obama was not born in the United States. Among Republicans and Tea Party supporters, 45% believe he was born in another country. It is very difficult to be fair and balanced in evaluating new information when one has a strong emotional attachment to beliefs that conflict with the new information. (Why anybody cares about where Obama was born, who his parents were, or what religion, if any, he practices doesn’t concern us here.)

Some people believed Vice President Dick Cheney when he claimed: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” The good news is that many people changed their minds when provided with good evidence contrary to what Cheney had claimed. Several years after Cheney made his false claim and the evidence for it remained near zero, the percentage of Americans who accepted the falsehood about Saddam and weapons of mass destruction dropped from 36 to 26 percent. Still, one out of four Americans believing something false is not something to be proud of. Nor should Cheney be proud that he still (2013) claims that thanks to our invading Iraq we prevented Saddam Hussein from providing al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction to use against our country.

It should be obvious that most of us are not critical of claims that fit well with our prejudices and emotion-laden beliefs. Still, you would think that we would give up believing something once the evidence shows that we’re wrong, especially since most of us are encouraged in childhood to be truthful and honest. The science indicates otherwise. (See, for example, the backfire effect.) Even without the science, most of know from experience that some nuts are nearly impossible to crack. One of the more obvious examples is religion. Last year, a Gallup poll found that 3 in 10 Americans take the Bible to be the literal word of the god of Abraham. Another 49 percent say the Bible is inspired by a god but should not be taken literally. When you are taught something from childhood that is continually reinforced by one’s family and other communities, it is very difficult to be fair and balanced in evaluating evidence that conflicts with those teachings. On the other hand, in areas where emotion is less dominating, when people are faced with overwhelming evidence contrary to what they believe, they correct their errors. This is what happens in science again and again, unlike what has occurred with fundamentalist religious believers.

It has long been known that false information can influence memory. Recent studies have found that correcting false information often has little effect on changing beliefs. Discredited information continues to influence reasoning and understanding even after one has been corrected. The backfire and continued influence effects should be disheartening to those who think that the first step in arguing with those who base their beliefs on misinformation should be to get their opponents to see what the facts are. Correcting errors is pointless when dealing with people who attribute their own beliefs to principled, unprejudiced inquiry, while attributing the beliefs of those who disagree with them to bias and ulterior motives. But even if a person admits that those who disagree with him have integrity and are really seeking the truth, you are probably wasting your time providing data and facts that might change his mind if the claim you are trying to correct challenges his gut feelings and core beliefs.

It is unfortunate, but inevitable in our day an age I suppose, that some people in the media on both the left and the right purposely report false stories about those they dislike. Those passing on the false stories know that even though the stories will be corrected by others, the influence of the false story will continue almost unabated.

Critical thinkers want errors corrected. At the very least, getting the facts right might prevent some faulty inferences and prevent one from behaving in ways that could prove harmful. Is there any hope that those who tend to stick to their beliefs no matter what the evidence can change? Yes, there’s some hope, but it is very slight. A study by Ullrich Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, and David Tang found that giving subjects detailed information about the continued influence effect reduced the reliance on outdated information but did not eliminate it. They also found that reminding people that facts are not always properly checked before information is published in the media didn’t have much effect on reducing the continued influence of misinformation.

Holly M. Johnson and Colleen M. Seifert have argued that providing a plausible causal alternative, rather than simply negating misinformation, mitigates the continued influence effect. They may be right for some beliefs, but I have not found that providing a causal alternative to astrologers, acupuncturists, homeopaths, parapsychologists, or defenders of applied kinesiology, for example, has had much effect on true believers. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial beliefs seem impenetrable to facts that contradict them. Changes in these beliefs seem more likely to occur outside of direct confrontation with opponents.

One obviously important area where reliance on misinformation can be harmful is in the courtroom. Jurors’ reasoning is influenced by misinformation. Just warning them that something they’ve been presented with is false won’t necessarily prevent the false information from affecting their thinking. We like to think that such warnings would prevent our memories from being distorted, but the way memory ordinarily works is that it often instinctively draws on misinformation—even misinformation that we know is wrong because we’ve had it corrected.

So, is there anything that might change the minds of those who believe Obama is a Muslim born outside of the United States or that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction before George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq? I would argue that if a person is driven by emotions, especially fear, you probably have little chance of changing his mind. If, however, a person is not driven by emotion and is flexible and open to new information, you have a good chance of changing that person’s mind by providing accurate information backed up with reliable sources. What percentage of so-called birthers are not driven by emotion and are comfortable with changing their minds as new information becomes available? Figure that out and you will know the probable odds of your success at persuading a birther to change his mind.

Finally, further complicating matters are the suggestions that some people’s personalities and brains are structured in ways that make them nearly impenetrable to data that conflict with what in their hearts they know to be true. Their belief armor, perhaps, makes them impervious to change unless one appeals directly to their emotions and gut feelings without challenging the core beliefs that define who they are. Data run off the backs of some people who are moved to tears by an emotional story that is merely anecdotal, even if fictional. Authoritarian personalities who know what they know is true and are driven by fear of “liberals” who are conspiring to take away their freedom and establish an atheistic and socialist state are not going to be too open-minded about Obama’s citizenship. The belief armor is strengthened by the tendency of many people to seek out sources of misinformation, perhaps deluding themselves into thinking that they are truth seekers.

Sources

Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Swire, B., & Chang, D. 2011. Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 570-578.

Johnson, Holly M. and Colleen M. Seifert. 1994. Sources of the continued influence effect: When misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 20 (6), 1420-1436.

Mooney, Chris. 2012. Fox’s misinformation effect: It’s not just the programming. Conservatives are more likely to seek out outlets that affirm their views,” Salon. April 10 <www.salon.com/2012/04/10/foxs_misinformation_effect/>, accessed 12/14/2012.

Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior. 32 (2):303-330.

control group study

Scientists use randomized control group studies to minimize self-deception and bias in testing causal claims. Such studies are much more reliable than intuition for identifying causes.

A control group study uses a control group to compare to an experimental group in a test of a causal hypothesis. The control and experimental groups must be identical in relevant ways except for the introduction of a suspected causal agent into the experimental group. If the suspected causal agent is actually a causal factor of some event, then logic dictates that that event should manifest itself more significantly in the experimental than in the control group. For example, if ‘C’ causes ‘E’, when we introduce ‘C’ into the experimental group but not into the control group, we should find ‘E’ occurring in the experimental group at a significantly greater rate than in the control group. Significance is measured by relation to chance: if an event is not likely due to chance, then its occurrence is statistically significant. Being statistically significant is not the same as being important. It means only that the results are not likely due to chance.

A double-blind study is one where the experimenter and the subject are kept in the dark regarding things that might bias them. In some studies, neither the experimenter nor the subject is told which group—experimental or control—the subject is in. In other studies, neither knows whether something given to the subject is an active substance or a placebo. Just knowing whether something tested is active or a placebo can affect the judgment of the experimenter and the reaction of the subject. Just knowing which group—experimental or control—a subject is assigned to can affect the judgment of the experimenter and the response of the subject.

A randomized study is one that randomly assigns items or subjects to the control and the experimental groups. Random assignment reduces the chance of biasing the study.

The purpose of controls, double-blinding, and randomizing is to reduce error, self-deception, and bias. The following case study exemplifies the necessity of these safeguards.

Testing the DKL LifeGuard

The DKL LifeGuard Model 2 from DielectroKinetic Laboratories can allegedly detect a living human being by receiving a signal from the heartbeat at distances of up to 20 meters through any material. So say the manufacturers of the device. Sandia Labs tested the LifeGuard 2 using a double-blind, randomized method of testing. Sandia is a national security laboratory operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by the Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Co. The causal hypothesis they tested could be worded as follows: the human heartbeat causes a directional signal to activate in the Lifeguard, thereby allowing the user of the LifeGuard to find a hidden human being (the target) up to 20 meters away, regardless of what objects might be between the LifeGuard and the target.

The testing procedure was quite simple: five large plastic packing crates were set up in a line at 30-foot intervals. The test operator, using the DKL LifeGuard Model 2, tried to detect in which of the five crates a human being was hiding. Whether a crate would be empty or contain a person for each of the twenty-five trials was determined by random assignment to avoid using a pattern that might be detected by the subject.

Tests showed that the device performed no better than expected by random chance. The test operator was a DKL representative. The only time the test operator did well in detecting his targets was when he had prior knowledge of the target’s location. The LifeGuard was successful ten out of ten times when the operator knew where the target was. It may seem ludicrous to test the device by telling the operator where the objects are, but it establishes a baseline and affirms that the device is working. Only when the operator agrees that his device is working should the test proceed to the second stage, the double-blind test. The operator will not be as likely to come up with an ad hoc hypothesis to explain away any failures in a double-blind test if he has agreed beforehand that the device is working properly.

If the device had performed as claimed, the operator would have received no signals from the empty crates and signals from each of the crates with a person within. In the main test of the LifeGuard—when neither the test operator nor the investigator keeping track of the operator’s results knew which of five possible locations contained the target—the operator performed poorly (six out of 25) and took about four times longer than when the operator knew the target’s location. If human heartbeats cause the device to activate, one would expect a significantly better performance than 6 of 25, which is about what would be expected by chance.

Testing Dowsers

The different performances—10 correct out of 10 tries versus 6 correct out of 25 tries—vividly illustrate the need for keeping the subject blind to the controls: it is needed to eliminate self-deception and subjective validation. The evaluator is kept blind to the controls to prevent him or her from subtly tipping off the subject, either knowingly or unknowingly. If the evaluator knew which crates were empty and which had persons, he or she might give a visual signal to the subject by looking only at the crates with persons. To eliminate the possibility of cheating or evaluator bias, the evaluator is kept in the dark regarding the controls.

The lack of testing under controlled conditions explains why many psychics, graphologists, astrologers, dowsers, criminal profilers, New Age therapists, and the like, believe in their abilities. To test a dowser it is not enough to have the dowser and his friends tell you that it works by pointing out all the wells that have been dug on the dowser’s advice. One should perform a random, double-blind test, such as the one done by Ray Hyman with an experienced dowser on the PBS program Frontiers of Science (Nov. 19, 1997). The dowser claimed he could find buried metal objects, as well as water. He agreed to a test that involved randomly selecting numbers that corresponded to buckets placed upside down in a field. The numbers determined which buckets a metal object would be placed under. The one doing the placing of the objects was not the same person who went around with the dowser as he tried to find the objects. The exact odds of finding a metal object by chance could be calculated. For example, if there are 100 buckets and 10 of them have a metal object, then getting 10% correct would be predicted by chance. That is, over a large number of attempts, getting about 10% correct would be expected of anyone, with or without a dowsing rod. On the other hand, if someone consistently got 80% or 90% correct, and we were sure he or she was not cheating, that would confirm the dowser’s powers.

The dowser walked up and down the lines of buckets with his rod but said he couldn’t get any strong readings. When he selected a bucket he qualified his selection with something to the effect that he didn’t think he’d be right. He was right about never being right! He didn’t find a single metal object despite several attempts. His performance is typical of dowsers tested under controlled conditions. His response was also typical: he was genuinely surprised. Like most of us, the dowser is not aware of the many factors that can hinder us from doing a proper evaluation of events: self-deception, wishful thinking, suggestion, selective thinking, subjective validation, communal reinforcement, and the like.

Placebo Studies

Many control group studies use a placebo in control groups to keep the subjects in the dark as to whether they are being given the causal agent that is being tested. For example, both the control and experimental groups will be given identical looking pills in a study testing the effectiveness of a new drug. Only one pill will contain the agent being tested; the other pill will be a placebo. In a double-blind study, the evaluator of the results would not know which subjects got the placebo until his or her evaluation of observed results was completed. This is to avoid evaluator bias from influencing observations and measurements.

The first use of control groups in medicine is attributed to Dr. James Lind (1716-1794) who discovered a relationship between citrus fruit and scurvy, a disease that killed many more sailors than died of battle wounds in the 18th century. Lind compared six treatments on sailors with scurvy. Those given lemons and oranges were almost symptom free within a week. The others sailors in the study didn’t fare so well, though those given cider improved slightly. (For more on the history of the randomized control study, see Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh.)

Of course, Lind did not know that vitamin C was the necessary nutrient in the citrus fruit that was preventing scurvy. In fact, he believed that the cause of scurvy was “incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body” (Bryson). Lind’s controlled experiment showed that there was something vital in oranges and lemons that prevented scurvy. His view of what caused scurvy indicates that he still adhered to the belief that disease is caused by internal toxins that need to be expelled, a popular belief among medical experts from antiquity through the 19th century. Only quacks still maintain the belief that toxins in the body are the main cause of disease and the only cure is to expel them.

The long road from Lind’s experiment to a complete understanding of the role of ascorbic acid in nutrition involved the work of many scientists over many years. It would not have been possible to conceive that food itself contains nutrients necessary to avoid specific diseases when one believed that all disease is due to internal bad humors or toxins that need to be expelled. Had Lind lived in a later age (but maintained his belief in the internal toxin theory of disease) where it would have been possible to determine the level of toxins in scurvy victims, he might have thought his belief validated if he found toxins in scurvy victims. However, if there were such toxins, they could have been the effect of scurvy, or the effect of something altogether unrelated to the scurvy.

As late as the early 20th century, the leading medical textbook of the day attributed scurvy to “insanitary surroundings, overwork, mental depression and exposure to cold and damp” (Bryson). The medical textbook reflects what is called the miasma theory of disease, which was also very popular in the 19th century.

In 1917, E. V. McCollum, who coined the terms ‘vitamin A’ and ‘vitamin B’, declared that scurvy was caused by constipation. McCollum, who was one of the leading nutritionists of his day, seems to have adhered to the toxic buildup theory, the one that led to so much death and destruction over several centuries in the form of bloodletting. Still, McCollum represents progress. Who wouldn’t prefer a laxative to bloodletting?

Non-control Group Studies

Dr. Alan Hirsch claims to be “The World Expert In Smell & Taste.” He is an M.D.—a psychiatrist, in fact—who developed some magical crystals that will “help you reduce your appetite and food cravings.” You can read all about his crystals, which he calls SprinkleThin™, on his website (which has been taken down, but you can see what it looked like at <tinyurl.com/mtzcepc>). On July 25, 2005, I found the following testimonial on that website.

Dateline NBC Investigates SprinkleThin

What Dr. Hirsch discovered might surprise you. (Certain smells) seem to control appetite. Dr. Hirsch studied 2,700 people over six months, like the six people we met. They tried just about every diet imaginable. Dr. Hirsch brought along with him these special, non-caloric, scented crystals and asked the six to sprinkle it on their food.

All the participants kept a video diary for Dateline to prove they were using the product. At the end of three months when we checked in on them, they were all losing weight.

What is wrong with Dateline’s investigation? Among other things, Dateline did not have a control group. Dr. Hirsch says he has been studying eating behavior and weight loss for 25 years. He says he has done many studies, but if his studies were like Dateline’s study they are not of much scientific value.

A well-designed study on the diet crystals would use a control group. Using a control group wouldn’t eliminate all problems with a study on weight loss, but it would reduce them. Weight loss is affected by many factors (motivation, eating behavior, amount of activity, overall health, metabolism, stress, and so on) and experimenters can’t lock up humans in cages to make sure they do what they’re supposed to do for the study. But at the very least a well-designed scientific study should use a control group and try to match the members of that group to those in the experimental group for factors that might have a significant effect on the outcome. For example, if you were doing a study that was testing whether prayer has an effect on the longevity of patients dying of AIDS, you should make sure that the ages of the subjects in both groups match up. It would not be a fair study to have all the 60-year-olds in one group and all the 20-year-olds in the other group.

Without a control group, a scientist can’t be sure that the diet crystals contributed significantly to the weight loss or, if they did, in what way. The power of belief may be at work here: dieters may believe these crystals really affect their sense of taste and smell to such a degree that their appetites are suppressed. They may be deceiving themselves, but the crystals help them anyway. However, powdered beetle dung might have had the same effect. The diet scientist doesn’t just want to help people lose weight. If a product works, she wants to know why it works.

Dateline (and Dr. Hirsch) should not just give the crystals to dieters and observe whether they lose weight. They should have a group of similar people who want to lose weight and give them a placebo, a substance that looks like the diet crystals and is ingested in exactly the same way, but which is inert. They should agree to study the two groups for a set length of time, long enough for any diet to show results (several weeks, at least). At the end of the study they would compare the weight loss of the two groups. If the experimental group shows a significantly greater weight loss than the control group, then the scientists have good evidence that the crystals might be effective.

Having a control group is necessary but it is not sufficient for having a well-designed control group study. The study must use an adequate number of participants. Six people would not be adequate for a control group study. Several hundred would be a better number. Why? With only six people, all it takes is one participant to do really well to elevate the average of the group significantly above the average of the other group. But this one person’s success might be a fluke. By having a larger sample, the researcher reduces the chances that a few fluky individuals have skewed the results.

Another way to reduce the chances of fluky results is to randomly assign subjects to the control and experimental groups. As noted above, randomization is very important to reduce the chances of biasing the samples. If highly motivated folks are placed in the diet crystal group and the lazy couch potatoes are in the control group, the results of the study would be biased. It is important that a method of true randomization be used, such as a random number table. You might think that assigning all the dark-haired subjects to one group and the light-haired subjects to the other would be sufficient to avoid having biased groups, but you cannot be sure that there is not something about hair color that is related to a person’s weight. It is unlikely, but a scientist should not go with hunches in matters such as randomization.

It is also important that the subjects in this study not know whether they have been given the magic crystals or the placebo. There is much controversy regarding the ethics of deceiving subjects, but from a scientific point of view it might be better if the subjects didn’t even know that the study is about weight loss. If they think, for example, that the study is testing the effectiveness of a new blood pressure medicine, you would eliminate such things as motivation to lose weight or belief that the crystals are appetite suppressants as possible causes of any weight loss achieved. However, many, if not most, scientists argue that it is unethical to deceive participants in scientific studies. The subjects in a study don’t need to be told which group they are in, but they should be told that they have been randomly assigned to their group and that at the end of the study they will be told which group they were in. (In some studies, participants will know which group they’re in by obvious facts, e.g., the control group folks would know they’re in the control group of a study testing various methods to reduce blood pressure if they’re told to do nothing special and just come in for regular blood pressure measurements.)

The kind of control group study described above is known as a parallel group study. However, as Dr. Gerard Dallal writes: “It takes little experience with parallel group studies to recognize the potential for great gains in efficiency if each subject could receive both treatments. The comparison of treatments would no longer be contaminated by the variability between subjects since the comparison is carried out within each individual.” Such studies are known as crossover studies. They are highly recommended.

Had Dr. Hirsch done a double-blind study, an assistant might have randomly assigned the subjects to their groups and kept a record of who is in which group. Dr. Hirsh or another assistant might have weighed all the subjects and kept weight records for each participant. After all the data had been collected, Dr. Hirsch would unblind the study and the data for the two groups compared.

The final step in a well-designed study is the analysis of the data. You might think that the scientists should be able to look at the results and see right away whether the crystals did any good. This would only be true if, say, there were hundreds in each group and the experimental group lost 50 pounds each on average, while the control group gained 2 pounds. If the study had been designed properly, such results would be extremely unlikely to be a fluke. But what if the experimental group lost 2% more weight than the control group? Would that be statistically significant? To answer that question, scientists revert to statistical formulae. By some formula, a 2% weight loss might be statistically significant. If, however, a 2% weight loss meant 4 ounces over six weeks, most of us would say that even if this is statistically significant it is not important and not worth the money or the risk to use these crystals. The crystals might have some wicked side effect that hasn’t yet been discovered.

The moral of this story is that while testimonials of six people who use crystals and lose weight might have a powerful effect on a television audience, a critical thinker should recognize that without a well-designed control group study, such testimonials do not have much scientific value.

A critical thinker also knows that information should be put in the proper context, which requires a certain amount of background knowledge. For example, you should know that many well-designed scientific studies get significant results that cannot be replicated at all or in a consistent fashion. If there is a causal relationship between diet crystals and losing weight, it should not work sporadically but consistently, unless, of course, there are so many factors that affect body weight as to make it nearly impossible to isolate the true effectiveness of a single item. In any case, a single study, no matter how well designed or how significant the results, rarely justifies drawing strong conclusions about causal relationships.

Finally, as mentioned above, there might be some deleterious side effect of these crystals that has not yet been discovered. SprinkleThin™ might help you lose weight but if it kills you in the process, what have you gained?

Sources

Bryson, Bill. 2010. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Doubleday.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Dallal, Gerard E. Ph.D. 2000. The Computer-Aided Analysis of Crossover Studies. <www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/crossovr.htm>, accessed 12/20/2012.

Ernst, Edzard and Simon Singh. 2008. Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. W. W. Norton & Company.

Giere, Ronald. 1998. Understanding Scientific Reasoning, 4th ed. Holt Rinehart, Winston.

Kourany, Janet A. 1998. Scientific Knowledge: Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Sagan, Carl. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House.

critical thinking/critical thinker

The expression ‘critical thinking’ has become a popular one, so much so that people who couldn’t agree on most of the important things in life are likely to claim that they are thinking critically but their adversaries are not.

In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins objects to the motto on the website of Bryan College, a Christian Bible College named after fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan: Think Critically and Biblically. Imagine the response of the folks from Bryan College should they be greeted with a sign on the campus of a secular college advising students: Think Critically and Naturalistically.

The advice to think critically and biblically is inconsistent with the notion of critical thinking as the term has been used by most scholars and educators in the field over the past forty years. In 1981, I think it was, Richard Paul and a few like-minded professors at Sonoma State University sponsored an international conference on critical thinking. I attended that conference and a few more at Sonoma State in the ensuing years. At one of the meetings, Robert Ennis, a philosopher of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defined critical thinking as “reasonable reflective thinking that is concerned with what to do or believe.” This definition, like most definitions of critical thinking, should be seen as scaffolding (to use Paul’s expression) on which to build our theories and curricula, rather than as the one and only specific goal we aim to achieve. Paul emphasized that reflective thinking entails subjecting one’s own worldview to the same kind of scrutiny and critical analysis that many of us are willing and able to do for the worldviews of those who don’t think like we do. The advice to think critically and biblically implies that the biblical worldview (whatever one considers that to be) is not open to rejection. Critical thinking is antithetical to using logical and argumentative skill to promote a particular worldview that itself is considered immune from scrutiny.

We can get a good sense of what the folks at Bryan College mean by ‘critical thinking’ by looking at how they describe their Center for Critical Thought:

Bryan College is committed to helping students develop a biblical worldview, and as part of a Christ-centered education, offers several programs toward this end. Central to the Center’s work and mission is the development of exciting academic seminars in which Christian scholars who compete at the highest levels of scholarly inquiry address topics which are at the center of critical national issues. Topics include natural law, the federal judiciary system, education, taxation, science, athletics, the fine arts, and a wide range of other critical cultural concerns.

Through the presentation of four seminars annually, the Center enables our academic departments on a regular multi-year basis to discuss in depth a relevant cultural issue of significance stemming from their own disciplines.

It seems that what the folks at Bryan mean by ‘critical thinking’ is thinking about issues that are of critical concern to them in their mission to promote a biblical worldview and thinking about them in ways that are in accord with how they understand that worldview.

They’re not the only ones who understand ‘critical thinking’ in this way. The school board in Cobb Country, Georgia, said that it was trying to encourage critical thinking by requiring a warning sticker to be placed on all biology texts used by its students. The sticker read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.” On the surface, the “warning” seems reasonable: it encourages open-mindedness and careful study. The real intent, though, was to encourage doubting a consensus scientific view that the members of the school board consider contrary to their understanding of the Bible. In their view, if you can encourage students to doubt a whole area of science that conflicts with a biblical worldview, you are encouraging critical thinking.

This view of critical thinking is not the one that has dominated the thinking of the majority of people who teach critical thinking, who study it and write theoretical papers about it, who produce textbooks on the subject, and the like. The consensus of that group is that critical thinking requires real open-mindedness. You’re not encouraging an attitude of open-mindedness by telling students that what they are about to study should not be taken as fact even though the consensus of the scientific community is that it is fact. You are encouraging narrow-mindedness when you advise students to think critically and biblically. You are encouraging narrow-mindedness by encouraging students to filter science with their biblical beliefs. You are encouraging narrow-mindedness when you encourage students to treat religious mythology on par with evolutionary biology, embryology, structural anatomy, genetics, paleontology, psychology, and other fields that converge to support the fact of evolution of species.

Critical thinking requires a fair-minded consideration of alternative viewpoints, but the Cobb county school board discouraged rather than encouraged fair-minded inquiry. The quaint stories told in the Bible are not alternative viewpoints to the scientific study of evolution. The Board wanted to raise doubts about evolution, which it presumably thought would enhance its own creationist beliefs. The board was not encouraging the legitimate investigation and study of various alternative evolutionary mechanisms. It was not interested in advancing inquiry, but in advancing its own religious beliefs.

Using critical thinking skills to support your beliefs and to undermine opposing viewpoints is certainly legitimate, but it is a mistake to identify critical thinking with these two activities. The catalogue description for the Liberal Arts Program at Bryan College specifies that thinking critically will enable the students to “relate ideas historically and logically and compare and contrast competing views.” That sounds promising, since the disposition to be open-minded enough to take seriously viewpoints that contrast with one’s own is essential to being a critical thinker. But in terms of views competing with the Bible’s stories of creation (there are two of them), the alternative views should come from other religious mythologies, not from science. To argue that biblical creation stories are competitors with theories like natural selection is as misguided as arguing that astrology is a competitor with astronomy or that numerology is a competitor with Euclidean geometry.

One of the key elements of critical thinking is the recognition that one’s worldview can be a major hindrance to being fair-minded. A minimum requirement of fair-mindedness is a willingness to take seriously viewpoints opposed to your own. In other words, you have to be willing to admit that you might be wrong. To exempt one’s own worldview from critical evaluation ignores the fact that one’s worldview is likely to be embedded with prejudices, biases, and false notions. Everything one experiences or remembers is filtered through the beliefs and values that make up one’s worldview. To think critically is to be willing to examine conflicting positions in a fair-minded way and to accept that even beliefs you’ve held all your life might be wrong. If you can’t do that, you might still be able to develop some essential skills such as comparing and contrasting ideas or comparing ideals with practices. You might consider yourself a critical thinker if you have the ability to apply one or more of the standards of critical thinking in a skillful way. In some quarters, this might be called the ‘weak sense’ of critical thinking, where the strong sense requires that the thinker have a certain disposition as well as a recognition of the many affective, cognitive, and perceptual biases that inhibit and distort our judgment.

If I had to give a short definition of critical thinking I would say that critical thinking is thinking that is clear, accurate, knowledgeable, reflective, and fair in deciding what to believe or do. But that short definition is just scaffolding and needs some filling in.

Standards of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking in the weak sense is thinking that is clear and accurate, and uses only relevant evidence and all the relevant evidence available (if possible). Critical thinking in the weak sense does not give each piece of evidence equal weight, but recognizes how much significance each piece of evidence has. Critical thinking in the weak sense does not distort arguments in refutations and considers that a position gains in plausibility the more disparate fields of inquiry there are providing evidence in support of that position. Finally, critical thinking in the weak sense is coherent, free of contradiction, and provides sufficient support for whatever conclusion is being argued for.

Critical Thinking Skills

The critical thinker must understand and avoid as far as possible language that is vague, ambiguous, obscure, or misleading. A critical thinker understands the role of assumptions in argumentation, recognizes the difference between justified and unjustified inferences. A critical thinker knows how to evaluate sources of information, claims, and arguments. A critical thinker recognizes common fallacies of assumption, relevance, and omission. A critical thinker recognizes when evidence is sufficient or insufficient to support a conclusion. A critical thinker knows how to evaluate fundamental types of inductive reasoning such as sampling, analogical reasoning, and causal reasoning. A critical thinker knows the difference between an argument and an explanation and knows the difference between theories that are empirical and those that are conceptual.

The Attitude and Disposition of the Critical Thinker

A critical thinker in the strong sense is open-minded, has a healthy skepticism, is fair-minded, and puts forth all arguments as tentative and subject to revision should new evidence be discovered.

A critical thinker in the strong sense is characterized by intellectual humility, i.e., by a willingness to admit error and change beliefs or suspend judgment when warranted.

A critical thinker in the strong sense has confidence in reason and is willing to go wherever the evidence leads.

A critical thinker in the strong sense is intellectually curious, loves to explore new topics, learn new things, and gain more knowledge.

A critical thinker in the strong sense is intellectually independent, i.e., willing to examine honestly and fairly positions one does not agree with and willing to question authority, tradition, and majority opinion.

A critical thinking attitude is unnatural and must be cultivated. To understand this requires a few insights into how we acquire beliefs and make decisions.

Critical Thinking Insights

A critical thinker in the strong sense recognizes the tendencies to affective, cognitive, and perceptual biases and how they affect interpretations of experience, testimony, and other evidence.

A critical thinker in the strong sense recognizes that there are alternative explanations for experiences and that selecting from among them requires consideration of the consequences and implications of the alternative explanations as well as an awareness of the assumptions they are built on.

(For a more detailed definition of critical thinking see The Foundation for Critical Thinking at <www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766>.)

Sources

Browne, M. Neil and Stuart M. Keeley. 2006. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, 8th edition. Prentice-Hall.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2005. Becoming a Critical Thinker A Guide for the New Millennium. 2nd edition. Pearson.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2011. Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! James Randi Educational Foundation.

Kahane, Howard. 2005. Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Uses of Reason in Everyday Life, 10th ed. Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Paul, Richard. 1995. Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World. Foundation for Critical Thinking.

debiasing

Is there anything we can do to mitigate the effects of cognitive biases or are we doomed to die with our biases on?

For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential. –Daniel Kahneman

Debiasing refers to methods, strategies, and techniques used to overcome biases in thinking. Many thinking biases are rooted in our evolutionary history; some are rooted in cultural traditions; and some are due to a variety of personal and social factors.

Biased thinking doesn’t always lead to bad judgments or decisions. A bias is a tendency. If the foundation beneath that tendency is built of solid knowledge, recognized expertise, and years of relevant experience, then something like the availability bias might lead to quick judgments or decisions but not necessarily to bad ones. As Daniel Kahneman notes:

Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous....The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” (2011: 11)

Most of us, however, are not knowledgeable of most subjects, are not recognized experts in anything, and lack experience in most fields. Biased thinking for most of us most of the time might not be a problem, but for important matters following our instincts may not be the best course of action. Cognitive biases for most of us most of the time are cognitive illusions. Can we learn to overcome cognitive illusions? The evidence, according to Kahneman, one of the leading experts in the study of cognitive biases and illusions, is “not encouraging.” It is hard to accept that our minds are working in ways we have little control over and that we know much less about ourselves than we think we do. Much of our thinking is automatic and can’t be turned off at will. Kahneman notes: “Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious...much too slow and inefficient....The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”

One bias we should all be concerned with is the bias that many of us have that favors intuition over scientific data. We might excuse a non-expert like Boris Johnson who believes his experience of a very cold winter should be considered as strong evidence against the scientific consensus that the planet is warming up (<tinyurl.com/n4qfbe7>, accessed 10/29/2013). But we should not excuse experts who don’t recognize that the situation in which they are making decisions is one of low validity for predictability yet they go ahead and follow intuition anyway without further investigation.

In one of his wonderful collections of essays (The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher), the late physician Lewis Thomas tells of a highly successful doctor (a senior citizen back when Dr. Thomas’ father was an intern) in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital who was trained before the medical profession understood how disease spreads.

The elder doctor was renowned for his remarkable ability to diagnose typhoid fever, a common disease at that time and place. His method was to closely examine the tongues of patients. His ward rounds, the younger Dr. Thomas recounts, “were essentially tongue rounds.” Each patient would stick out his tongue for the doctor to palpate. Pondering its texture and irregularities, he would diagnose the disease “in its earliest stages over and over again” and turn out, “a week or so later, to have been right, to everyone’s amazement.”

The essayist wryly concludes: “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” (Shafran)

Despite the obstacles that face all of us who attempt to overcome cognitive biases and illusions, the first step seems obvious. We must recognize and study the main biases and illusions, so that we are aware of them and aware of what kinds of situations they frequently occur in. The second step seems obvious too: devise a plan for dealing with individual biases. At the very least, this second step requires a commitment to hard work and reflection before making a judgment (Cf. Stanovich 2010). The third step may not seem obvious, especially to those who are overconfident in their ability to make important decisions quickly: recognize what kinds of situations are inherently unpredictable and what kinds of situations allow time for getting feedback. It should go without saying that it is not wise to follow your intuition when the situation is predictably unpredictable and it is wise to get feedback whenever possible before making important decisions.

Ideally, I suppose, debiasing would be one of the primary objectives of education. What could be more important for a society than a populace that knows how to avoid some of the main hindrances to making good decisions and judgments? Yet, few high school students and most college students will graduate without even knowing what these biases are much less having been taught how to diminish their power over us.

There is every reason to be pessimistic about the chances of successfully overcoming many cognitive biases and illusions. Nobody has made a more detailed and careful study of these biases and their effects than Daniel Kahneman, yet here is what he had to say at the end of his book Thinking Fast and Slow:

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely ... And I have made much more progress in recognizing the errors of others than my own.

Even so, there may be hope for us after all. For example, there may be little we can do to overcome the optimistic bias in individuals, but there is some evidence that we can reduce this bias in organizations. The optimistic bias is an expression used by Kahneman to describe the idea that “most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.” Furthermore, most of us have an unrealistic view about predicting the future: we think we’re much better at it than we really are. We might advise individuals when considering their goals that they ask themselves two questions: what could go wrong? and what would happen if I fail? A consideration of possible failure need not lead one to dismantle one’s dreams. In fact, it could help prevent the very failures that one considers by planning ahead to avoid them. For organizations, Gary Klein has this advice:

....when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.” (Kahneman 2011: 264)

Klein called his proposal a premortem. Kahneman comments:

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction....The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier.

Another area where debiasing has shown some success is with the planning fallacy, a term coined by Kahneman and Amos Tversky “to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios” and “could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases” (Kahneman 2011: 250). To mitigate this tendency to be unrealistic about how long some task will take to accomplish, one should research similar tasks that have been accomplished and find out how long the proposers thought it would take and how long it actually took. According to Kahneman: “Using ... distributional information from other ventures similar to that being forecasted is called taking an ‘outside view’ and is the cure to the planning fallacy.” This advice has been put into practice enough that it has its own name: reference class forecasting. The process has been used in the UK, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland. Should we be optimistic? I don’t know. On the other hand, there is not much to report regarding successful methods of debiasing individuals.

Sources

Arkes, H. R. 1991. Costs and benefits of judgment errors: Implications for debiasing. Psychological Bulletin. 110, 486–98.

Arnold, Carrie.  2012. Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”? Scientific American. <tinyurl.com/8dv86wj>, accessed 10/29/2013; October 4.

Cook, John and Stephan Lewandowsky. 2012. The Debunking Handbook <www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf>, accessed 10/29/2013.

Fischhoff, B. 1982. “Debiasing.” In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky (eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press, pp. 422–44.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klein, Gary. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press.

Larrick, Richard P. Debiasing. 2004. ch. 16 in Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making. Edited by Derek J. Koehler and Nigel Harvey.

Merkhofer, Lee. 2012. Debiasing. <www.prioritysystem.com/reasons1d.html>, accessed 10/29/2013.

Shafran, Avi. 2009. A Malnourishment of Modesty. <tinyurl.com/kq7ohmg>, accessed 10/29/2013.

Stanovich, Keith. 2010. Rationality and the Reflective Mind. Oxford University Press, USA.

experimenter effect

Your body language may be signaling or cuing others when you think you are unbiased in asking questions or giving them instructions.

The experimenter effect is a bias in a scientific study of human or animal subjects due to the experimenter giving cues or signals to subjects in the experiment that affect their performance or response. The cues may be subtle, unconscious, nonverbal cues, such as muscular tension or gestures. They may be vocal cues, such as tone of voice or a slight difference in oral instructions given to control and experimental groups. They may be suggestions provided by informing the subjects of what to expect during the study.

Research has demonstrated that the expectations and biases of an experimenter can be communicated to experimental subjects in subtle, unintentional ways, and that these cues can significantly affect the outcome of the experiment (Rosenthal 1998). Something similar happens in non-experimental settings. For example, when questioning witnesses or victims of crimes, investigators must be careful not to unwittingly suggest answers by nodding approvingly or praising some answers but not others. The interviewer shouldn’t praise or show disapproval of any answer in a fair, unbiased interrogation.

In their study of the priming effect, Doyen et al. attempted to replicate earlier work by Bargh et al. that had found “participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants, consistent with the content of that stereotype.” In their study, Doyen et al. led half the experimenters “to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently and the other half was led to expect the opposite.” The only subjects who showed the “walking speed effect” were those given instructions by the experimenters who thought that the test was to see if words associated with aging would prime subjects to mimic a stereotypical behavior of the aged.

Since most of us don’t do experiments, my concern here isn’t to help experimenters design less biased experiments, but to clarify things for those of us who read accounts of those experiments either in scientific journals or in the mass media. What should we look for to determine whether experimenter bias has significantly affected the outcome of a study? When evaluating a journalist’s account of a scientific study, are any hints of experimenter bias given?

A few years ago, I attended a conference sponsored by two skeptics’ groups. Dr. Sarah Strand talked about the neurology of religious experiences. She brought up the work of Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She claimed (and so have many others) that Persinger has induced strange feelings—such as the “feeling of a presence” and other feelings sometimes described as “mystical” or “spiritual”—by sending low level magnetic pulses to the temporal lobes. He has his subjects put on a device that has been dubbed “the god helmet” while they sit alone in a darkened, silent room for 30 to 60 minutes. Persinger has been conducting these experiments over a period of at least fifteen years. He has tons of data and many published papers in peer-reviewed journals. However, when Atheist and anti-theist Richard Dawkins put on the god helmet, he sat in the makeshift sensory deprivation chamber without feeling the presence of anything unusual except for the helmet on his head. Dawkins and others have speculated that Persinger’s subjects are having experiences that are induced not by magnetic pulses to the temporal lobes but by the power of suggestion and expectation and a desire for a weird experience. Subjects know what the experiment is about; they long to experience something “spiritual” or Persinger suggests what they will experience and then they do, thanks to his suggestion.

When I proposed to Dr. Strand that we should be skeptical of Persinger’s work because it may be suggestion not magnetic pulses to the temporal lobes that was inducing strange feelings, she proceeded to lay out the evidence in support of Persinger and against the alternative explanation. Unfortunately, the only evidence she supplied came from Persinger himself and his own analysis of his data. Persinger would not be the most disinterested, unbiased party in such an evaluation. Rather than describe experiments where subjects had no idea what to expect, where some were clearly expecting to experience something weird but Persinger gave them no magnetic pulses at all, or a host of other kinds of experiments that would have ruled out experimenter bias and clearly shown that it was the magnetic pulses that were causing the weird feelings, we were told that Persinger had done some sort of reanalysis of the data he’s collected over the years and the reanalysis confirmed his earlier conclusions.

What would have clearly ruled out experimenter bias would have been reference to double-blind, randomized controlled studies done in other labs by other researchers who had clearly ruled out suggestion or some aspect of the quasi-sensory deprivation chamber experience as a cause of the “feeling of a presence.” Dr. Strand didn’t cite any other studies because they don’t exist. The only other scientist who has tried to replicate Persinger’s work is Pehr Granqvist of Uppsala University and his research team. In a double-blind, controlled study with 90 participants, they found that magnetic pulses had no discernible effect. They did find, however, many subjects from both groups claimed to have had strong religious experiences during the sessions. “Two out of the three participants in the Swedish study that reported strong spiritual experiences during the study belonged to the control group, as did 11 out of the 22 who reported subtle experiences.” Persinger countered by claiming that the replication failed because the magnetic pulses had not been strong enough or given over a long enough period, which seems unlikely given that so many subjects in both the control and experimental groups reported strong or subtle effects.

If it turns out that Granqvist’s study is what other labs with no special interest in the outcome continue to find, then Michael Persinger has been deluding himself and others for fifteen years. He would not be the first Ph.D. to have done so. Nor would he be the first to have tainted his experiments with unintentional bias. (If the reader is wondering why Persinger would think stimulating the temporal lobes would induce a “spiritual” experience, it is probably because there have been many reports of those with temporal lobe epilepsy experiencing such things as “oneness with everything.” For more on “spiritual” experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, see V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, 1998.)

We should also note that it is common for some scientists and journalists to falsely and unjustly accuse other scientists of experimenter bias when the scientists’ experiments contradict the accuser’s beliefs. It does seem to be a fact that parapsychologists who are skeptical usually get negative results in their psi studies, while believers in psi often get positive results. One important exception is Susan Blackmore, who, while a true believer, continually got negative results and left parapsychology because of it. She’s turned her attention to other matters, including trying to figure out why people believe in psi when the evidence for it is so flimsy. In any case, a skeptic (Richard Wiseman) and a true believer (Marilyn Schlitz) explored the experimenter effect while doing a joint study on the staring effect.  The result?

Both authors of the present paper previously attempted to replicate this staring effect. The first author (R. W.) is a skeptic regarding the claims of parapsychology who wished to discover whether he could replicate the effect in his own laboratory. The second author (M. S.) is a psi proponent who has previously carried out many parapsychological studies, frequently obtaining positive findings. The staring experiments carried out by R. W. showed no evidence of psychic functioning…. M. S.’s study, on the other hand, yielded significant results….

Even though the authors designed the experiments together, the skeptic got negative results and the psi proponent got positive results. They offer several possible explanations for the difference in their results. I encourage the reader to review their alternative explanations. One explanation they don’t seem to consider is that the difference in results could have been a fluke. More joint experiments by skeptics and psi proponents might resolve this issue, but there is so much hostility between parapsychologists and skeptics that cooperation like that of Schlitz and Wiseman is rare. In any case, the charge of experimenter bias should be ignored, whether made by a skeptic or a psi proponent, unless it is backed up by specific evidence that bias has likely occurred. Claims that the beliefs of skeptics or psi proponents affect the telepathic or precognitive abilities of subjects are pure speculation and beg the question.

In addition to the experimenter biasing a study by unconsciously cuing or signaling a person or animal subject, others nearby may also be unintentionally providing information to the subject. One of the earliest scientific studies to recognize this was done by psychologist Oskar Pfungst while testing a horse that allegedly could understand German and do such amazing things as count or figure out what day it was. Pfungst recognized that the horse was responding to subtle physical cues (ideomotor reaction) that others had mistaken for understanding language and ability to do math. “Hans [the horse] was responding to a simple, involuntary postural adjustment by the questioner, which was his cue to start tapping, and an unconscious, almost imperceptible head movement, which was his cue to stop” (Hyman 1989: 425). Giving such inadvertent cues to a subject is now known as the Clever Hans effect.

I may have seen the Clever Hans effect in action whiles watching a television program about dogs that can allegedly detect cancer cells by smell. Each dog was led into a room with several dishes spread out on the floor. The dog would sniff here and there and eventually stop by one bowl, the bowl that had the cancer cells in it. I noticed that the investigator was in the room with the dog at all times. This made me wonder if some subtle, unintentional cue wasn’t being given to the dog by the investigator. My suspicion was aroused because the investigator went right to the bowl the dog had picked and announced it was the right one. A blinded experiment would have been set up so that the investigator in the room would not know which bowl had the cancer cells. This would avoid any unintentional cuing.

Double-blind experiments that use control groups help experimenters avoid or reduce greatly the chances of an experimenter effect skewing the outcome of their study. Of course, double-blind experiments can be set up in biased ways, e.g., by not randomizing the assignment of subjects to the experimental and control groups or by using samples that are too small even if randomized. There are other ways experimenters can bias a study without knowing it. For example, some telepathy tests have subjects guess which of four pictures a sender in another room is trying to transmit telepathically. The experimenter must make sure that the order of pictures is randomly presented to both the sender and the receiver. Not only should the experimenter who is showing the pictures to the receiver not know which is the correct one, the experimenter responsible for putting the pictures in an envelope should make sure that the correct picture occurs in the one, two, three, and four positions at about the same rate. The experimenter who sets out the pictures for the receiver to review must present them in exactly the same way for each subject, e.g., the first picture goes to the upper left, the second to the upper right, the third to the lower left, etc. This would avoid any unintentional bias that might occur should it be the case that subjects are more likely to select, say the first picture or the upper right picture at a greater than chance rate.

Parapsychologists must be especially sensitive to experimenter effects since any transfer of information by ordinary sensory means from experimenters to subjects contaminates any claim to extrasensory transmission of information. The problem in parapsychology is serious enough to have a name: sensory leakage, which Daryl Bem described as the most potentially fatal flaw in psi studies.

Experimenters can bias their studies in so many ways that it is probably not possible to conduct a perfect scientific study. There will always be something that could have been done better. In addition, there is the possibility of fraud or media distortion and manipulation by the experimenter. Also, some experimenters are simply incompetent.

Sources

Bargh, John A. et al. 1996. Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 71 (2), August, 230-244.

Bem, D. J. 1994. Does Psi Exist? The World & I. August, 215-219 <dbem.ws/psi_world.html>, accessed 12/14/2012

Doyen, Stéphane et al. 2012. Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind? PLOS ONE <www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029081>, accessed 12/14/2012.

Economist. 2013. October 19. “How science goes wrong” and “Trouble at the lab.”

Granqvist et al. 2004. Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters, 348-350.

Hyman, Ray. 1999. “The Mischief-Making of Ideomotor Action,” in The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 3 (2):34-43.

Rosenthal, Robert. 1998. “Covert Communication in Classrooms, Clinics, and Courtrooms,” Eye on Psi Chi. Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 18-22.

Wiseman, R. & Schlitz, M. 1998. Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring. Journal of Parapsychology, 61(3), 197-208.

fallacies

Good arguments don’t make questionable assumptions or rely on irrelevant reasons to support their conclusions. Nor do good arguments give undue weight to evidence or omit relevant data. A clear sign that you arguing for the wrong position is when you provide nothing but truthful, relevant evidence, omit nothing relevant from consideration, and still don’t have enough evidence to prove your point.

Logical fallacies are errors in arguments. In logic, an argument is the giving of reasons (called premises) to support some claim (called the conclusion). Arguments may be classified as deductive or inductive. Deductive arguments assert or imply that if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true. (Another way of saying this is that deductive arguments assert or imply that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.) Inductive arguments assert or imply that the premises provide adequate support for the conclusion. (Another way of putting this is that inductive arguments assert or imply that the conclusion follows with some degree of probability, not necessity. Even if the premises of an inductive argument are true, the conclusion may not be true, but if the premises provide adequate support for the conclusion it is unreasonable to doubt the conclusion.)

(Note: This entry is mainly about fallacies in non-deductive reasoning. For a detailed account of deductive arguments, see any standard logic text, such as Patrick Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic.)

Deductive arguments are evaluated for validity. If the conclusion of a deductive argument follows necessarily from the premises, the argument is said to be valid. If the conclusion of a deductive argument does not follow with necessity from the premises, the argument is said to be invalid. Validity is determined by the form of the argument, not by the truth or falsity of the premises or the conclusion. An argument with the form If p then q; p; so, q is a valid argument, no matter what statements are represented by p and q. If p and if p then q are both true, then q must be true. An argument with the form If p then q; q; so p is invalid no matter what statements are represented by p and q. Even if q and if p then q are true, p is not necessarily true. (Note: to say a statement is not necessarily true is not the same as saying that it is false. For example, the statement “it is raining now” is not necessarily true but it may be true.) The invalid argument form just presented is called affirming the consequent and is known as a formal fallacy. Inductive arguments may be evaluated by their form, but usually they are evaluated by other criteria. The fallacies of induction are sometimes called informal fallacies because they do not evaluate the form to determine validity. I’ll go over the criteria for a cogent inductive argument as I discuss the informal fallacies below.

There are many ways to classify informal logical fallacies. I prefer listing the conditions for a good or cogent argument and then classifying logical fallacies according to the failure to meet these conditions.

fallacies of assumption

Every argument makes some assumptions. A cogent argument makes only warranted assumptions, i.e., its assumptions are not questionable or false. (An assumption does not become questionable or controversial just because one person or a few outliers question it.) Fallacies of assumption make up one type of logical fallacy. One of the most common fallacies of assumption is called begging the question. Here the arguer assumes what he claims to be proving. Most arguments for psi commit this fallacy. For example, many believers in psi point to the ganzfeld experiments as proof of paranormal activity. These experiments had senders in one room look at a picture or video and try to telepathically communicate what they perceived to a receiver in another room. Between 1974 and 1981, forty-two ganzfeld experiments were conducted whose results were reported or published. According to Charles Honorton, 55% of the studies produced positive results and a meta-analysis found a successful hit rate of 38% when 25% was expected by chance. One defender of psi claims that the odds of getting 38% correct in these experiments was a million billion to one. That may be true but one is begging the question to ascribe the amazing statistic to paranormal powers. It could be evidence of psychic activity, but there might be some other explanation as well. The amazing statistic doesn’t prove what caused it. The fact that the experimenter was trying to find proof of psi isn’t relevant. If someone else did the same experiment but claimed to be trying to find proof that angels, dark matter, or aliens were communicating directly to some minds, that would not be relevant to what was actually the cause of the amazing statistic. The experimenters are simply assuming that any amazing stat they get is due to something paranormal.

Not all fallacies of assumption are fatal. Some cogent arguments might make one or two questionable or false assumptions, but still have enough good evidence to support their conclusions. Some, like the gambler’s fallacy, are fatal, however. The gambler’s fallacy is the false assumption that the odds for something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences. If black has come up four times in a row, some people will bet on red because they think it more likely that red will come up than black on the next roll. It isn’t. The odds never change for red or black. They’re always a little under 50/50 because of the two green numbers, 0 and 00.

The slippery slope fallacy is another fatal fallacy of assumption. The slippery slope fallacy occurs when one asserts, without providing any evidence to support the assertion, that a chain of events will follow the taking or not taking of some action. In other words, the arguer assumes that the chain of events will occur, but offers no proof. This negative version of this fallacy is usually combined with an appeal to fear. The more horrible the chain of events is, the better the chance that this fallacy will work on uncritical minds. Political ads often feature this fallacy. If so-and-so is elected he’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who will repeal the Second Amendment. After they’ve taken away our guns, they’ll take away our money and give it to the people on welfare. Then they’ll tell us where we have to go to work, when we have to get health care, and what time we have to get out of bed every day. The positive version of this fallacy is usually combined with an appeal to hope, pleasure, or greed. For example, “If I’m elected there will be jobs for everyone, which will create enormous wealth for this country, which will generate greater taxes that we can use to provide more health and education services for our people, and we will shortly become the richest people on the planet.”

fallacies of relevance

Another quality of a cogent argument is that the premises are relevant to supporting the conclusion. Providing irrelevant reasons for your conclusion need not be fatal, however, provided you have sufficient relevant evidence to support your conclusion. However, if all the reasons you give to support your conclusion are irrelevant, then your reasoning is said to be a non sequitur. For example, poor women can’t afford abortions, so the government should pay for them is a non sequitur. It is true that a poor woman can’t afford an abortion, but that fact is irrelevant to the issue of what kinds of services government should pay for. You might as well argue that poor men can’t afford a car, so the government should pay for them. The poverty of women or men would become relevant if first it were established that everybody has a right to an abortion or a new car and that the government must make sure they get anything they have a right to, if they request it. Good luck with that.

One of the more common fallacies of relevance is the ad hominem, an attack on the one making the argument rather than an attack on the argument. One of the most frequent types of ad hominem attack is to attack the person’s motives rather than his evidence or his reasoning. For example, when an opponent refuses to agree with some point that is essential to your argument, you call him an Atheist, obtuse, or closed-minded. Personal characteristics or motives are irrelevant to whether a person’s premises adequately support her conclusions. Good people sometimes make bad arguments and bad people sometimes make good arguments. People with good motives can make bad arguments and people with evil motives can make good arguments.

Other examples of irrelevant reasoning are the ad populum fallacy, the irrelevant appeal to tradition, the irrelevant appeal to authority and the argument to ignorance. The popularity or longevity of a belief is irrelevant to its truth. The integrity, expertise, and authority of those holding a belief are irrelevant to its truth. Whether a claim has not been proved or disproved is irrelevant to whether the claim is true or false.

There are as many fallacies of relevance as there are types of irrelevant reasons people give for their beliefs. Two frequently occurring fallacies of this type are the irrelevant comparison and the irrelevant appeal to emotion. The reader can find many examples of these in advertisements. Comparing a relatively inexpensive single function copier to an expensive, multi-function machine is irrelevant in an ad that tries to convince the potential buyer that you’ll get equal copies with the inexpensive machine and save a lot of money as well. Besides the quality of the copies, there are many other features of the two machines that should be considered but are ignored in the ad. Those other features make comparing the machines like comparing apples to fruit salad.

Appeals to fear, greed, pity, vanity, pleasure, shame, guilt, and other emotions are often made to motivate somebody to do something or believe something, but such appeals are usually irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Finally, bringing up an irrelevant topic in the course of a debate is sometimes referred to as a red herring and responding to an accusatory question by changing the subject is sometimes referred to as evading the issue. For example, in a debate on the merits of a health care law, one party tries to stir the discussion to computer software issues or when charged with lying you respond by pointing out a bigger lie that somebody else told.

fallacies of omission

A third quality of a cogent argument is sometimes called the completeness requirement: A cogent argument should include all the relevant evidence. In real life, it is often impossible to know all the relevant evidence, so we should strive not to omit any relevant evidence that we are aware of, and we should try to discover as much relevant evidence as the argument deserves. We need to be much more diligent about satisfying the completeness requirement when dealing with, say, a criminal trial than when dealing with a decision as to what car to buy or what color pencil should be used for a school project. There is a natural tendency, however, to be selective in our search for evidence. The confirmation bias may drive us to seek only evidence that supports what we already believe or want to believe.

Some of the best-selling books on happiness, success, getting rich, losing weight, the power of intuition, etc. use the same fallacious formula: To prove your claim that x is essential to y, simply omit all cases where x is not essential to y. For example, to show that being kind is essential to being a successful CEO, simply provide lots of examples where a successful CEO is kind, but omit all those cases where a successful CEO is not kind and where a CEO is kind but not successful. It’s amazing how many people will buy your argument….and your book!

Selective thinking is the basis for most beliefs in the psychic powers of so-called mind readers and mediums. It is also the basis for many, if not most, occult and pseudoscientific beliefs. Selective thinking is essential to the arguments of defenders of untested and unproven remedies. Suppressing or omitting relevant evidence is obviously not fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument, but it is fatal to its cogency. The regressive fallacy is an example of a fallacy of omission. The regressive fallacy is the failure to take into account natural and inevitable fluctuations when ascribing causes to events. The false dilemma (or false dichotomy), whereby one restricts consideration of reasonable alternatives, is also a fallacy of omission. Sometimes this fallacy is called the black or white fallacy or the either-or fallacy: one poses what looks like a true dilemma—I must pick one or the other—when, in fact, there are other viable alternatives.

While at The Amazing Meeting 5, the James Randi Educational Foundation’s annual celebration of reason and skepticism, I was approached by André Kole, who introduced himself as a magician and longtime friend of Randi’s. I was there as part of workshop on critical thinking. Kole asked me if I would read a short pamphlet he’d written and give him my opinion of his arguments. I looked at the title of his pamphlet and told him I’d read it, but I could see that he was presenting a false dichotomy. The title of his tract is Jesus: Magician or God? (Kole is a “Christian magician” who does “faith-based illusions.”) I told him without reading his tract that there were other possibilities like madman, fraud, and myth. My own view is that the character described in the four gospels accepted as “authentic” by most Christians is a mythical character. A man named Jesus existed but the stories about his miracles are either exaggerations or distortions of actual, non-miraculous events or confabulations that incorporated myths from other traditions (like the Mithraic tradition). Jesus may have been a healer who benefited from the ignorance of conditioning and placebo medicine.

I read the tract and told Kole that he did a good job in arguing that Jesus was not a magician, but that it didn’t follow that just because he wasn’t a magician he was therefore a god. I really had no interest in arguing with Kole about the Bible or the alleged miracles, but he asked me what I thought of his argument and I told him. If he wants to prove Jesus was a god, he has to do more than prove that he wasn’t a magician.

Kole was not satisfied with my appraisal and asked me to explain how the Bible could be so accurate about some range of prophecies if the Bible weren’t the word of Abraham’s god. The pamphlet he wrote wasn’t focused on prophecies and I let him know that I wasn’t interested in discussing his belief in prophecies. The fact is, however, my ability or inability to disprove or explain passages in the Bible is irrelevant to whether the Bible is the word of Abraham’s god.

Many arguments appear more cogent than they really are because they intentionally suppress relevant evidence.

fallacies of unfairness or distortion

A fourth quality of a cogent argument is fairness. A cogent argument doesn’t distort evidence nor does it exaggerate or undervalue the strength of specific data. The straw man fallacy violates the principle of fairness. In a straw man argument, one attacks a distorted version of another person’s argument. Anyone using a straw man argument is refuting a position of his own creation, not the position of someone else. The refutation, however, may appear to be a good one to someone unfamiliar with the original argument. If I make the sexist remark that women don’t appear on skeptical panels because “it’s a guy thing,” you argue against a straw man if you attack me for saying that women aren’t intelligent enough to be on panels.

One of the most frequent fallacies of reasoning occurs by giving improper weight to evidence. While all relevant evidence to a conclusion should be considered, each piece of evidence is not equal in significance to every other piece. One should not elevate a relatively minor piece of evidence to the status of linchpin in an argument, nor should one treat stronger evidence that is contrary to your view as if it were minor. Each piece of evidence has to be properly weighted and then the overall weight of the evidence must be evaluated.

One factor that ought to be considered in determining how much weight to give to a premise is its source. All else being equal, the more reliable the source, the more weight the premise ought to be given. Also—again, all other things being equal—the more warranted a premise, the more weight it ought to be given.

….To illustrate the general point that different pieces of evidence might be given different weight, one might think of an example from a criminal trial. Some of the eyewitness testimony might be quite strong, while some of it might be weak. Some of the physical evidence might be relevant and indicate a possible connection of the defendant with the crime. Still other physical evidence might indicate a probable connection of the defendant with the crime.  The circumstantial evidence might indicate a strong probability of guilt while the physical evidence might be exculpatory and therefore outweigh the circumstantial evidence. Discovery of a motive for committing a crime would indicate at least a possible connection to the crime, but in the absence of any other evidence would generally be taken as very weak evidence. (Carroll 2005: 121)

fallacies of ambiguity

A fifth quality of cogent reasoning is clarity. Some fallacies are due to ambiguity, such as the fallacy of equivocation: shifting the meaning of a key expression in an argument. For example, the following argument uses ‘accident’ first in the sense of ‘not created’ and then in the sense of ‘chance event.’

Since you don’t believe you were created by a god then you must believe you are just an accident. Therefore, all your thoughts and actions are accidents, including your disbelief in any god.

Most arguments that claim some event is the fulfillment of a prophecy, a dream, or psychic prediction commit a fallacy of ambiguity. The meaning of vague or ambiguous expressions is given wide latitude or the expressions are interpreted metaphorically after the fact.

(Note: There are other fallacies of ambiguity and other ways of classifying such fallacies. See, for example, T. Edward Damer’s Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, where these fallacies are listed under the heading of “fallacies of linguistic confusion.”)

fallacies of insufficient evidence

Finally, a cogent argument provides a sufficient amount of evidence to support its conclusion to whatever degree of probability is asserted. An argument might provide truthful, relevant premises. It might distort or leave out nothing relevant. Yet, the argument might still come up short. Failure to provide sufficient evidence is to commit the fallacy of hasty conclusion. One type of hasty conclusion that occurs quite frequently in the production of superstitious beliefs, beliefs in the paranormal, and beliefs about healing is the post hoc fallacy—the notion that because one thing happened after another the first must have caused the second. You need more evidence to prove precognition than that your aunt Sady died the night after you had a dream about her dying. You need more evidence than the fact that you got sick a few days after a flu shot to prove that the shot made you sick. Another causal fallacy argues from the fact that two variables are correlated to the claim that they are causally related. You need more evidence than a strong correlation to provide adequate evidence for causality. Correlation doesn’t prove causality, as the saying goes.

A clear sign that you arguing for the wrong position is when you provide nothing but truthful, relevant evidence, omit nothing relevant from consideration, and still don’t have enough evidence to prove your point.

classifications are not mutually exclusive

Some fallacies may be classified in more than one way, e.g., the pragmatic fallacy, which at times seems to be due to vagueness and at times due to insufficient evidence. The pragmatic fallacy is committed when one argues that something is true because it works, where ‘works’ means something like “I’m satisfied with it,” “I feel better,” “I find it beneficial, meaningful, or significant,” or “It explains things for me.” For example, many people claim that astrology works, acupuncture works, chiropractic works, homeopathy works, numerology works, palmistry works, therapeutic touch works. What ‘works’ means here is vague and ambiguous. You could also criticize such arguments for not supplying enough evidence that they work in the sense of being accurately predictive or medically efficacious. You could also criticize such arguments for posing a false dichotomy by ignoring other plausible explanations for the effects observed. Finally, you could also criticize such arguments for their selective use of evidence and ignoring all the anecdotes where the given therapy did not work in any sense of the word or where the prediction could have been satisfied by a gazillion scenarios.

Sources

Browne, M. Neil & Stuart M. Keeley. 2011. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking. 10th ed. Pearson.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2005. Becoming a Critical Thinker. Pearson.

Damer. T. Edward. 2012. Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments. 7th ed. Cengage Learning.

Honorton, C. 1985. Meta-analysis of psi ganzfeld research: A response to Hyman. Journal of Parapsychology, 49, 51-91.

false implication

Watch out for true statements that suggest falsehoods.

What do the following products have in common?

Berry Berry Kix

Country Time® Lemonade Flavor Drink

Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries

Dannon Danimals XL (Strawberry Explosion)

Froot Loops

Fruity Cheerios

Juicy Fruit Gum

Life Savers (Wild Cherry)

Nestle Nesquik milk and drink mix (strawberry)

Post Fruity Pebbles

Push Pop (cherry)

Ring Pop (cherry)

Tang

Trix cereal

Trix yogurt (strawberry kiwi)

Yoplait Go-Gurt yogurt (Strawberry Splash)

They contain no fruit. But the labels and ads used to attract consumers to these products falsely imply that fruit is one of their ingredients.

What does “no cholesterol” mean when printed on a bag of carrots or on a soft-drink can? (You might get some cholesterol with your carrot if it’s fried in animal fat and your soda might contain cholesterol if it’s made with pork rinds.) “No cholesterol” printed on a bag of potato chips may falsely imply that the fat used to fry the potatoes won’t be turned into cholesterol when you eat the chips. For some people, I suppose, the words might even falsely imply that potato chips are a healthy food.

A package of Healthy Choice lunch meat says that it is 97% fat-free, which is true if measured by weight, but 25% of its calories come from fat. That right, a product that implies it is very low in fat actually provides a healthy amount of fat with each serving. The dairy industry also cleverly expresses fat content as a percentage of weight rather than percentage of calories. Otherwise, it would tell you that the milk it now calls 2% is actually 31%.

Advertisers and those who market commercial products aren’t the only ones who try to use false implications to their advantage. When Sandra Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University, spoke out in favor of the Obama administration’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—especially the requirement that insurers cover preventive care services, including contraception—she was attacked by popular conservative radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh said: “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Besides expressing himself in his familiar vulgar way, Limbaugh falsely implied that Fluke wanted the taxpayer to pay for her birth control. This implication was false on two counts. The issue had nothing to do with taxpayers covering the cost of anything. It was about what insurers would be required to cover by the government. More important, Fluke spoke in support of contraception as basic health care for several reasons and not one of those reasons involved her desire to have sex and not get pregnant. She said:

Last month, students from several Catholic universities gathered to send a message to the nation that contraception is basic health care. I was among them, and I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.

I joined these students in speaking at a media event because I believe that stories of how real women are affected are the most powerful argument for access to affordable, quality reproductive health care services....

They are women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, who need contraception to prevent cysts from growing on their ovaries, which if unaddressed can lead to infertility and deadly ovarian cancer. They are sexual assault victims, who need contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

They are Catholic women, who see no conflict between their social justice-based faith and family planning. They are new moms whose doctors fear that another pregnancy too soon could jeopardize the mother’s health and the potential child’s health too. They are mothers and grandmothers who remember all too well what it was like to be called names decades ago, when they were fighting for a job, for health care benefits, for equality.

They are husbands, partners, boyfriends and male friends who know that without access to contraception, the women they care about can face unfair obstacles to participating in public life. And yes, they are young women of all income levels, races, classes and ethnicities who need access to contraception to control their reproduction, pursue their education and career goals and prevent unintended pregnancy.

And they will not be silenced.

Another person who won’t be silenced is Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. On the ABC program This Week, Santorum said “62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it.” He admitted that he might not have the exact statistic. “I suspect it may even be worse,” he said. Santorum implies that going to college leads to loss of religious faith. He also implies that had these kids not gone to college they’d still be religious. PBS tracked down the study Santorum referred to and found that it actually suggests that people who have not enrolled in college are even less religious than those who do. “64 percent of those currently enrolled in a traditional four-year institution have curbed their [religious] attendance habits,” said the study, published in the journal Social Forces. “Yet, 76 percent of those who never enrolled in college report a decline in religious service attendance.”

Another study, published last year in the Review of Religious Research, found that for each year of education after 7th grade, seemingly contradictory trends emerge: people become more likely to attend religious services and to believe in a “higher power” but at the same time they are less likely to say the Bible is the “actual word of [a] god” and become more open to believing there is truth in more than one religion.

Anti-vaxxers and abortion

One argument presented by some anti-vaxxers is that vaccines contain cells from aborted fetuses. A charitable interpretation of this claim is that it is a false implication based on the fact that:

The rubella vaccine virus that is included in the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) shot is cultured using human cell lines. Some of these cell lines were started from fetal tissue that was obtained in the 1960s from legal abortions.

However, anti-vaxxers, such as the popular Internet alternative medicine advocate Joseph Mercola, fail to mention that no new fetal tissue is required to generate rubella vaccine.

Others use whatever they can in their zeal to oppose abortion. Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey introduced a bill banning the use of human fetuses in food, falsely implying that human fetuses are being used in food products. The real intent of the bill was part of an anti-abortion campaign.

Libel by omission

The law recognizes that reporters, politicians, and anyone with an axe to grind can libel another person by omitting facts that would negate or mitigate otherwise defamatory statements. For example, a television reporter let her audience know that there had been some serious allegations of abuse and neglect at a daycare center and that a mother had taken her children out of the center because her son was abused. The mother said that the daycare center had abused her trust. The reporter did not mention that the alleged abuse involved one four-year-old boy touching another four-year-old-boy inappropriately. An appeals court judge commented:

A reasonable jury could find that this statement was defamatory, inasmuch as there is material difference between a daycare worker actually abusing a child in his or her care, and a daycare worker negligently supervising a child such that he or she is ultimately responsible for one child’s assault of another child. (Peterson)

Libel by false implication could be a confusing and troublesome area for reporters, who might believe that they’ve done their job well if they report the truth (but not the whole truth) or the facts as they know them. But it is obviously true that a reporter can get all the facts right but imply something that is false by not reporting all the facts. It might be true that Dr. Stanley stuck a knife into Richardson’s belly and that Richardson died soon thereafter, but you might be led to falsely conclude that Stanley murdered Richardson if I didn’t also tell you that Richardson had been brought to the emergency room and had suffered multiple gunshot wounds when Dr. Stanley tried to save his life by cutting into his abdomen. Or, to use a real-life case, it might be true that a mentally disabled man, his friends, family, and defense attorney depict him as persecuted by a store owner, but if this is a false impression that leads people to boycott the store, the reporter who presented just one side of the story in a distorted way might find himself and his television station in court for defamation.

Some questions to ponder

Does “based on a true story” falsely imply that the story told is true in all important respects? When television news programs show dramatizations that are not labeled as such do they falsely imply that their cameras are telling the truth about what happened? Do reporters falsely imply there is a controversy over an issue when they introduce an outlier for pseudosymmetry? Does a peer-reviewed scientific journal falsely imply that the articles it publishes were conducted as the authors say they were conducted? Is it possible to report on any complex social or political issue, or on any significant person or event, without omitting something that will leave a false impression with many readers, viewers, or listeners?

Sources

Fluke, Sandra. 2012.  Sandra Fluke: Slurs won’t silence women. Special to CNN, March 14 <www.cnn.com/2012/03/13/opinion/fluke-contraception/index.html>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Orac. 2011. Joe Mercola plays the religion card against vaccines. Respectful Insolence. July 11 <scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/07/11/joe-mercola-plays-the-religion-card-agai/>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Peterson, Emily. 2011. Libel by omission: Creating a false impression with true statements. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press <tinyurl.com/broegpe>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Regnerus, Mark D. and Jeremy E. Uecker. 2007. How Corrosive Is College to Religious Faith and Practice? Social Science Research Council. February 5 <religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Regnerus_Uecker.pdf>, accessed 12/15/2012.

University of Nebraska—Lincoln News Release. 2011. Study: Education affects Americans’ religiosity—but not how you might think, August 8 <tinyurl.com/clxfm3q>, accessed 12/15/2012.

false memories

Memory is not a recorder. Memories are constructed and are often not accurate. You really can’t trust yourself when it comes to memory.

A false memory is a memory that is a distortion of an actual experience or a confabulation of an imagined one. Many false memories involve confusing or mixing fragments of memory events, some of which may have happened at different times but which are remembered as occurring together. Many false memories involve an error in source memory. Some involve treating dreams as if they were playbacks of real experiences. Still other false memories are believed to be the result of the prodding, leading, and suggestions of therapists and counselors. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus has shown that it is not only possible to implant false memories, but that it is relatively easy to do so.

source memory

A memory of your mother throwing a glass of milk on your father when in fact it was your father who threw the milk is a false memory based on an actual experience. You may remember the event vividly and be able to “see” the action clearly, but only corroboration by those present can determine whether your memory of the event is accurate. Distortions such as switching the roles of people in one’s memory are quite common. Some distortions are quite dramatic.

Many people have vivid and substantially accurate memories of events that are erroneous in one key aspect: the source of the memory. For example:

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot’s heroic response: “Never mind. We’ll ride it down together.” ...this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source. (Schacter 1996: 287)

An even more dramatic case of source amnesia (also called memory misattribution) is that of the woman who accused memory expert Dr. Donald Thompson of having raped her. Thompson was doing a live interview for a television program just before the rape occurred. The woman had seen the program and “apparently confused her memory of him from the television screen with her memory of the rapist” (Schacter 1996: 114). Studies by Marcia Johnson et al. have shown that the ability to distinguish memory from imagination depends on the recall of source information.

Tom Kessinger, a mechanic at Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, gave a detailed description of two men he said had rented a Ryder truck like the one used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. One of the men looked like Timothy McVeigh, who was later executed for the murder of 168 people including 19 children under the age of 6. The other wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt and had a tattoo above the elbow on his left arm. That was Todd Bunting, who had rented a truck the day after McVeigh, and had come to Elliott’s with Michael Hertig. Kessinger mixed the two memories but was absolutely certain McVeigh and Bunting had come in together. He was wrong.

Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist, claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of two. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse’s face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse, the family, and others who had heard the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget’s former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote: “I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false” (Tavris).

Remembering being kidnapped when you were an infant (under the age of three) is a false memory almost by definition. The left inferior prefrontal lobe is undeveloped in infants but is required for long-term memory. The elaborate encoding required for classifying and remembering such an event is very unlikely to occur in the infant’s brain.

The brains of infants and very young children are capable of storing fragmented memories, however. Fragmented memories can be disturbing in adults. Schacter notes the case of a rape victim who could not remember the rape, which took place on a brick pathway. The words ‘brick’ and ‘path’ kept popping into her mind, but she did not connect them to the rape. She became very upset when taken back to the scene of the rape, though she didn’t remember what had happened there (Schacter 1996: 232). Whether a fragmented memory of infant abuse can cause significant psychological damage in the adult has not been scientifically established, though it seems to be widely believed by many psychotherapists.

What is also widely believed by many psychotherapists is that many psychological disorders and problems are due to the repression of memories of childhood sexual abuse. On the other hand, many psychologists maintain that their colleagues doing repressed memory therapy (RMT) are encouraging, prodding, and suggesting false memories of abuse to their patients. Many of the recovered memories are of being sexually abused by parents, grandparents, and ministers. Many of those accused claim the memories are false and have sued therapists for their alleged role in creating false memories.

It is as unlikely that all recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse are false as that they are all true. What is known about memory—especially that memories are constructions from both real and imagined experiences— should make us aware of how difficult it is to sort out true from distorted or false recollections. However, some consideration should be given to the fact that certain brain processes are necessary for any memories to occur. Thus, memories of infant abuse or of abuse that took place while one was unconscious are unlikely to be accurate. Memories that have been directed by dreams or hypnosis are notoriously unreliable. Dreams are not usually direct playbacks of experience. Furthermore, the data of dreams are generally ambiguous. Hypnosis and interrogation techniques must be used with care to avoid creating memories by suggestion.

Furthermore, memories are often mixed: some parts are accurate and some are not. Separating the two can be a chore under ordinary circumstances. A woman might have consciously repressed childhood sexual abuse by a neighbor or relative. Some experience in adulthood may serve as a retrieval cue and trigger a memory of the abuse. This disturbs her and her dreams. She has nightmares, but now it is her father or grandfather or priest who is abusing her. She enters RMT and within a few months she recalls vividly how her father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, or priest not only sexually abused her but engaged in horrific satanic rituals involving human sacrifices and cannibalism. Where does the truth lie? The patient’s memories are real and horrible, even if false. The patient’s suffering is real whether the memories are true or false. Families are destroyed whether the memories are true or false.

Should such memories be taken at face value and accepted as true without any attempt to prove otherwise? Obviously it would be unconscionable to ignore accusations of sexual abuse. Likewise, it is unconscionable to be willing to see lives and families destroyed without at least trying to find out if any part of the memories of sexual abuse is false. It also seems inhumane to encourage patients to recall memories of sexual abuse unless one has a very good reason for doing so. Assuming all or most emotional problems are due to repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse is not a good enough reason to risk harming a patient by encouraging delusional beliefs and damaging familial relationships. A responsible therapist has a duty to help a patient sort out delusion from reality, dreams and confabulations from truth, and real abuse from imagined abuse. If good therapy means the encouragement of delusion as standard procedure, then good therapy may not always be worth it.

Those who find that it is their duty to determine whether a person has been sexually abused or whether a memory of such abuse is a false memory should be well versed in the current scientific literature regarding memory. They should know that all of us are pliable and suggestible to some degree, but that children are especially vulnerable to suggestive and leading questioning. They should also remember that children are highly imaginative and that just because a child says he or she remembers something does not mean that he or she does. However, when children say they do not remember something, to keep questioning them until they do remember it is not good interrogation and borders on child abuse.

Investigators, counselors, and therapists should also remind themselves that many charges and memories are heavily influenced by media coverage. People charged with or convicted of crimes have noticed that their chances of gaining sympathy increase if others believe they were abused as children. People with grudges have also noticed that nothing can destroy another person as quickly as being charged with sexual abuse, while at the same time providing the accuser with sympathy and comfort. Emotionally disturbed people are also influenced by what they read, see, or hear in the mass media, including stories of repressed abuse as the cause of emotional problems. An emotionally disturbed adult may accuse another adult of abusing a child, not because there is good evidence of abuse but because the disturbed person imagines or fears abuse.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. Repressed Memory Therapy in The Skeptic’s Dictionary. <www.skepdic.com/repress.html>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Baker, Robert A. 1992. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within. Prometheus Books.

Johnson, M.K., Raye, C.L., Wang, A.Y., & Taylor, T.H. 1979. Fact and fantasy: The roles of accuracy and variability in confusing imaginations with perceptual experiences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 229-240.

Loftus, Elizabeth. 1994. The Myth of Repressed Memory. St. Martin’s.

Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past. Basic Books.

Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Tavris, Carol. 1993. “Hysteria and the incest-survivor machine,” Sacramento Bee, Forum section, January 17.

Forer effect (aka Barnum effect)

You were born at an auspicious time. You tend to find meaning where there is none and give personal significance to many statements that other people also find personally significant. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements were not made about them personally.

Psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000) found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to them without realizing that many other people find the same descriptions applicable to them. Consider the following as if it were given to you as an evaluation of your personality.

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation (taken from a newsstand astrology column). He asked them to evaluate their personality assessment on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an “excellent” assessment and “4” meaning the assessment was “good.” The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.

In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character even though he knew nothing about them personally. His accuracy amazed his subjects, though his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their Sun sign. The Forer effect seems to explain, in part at least, why so many people think that various forms of divination “work.” Astrology, astrotherapy, biorhythms, cartomancy, chiromancy, the enneagram, fortune telling, graphology, rumpology, etc., seem to work because they seem to provide accurate personality analyses. Scientific studies of these various forms of soothsaying demonstrate that they are not valid personality assessment tools, yet each has many satisfied customers who are convinced they are accurate.

The most common explanations given to account for the Forer effect are in terms of hope, wishful thinking, vanity, and the tendency to try to make sense out of experience. People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard. We tend to accept questionable, even false statements about ourselves, if we deem them positive or flattering enough. We will often give very liberal interpretations to vague or inconsistent claims about ourselves in order to make sense out of the claims. Subjects who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, and the like will often ignore false or questionable claims and, in many cases, by their own words or actions, will provide most of the information they erroneously attribute to a bogus counselor. Many such subjects often feel their counselors have provided them with profound and personal information. Such subjective validation, however, has no correlation with accuracy.

Psychologist Barry Beyerstein seems to have captured the essence of why soothsaying “works” when he wrote that “hope and uncertainty evoke powerful psychological processes that keep all occult and pseudoscientific character readers in business.” We are constantly trying “to make sense out of the barrage of disconnected information we face daily” and “we become so good at filling in to make a reasonable scenario out of disjointed input that we sometimes make sense out of nonsense.” We will often fill in the blanks and provide a coherent picture of what we hear and see, even though a careful examination of the evidence would reveal that the data is vague, confusing, obscure, inconsistent, or unintelligible. Psychic mediums, for example, will often ask so many disconnected and ambiguous questions in rapid succession that they give the impression of having access to personal knowledge about their subjects. In fact, the psychic need not have any insights into the subject’s personal life, for the subject will willingly and unknowingly provide all the associations and validations needed. Psychics are aided in this process by using cold reading techniques.

A cold reading is a reading done for a stranger that may involve telling the client what she wants to hear about future relationships, travel, money, and the like; it may involve making some judgments about the client based on what she’s wearing, her jewelry, her interests, and the like. A cold reading may involve saying names or initials and letting the client try to find meaning and significance in them. A good cold reading makes the client feel like you know all about them even though you’ve never met before.

David Marks and Richard Kammann argue:

....once a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary. This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.

Having a pseudoscientific counselor go over a character assessment with a client is wrought with snares that can easily lead the most well-intentioned person into error and delusion.

Beyerstein suggested the following test to determine whether the apparent validity of the pseudosciences mentioned above might not be due to the Forer effect, confirmation bias, or other psychological factors. (Note: the proposed test also uses subjective or personal validation and is not intended to test the accuracy of any personality assessment tool, but rather is intended to counteract the tendency to self-deception about such matters.)

…a proper test would first have readings done for a large number of clients and then remove the names from the profiles (coding them so they could later be matched to their rightful owners). After all clients had read all of the anonymous personality sketches, each would be asked to pick the one that described him or her best. If the reader has actually included enough uniquely pertinent material, members of the group, on average, should be able to exceed chance in choosing their own from the pile.

Beyerstein notes that “no occult or pseudoscientific character reading method…has successfully passed such a test.”

The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures. Cold reading, communal reinforcement, and selective thinking also underlie these delusions. Also, it should be admitted that while many of the assessment claims in a pseudoscientific reading are vague and general, some are specific. Some of those that are specific actually apply to large numbers of people and some, by chance, will be accurate descriptions of a select few. A certain number of specific assessment claims should be expected by chance. The reader banks on the client forgetting all the specific things said that made no sense.

There have been numerous studies done on the Forer effect. Dickson and Kelly have examined many of these studies and concluded that overall there is significant support for the general claim that Forer profiles are generally perceived to be accurate by subjects in the studies. Furthermore, there is an increased acceptance of the profile if it is labeled “for you.” Favorable assessments are “more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects’ personalities than unfavorable” ones. But unfavorable claims are “more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status rather than low perceived status.” It has also been found that subjects can generally distinguish between statements that are accurate (but would be so for large numbers of people) and those that are unique (accurate for them but not applicable to most people). There is also some evidence that personality variables such as neuroticism, need for approval, and authoritarianism are positively related to belief in Forer-like profiles. Unfortunately, most Forer studies have been done only on college students.

The Forer effect is sometimes called the Barnum effect in deference to circus man P. T. Barnum’s reputation as a master psychological manipulator who is said to have claimed “we have something for everybody.”

Sources

Beyerstein, Barry L. Ph.D. 1996. How Graphology Fools People. <www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/grapho.html>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Dickson, D. H. and I. W. Kelly. 1985. The ‘Barnum Effect’ in Personality Assessment: A Review of the Literature. Psychological Reports, 57, 367-382.

Forer, B. R.. 1949. The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A classroom Demonstration of Gullibility, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 44, 118-121.

Hyman, Ray. 1977. ‘Cold Reading’: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them. The Skeptical Inquirer. Spring/Summer.

Marks, David and Richard Kammann. 1979. Psychology of the Psychic. Prometheus Books.

groupthink

Consider the possibility that your plan might have some flaws, despite the fact that you are absolutely certain it is perfect. Discourage your yes-men from being yes-men.

Psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as “a way of deliberating that group members use when their desire for unanimity overrides their motivation to assess all available plans of action.”

Some of the traits of groupthink are:

1.     Excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks;

2.     Excessive confidence that excludes reconsidering assumptions;

3.     Excessive demand for conformity that leads to self-censorship and to seeing critics as enemies.

One way to control criticism is to manage the information that people are allowed to have access to. Another way to control criticism is to surround oneself with sycophants. Controlling criticism has the negative effect of making sure that not all alternatives will be considered. The only options that get considered are those that are seen as promoting what the group members think the leader wants. Group members tend not to offer ideas that might be seen as critical of the leader. On the other hand, group members are quick to attack anyone whose ideas conflict with the group’s mindset. A defensive wall is built around the mindset; all criticism is seen as obstruction and must be defended against at all costs. Furthermore, the group tends to ignore expert help unless that help supports its mindset. This selectivity in how the leader or the group gathers and evaluates information can lead to disastrous consequences. Furthermore, because the group members keep reinforcing each other and pushing out those who disagree, the group becomes overconfident in its decisions and often fails to create contingency plans in case their designs fail.

Some of the symptoms of groupthink that lead to bad decisions are also symptoms of techniques used by individuals who make bad decisions. If you think you’re invulnerable, you’re asking for trouble. If you rationalize or gloss over criticisms, you are asking for trouble. You are likewise asking for trouble if you don’t accept the possibility that you might be wrong or if you label and stereotype critics as unworthy of consideration or do anything else to prevent contrary viewpoints from being heard.

To overcome groupthink, encourage criticism and ask members of the group to imagine what could go wrong if the plan is implemented.

sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2011. Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! James Randi Educational Foundation.

Janis, Irving L. 1982. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klein, Gary. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press.

halo effect

Be careful not to assume that if a person or company has one obvious positive or negative trait, then other traits of the person or company will follow suit.

The halo effect refers to a bias whereby the perception of a positive trait in a person or product positively influences further judgments about traits of that person or products by the same manufacturer. One of the more common halo effects is the judgment that a good looking person is intelligent and amiable.

There is also a reverse halo effect whereby perception of a negative or undesirable trait in individuals, brands, or other things influences further negative judgments about the traits of that individual, brand, etc. If a person “looks evil” or “looks guilty” you may judge anything he says or does with suspicion. Eventually you may feel confident that you have confirmed your first impression with solid evidence when, in fact, your evidence is completely tainted and conditioned by your first impression. The hope that the halo effect will influence a judge or jury is one reason some criminal lawyers like their clients to be clean-shaven and dressed neatly when they appear at trial.

The phrase ‘halo effect’ was coined by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920 to describe the way commanding officers rated their soldiers. He found that officers usually judged their men as being either good or bad “right across the board. There was little mixing of traits; few people were said to be good in one respect but bad in another.” The old saying that first impressions make lasting impressions is at the heart of the halo effect. If a soldier made a good (or bad) first impression on his commanding officer, that impression would influence the officer’s judgment of future behavior. It is very unlikely that given a group of soldiers every one of them would be totally good or totally bad at everything, but the evaluations seemed to indicate that this was the case. More likely, however, the earlier perceptions either positively or negatively affected those later perceptions and judgments.

The halo effect seems to ride on the coattails of confirmation bias: once we’ve made a judgment about positive or negative traits, that judgment influences future perceptions so that they confirm our initial judgment.

Some researchers have found evidence that student evaluations of their college instructors are formed and remain stable after only a few minutes or hours in class.  If a student evaluated a teacher highly early on in the course, he or she was likely to rank the teacher highly at the end of the course. Unfortunately for those teachers who made bad first impressions on the students, their performance over the course of the term would be largely irrelevant to how they would be perceived by their students. Some might think this shows how wonderful intuition is: students can perceive how good a teacher is within minutes or days of meeting her. On the other hand, the halo effect may be at work here. Also, the fact that the evaluations are similar at the beginning and end of the semester might indicate that there is something seriously wrong with the typical evaluation form. It may be measuring little more than likeability and the halo effect.

In The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Free Press 2009), Phil Rosenzweig writes:

Much of our thinking about company performance is shaped by the halo effect … when a company is growing and profitable, we tend to infer that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary CEO, motivated people, and a vibrant culture. When performance falters, we’re quick to say the strategy was misguided, the CEO became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture stodgy … At first, all of this may seem like harmless journalistic hyperbole, but when researchers gather data that are contaminated by the halo effect – including not only press accounts but interviews with managers – the findings are suspect. That is the principal flaw in the research of Jim Collins’s Good to Great, Collins and Porras’s Built to Last, and many other studies going back to Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. They claim to have identified the drivers of company performance, but they have mainly shown the way that high performers are described.

The fact is, despite the success of books like From Good to Great, it is not logically justifiable to infer the goodness (or badness) of a company’s strategy, values, or leadership based on the fact of the success or failure of the company. The reason is obvious. Many companies go from good to bad and don’t change their strategy or their leadership. But there is a natural bias to attribute good qualities to management and leadership when a company is successful and to attribute bad qualities to management and leadership when a company is failing.

When an athletic team succeeds or fails, the manager is often assumed to be a genius or an idiot, but the same manager doing the same things year in and year out has some successful years and some years that are failures. Yet, many people are quick to give credit for the success of a team to the manager when the team wins, conveniently forgetting that the same manager led the team to a fifth place finish last year. The success or failure of the team leads many people to perceive qualities in the manager and his strategy, plan, preparation, work ethic, etc. One finds similar comments from TV golf announcers about various golf coaches. If a coach has several players who win tournaments or play well during a relatively short period of time, the coach is a genius. When his players fire him or quit winning, the same coach’s methods are archaic and outdated, not suitable for the modern game.

Ronald Reagan was sometimes called the Teflon President, but he might more accurately have been called the Halo Effect President. The man had very few qualities that qualified him to be the leader of the free world, but he was the most likeable man on the planet. He exuded confidence and steadfastness as the good guy in the white hat. He was the John Wayne of politics. He could also be self-effacing when it suited him and his ability to deliver a story or a joke was second to none. He had little difficulty giving the impression that he knew what he was talking about when he told us that trees cause more pollution than automobiles or that government is the cause of all our problems. The public had little problem excusing the fact that while he was president Oliver North was selling arms to Iran and using the money to fund a group of terrorists...excuse me...freedom fighters in Nicaragua, unbeknownst to Congress or the American people. Reagan had a great sense of humor and you felt you could trust him with your only offspring and he wouldn’t cheat you at cards. But his reputation for being a great leader is mainly conditioned by his personality, his great speech writers, and the media. When people long for a leader like Reagan to reappear what they are really longing for is an actor who could put anyone at ease with his perceived authority, honesty, confident manner, wry smile, and his incomparable sense of humor.

Barack Obama benefited tremendously from the halo effect in his 2008 election campaign for president. His powerful speaking ability and the fact that he’s highly educated and appears physically fit (though I understand he’s a smoker) led many people to assume he possesses many other fine qualities that would qualify him to be leader of the free world. The fact is that Mr. Obama had very little experience that would qualify him to be president of the United States. He was helped significantly, of course, in his election bid when his opponent, John McCain, chose Sarah Palin for a running mate, thereby undermining one of the main themes of his campaign: country first. There is little doubt that Sen. McCain has the right stuff to be president, but if there was anyone less qualified to be president than Mr. Obama, it was surely Ms. Palin. (She wasn’t running for president, of course, but if McCain died in office, she would have become leader of the free world.) Anyway, it appears the Founders didn’t think it would be too hard to be president since the only job qualifications are being “a natural born citizen,” at least thirty-five years old, and have lived here for fourteen years. That’s right. Most adults in this country meet the minimum qualifications to be president. That’s comforting.

In 1977, social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments.” This was a study on our lack of awareness of the influence on our thinking of the halo effect:

Students were told the research was investigating teacher evaluations. Specifically, they were told, the experimenters were interested in whether judgments varied depending on the amount of exposure students had to a particular lecturer. This was a total lie.

In fact the students had been divided into two groups who were going to watch two different videos of the same lecturer, who happened to have a strong Belgian accent (this is relevant!). One group watched the lecturer answer a series of questions in an extremely warm and friendly manner. The second group saw exactly the same person answer exactly the [same] questions in a cold and distant manner. Experimenters made sure it was obvious which of the lecturer’s alter-egos was more likeable. In one he appeared to like teaching and students and in the other he came across as a much more authoritarian figure who didn’t like teaching at all.

After each group of students watched the videos, they were asked to rate the lecturer on physical appearance, mannerisms and even his accent (mannerisms were kept the same across both videos). Consistent with the halo effect, students who saw the ‘warm’ incarnation of the lecturer rated him more attractive, his mannerisms more likeable and even his accent as more appealing. This was unsurprising, as it backed up previous work on the halo effect.

What was most interesting about this study is that the students believed that they had not been influenced by the likeability of the teacher in their global evaluations. The students were convinced that their global evaluations had influenced their liking or disliking the teacher.

The halo effect is at work when we buy a product because it was made by a company that makes something else that we believe is a good product. We seem to assume that if a company made a good product, the company must have many good qualities that will lead it to produce more good products. Many of us know from experience that this isn’t true. KitchenAid might make a fine dishwasher but it makes a lousy can opener. (My experience was with the can opener first. I wouldn’t even consider a KitchenAid dishwasher when my wife and I were in the market for one, but the fact is that there need be no necessary connection between their crummy can opener and their dishwasher.)

Advertisers take advantage of the halo effect when they hire famous people or beautiful people to sell their products. The advertisers are banking on the consumer’s tendency to judge the product favorably because they judge the actor or beautiful actress favorably.

James Randi took advantage of the halo effect when he tested two Russian ladies who claimed to be able to use their psychic powers to determine the personality and life experiences of someone from a photograph. He showed the ladies a picture of Ted Bundy, a handsome, wholesome-looking mass murderer. The results were both amusing and disgusting. The psychics thought Bundy was a fine fellow. (“Secrets of the Psychics” on Nova. First broadcast October 19, 1993.)

Finally, consider this:

A growing literature suggests that the halo effect may also apply to foods, and ultimately influence what and how much we eat. For instance, research has shown that people tend to consume more calories at fast-food restaurants claiming to serve “healthier” foods, compared to the amount they eat at a typical burger-and-fry joint. The reasoning is that when people perceive a food to be more nutritious, they tend to let their guard down when it comes to being careful about counting calories—ultimately leading them to overeat or feel entitled to indulge. This health halo effect also seems to apply to certain foods considered by many to be especially healthy, such as organic products. Specifically, some people mistakenly assume that these foods are more nutritious just because they carry an “organic” label—an area of longstanding active debate among food and nutrition scientists. (Science Daily)

I can’t attest to how fast or large this “growing literature” is, but according to the article there has been at least one study where the subjects were all given organic food, although some was labeled non-organic. The participants found the “organic” food tastier, less fatty, lower in calories, higher in fiber, and more nutritious than the “non-organic” food.

Sources

Nisbett, Richard E. and Timothy D. Wilson. 1977. The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 35 (4), April, 250-256.

Science Daily. 2011. Health Halo Effect: Don’t Judge a Food by Its Organic Label. April 11 <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110410130831.htm>, accessed 12/15/2012.

Thorndike, E. L. 1920.  A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology 4 (1): 25–29.

hindsight bias

Don’t trust everything your memory tells you. You may be constructing a memory from your present beliefs rather than from what was true in the past.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something said in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was. When a surprise event occurs and you say “I knew it all along,” you probably didn’t. Hindsight bias may be kicking in. Daniel Kahneman put it this way: “The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.”

Hindsight bias accounts for the tendency of believers in prophecies and psychic predictions to retrofit events to past oracular claims, however vague or obscure. For example, after the Challenger space shuttle disaster that killed seven U.S. astronauts on January 28, 1986, hindsight bias was used by followers of Nostradamus to claim that he had predicted it in the following verse:

D’humain troupeau neuf seront mis à part,

De jugement & conseil separés:

Leur sort sera divisé en départ,

Kappa, Thita, Lambda mors bannis égarés.

From the human flock nine will be sent away,

Separated from judgment and counsel:

Their fate will be sealed on departure

Kappa, Thita, Lambda the banished dead err (I.81).

Of course, to make the obscene retroactive clairvoyance complete, Nostradamus’s minions would have to speculate that teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe was pregnant with twins to make nine the total in the “flock.”

Hindsight bias also seems to account for the tendency of many people to think they can explain events that weren’t predicted after the events have happened. It is unacceptable to many people to think that major events—like a respected Wall Street investment manager running a Ponzi scheme that cost people perhaps as much as $50 billion—aren’t predictable. If only somebody had paid attention to this and that detail, Bernard Madoff could never have pulled it off. What is true is that a major impact event can be easily explained after the fact. The explanations may satisfy people and lead them to believe that they now understand how such an event happened, but there is no way to know whether collecting many facts and using them to explain what occurred will help prevent a similar event from happening in the future.

Why do we engage in hindsight bias? There are several reasons. The way memory works explains why we sometimes misremember predicting things we didn’t predict. Once we know something to be true, the mind can easily reconstruct the past so that our memories jibe with what actually happened. Also, we have a natural desire to see events as orderly and predictable, rather than as random and unpredictable. Daniel Kahneman explains:

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events. Baruch Fischhoff first demonstrated this “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, or hindsight bias, when he was a student in Jerusalem. Together with Ruth Beyth ... Fischhoff conducted a survey before President Richard Nixon visited China and Russia in 1972. The respondents assigned probabilities to fifteen possible outcomes of Nixon’s diplomatic initiatives. Would Mao Zedong agree to meet with Nixon? Might the United States grant diplomatic recognition to China? After decades of enmity, could the United States and the Soviet Union agree on anything significant? After Nixon’s return from his travels, Fischhoff and Beyth asked the same people to recall the probability that they had originally assigned to each of the fifteen possible outcomes. The results were clear. If an event had actually occurred, people exaggerated the probability that they had assigned to it earlier. If the possible event had not come to pass, the participants erroneously recalled that they had always considered it unlikely. Further experiments showed that people were driven to overstate the accuracy not only of their original predictions but also of those made by others. Similar results have been found for other events that gripped public attention, such as the O. J. Simpson murder trial and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion.

One danger of hindsight bias is that it might make a person overconfident about his ability to predict the future. Neal Roese of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Kathleen Vohs of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota found in their review of research on hindsight bias that it can make us overconfident in how certain we are about our own judgments. Overconfident entrepreneurs are more likely to take on unjustified risky ventures. As Kahneman notes: “Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad.”

Sources

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Roese, Neal. 2012. I Knew It All Along, Didn’t I? Perspectives on Psychological Science,  September.

ideomotor effect

Sometimes what seems mysterious can be explained by unconscious body language. You might want to pay more attention to subtle bodily movements that might be cues to yourself or others to respond in predictable ways.

The ideomotor effect refers to the influence of suggestion or expectation on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior. The movement of pointers on Ouija boards, of a facilitator’s hands in facilitated communication (aka supported typing), of hands and arms in applied kinesiology, and of some behaviors attributed to hypnotic suggestion, are due to ideomotor action.

Ray Hyman (1999) has demonstrated the seductive influence of ideomotor action on medical quackery where it has produced such appliances as the “Toftness Radiation Detector” (used by chiropractors) and “black boxes” used in medical radiesthesia and radionics (popular with naturopaths to harness “energy” used in diagnosis and healing.) Hyman also argues that such things as qigong and “pulse diagnosis,” popular in both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine as allegedly practiced by Deepak Chopra, are best explained in terms of ideomotor action and require no supposition of mysterious energies such as qi (chi).

The term ideomotor action was coined by William B. Carpenter in 1852 in his explanation for the movements of rods and pendulums by dowsers and some table lifting by spirit mediums (the ones that weren’t accomplished by cheating). Carpenter argued that muscular movement can be initiated by the mind independently of volition or emotions. We may not be aware of it, but suggestions can be made to the mind by others or by observations. Those suggestions can influence the mind and affect motor behavior.

Scientific tests by American psychologist William James, French chemist Michel Chevreul, English scientist Michael Faraday (Zusne and Jones 1989: 111), and American psychologist Ray Hyman (1999) have demonstrated that many phenomena attributed to spiritual or paranormal forces, or to mysterious “energies,” are actually due to ideomotor action. Furthermore, these tests demonstrate that “honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations” (Hyman 1999). The tests also show that suggestions that guide behavior can be given by subtle cues (Hyman 1977).

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Hyman, Ray. 1977. “Cold reading: how to convince strangers that you know all about them,” Zetetic. 1 (2):18-37.

Hyman, Ray. 1999. “The Mischief-Making of Ideomotor Action,” in The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 3 (2):34-43.

Zusne, Leonard and Warren Jones. 1989. 2nd ed. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Psychology Press.

illusion of control

Just because we feel good when we think we are in control of things doesn’t mean we’re in control.

One thing is certain: most of our thoughts and actions occur under conditions of uncertainty and the more uncertainty in our lives, the more anxiety we have. Anxiety is a state that most of us try to minimize. We avoid people or situations that might cause us anxiety unless we expect some big payoff for the added stress. We’ll get on an airplane even though we don’t want to because the reward of two weeks in Italy is deemed worth the psychic cost. But when we’re on that airplane it will not help to remind ourselves that we are in a metal tube 35,000 feet above the ground and that we have no knowledge of the pilot or any of the people who pieced together the parts of the airplane or who fueled it, provided maintenance, and reviewed it for security. You also don’t want to dwell on the fact that you will soon have to make your way through an airport terminal where your language is not the language of the people or the signs you might look to for help. And before you embark on that trip of a lifetime, you do not want to think about the time you will spend being treated like a suspected terrorist as you pass through various levels of airport security.

It may seem that airlines are more concerned about adding fees for various services than they are about reducing passenger anxiety, but the industry really is aware of our travel anxiety and actively seeks ways to reduce our stress. Read this flyer’s account of his experience on Singapore Airlines:

I was flying in economy class, but I still felt pampered. The flight attendants give you a hot towel at the start of the flight to refresh yourself. A nice thing given the long flight ahead and the ordeal to get to the airport and on the plane. It was also nice that they give out these Givenchy for Singapore Air toiletry bags with toothpaste, a toothbrush and a pair of socks.

The entertainment system is top notch. There are tons of movies to watch. American, European, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and Arabic movies are all represented. The music CD selection is also internationally diverse. There are also TV shows, radio shows, short stories and games to keep you entertained. The only thing missing here is Wi-Fi, which I believe they are working on providing (Jon L. on Yelp, 5/31/2011).

What Singapore provides is more than in-flight entertainment. It provides something to take your mind off of other things that might stress you out. The passenger controls what movies to watch, when to watch them, when to pause them, etc. This is real control...over the entertainment device. It gives you no control over the airplane, but it reduces anxiety by giving you control of something.

We not only feel better when we are in control of something. We feel better when we know somebody else is in control. (Think of how your anxiety level would rise if somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean you found out that the plane had no pilot.) We also feel better when we think we are in control of things even when we aren’t.

The illusion of control can not only make us feel better, it can drive us to accomplish things we otherwise might not accomplish. For example, there is an abundance of evidence that economic forecasting is a matter of chance, not skill. This has not prevented many economic forecasters and their followers from continuing to believe in their “system.” If these folks admitted that luck, not skill, accounts for whatever success they have, they’d quit. Of course, some people who mistake luck for skill should quit: gamblers, for instance. But if everybody who realized that chance, not skill, accounts for what they accomplish, would we really be better off? Is there really any harm in wearing your lucky sweater when you take a test, in shouting commands to your in-flight golf ball, or in willing a red traffic light to turn green? What harm can come from making a wish before you blow out the candles on a birthday cake or from saying a prayer before taking a test you didn’t study for?

There seems to be little harm in thousands of fans wearing their hats inside out and backwards in the belief that such action might influence the outcome of a baseball game. What harm is there in believing that an omnipotent being can be influenced to determine the outcome of a high school football game by having the team hold hands and utter an incantation? What harm can come from millions of people believing they can make global warming a hoax just by believing it is? Plenty.

Control, whether illusory or not, makes us feel powerful, which is a good feeling. Feeling that there is order and design in the universe, that some being is in control of everything that happens, is comforting to many people. What harm is there in believing that your prayers saved the astronauts or your aunt Hildie, or that some invisible being is controlling everything in the universe? Is it really a bad thing to believe that there are no coincidences and that everything happens for a reason? What’s wrong with believing it was your prayers that led some god to change the direction of a tornado so that it spared your house while obliterating your neighbor’s house and family? What’s the harm in obliterating truth and reality in favor of what you want to be true?

A great deal of harm can come from deluding yourself that you can control your health or your wealth, or somebody else’s health or wealth, by your thoughts and prayers or other superstitious actions. It is impressive that most of us can lift our arms when we want to, but it is delusional to think you can make other people’s arms lift by your thoughts. Your headache may have gone away a few hours after you did twenty jumping jacks, but you are deluding yourself if you believe the exercise caused the headache to go away. I suppose we could make it a rule that the illusion of control isn’t a bad thing as long as it doesn’t lead to delusional thinking that results in harm to oneself or others. If we did make that a rule, what would we then say about financial advisers who convince their clients that their system of economic forecasting is a good bet? Are these folks in the same category as people who pray instead of having their child’s diabetes treated by a medical doctor?

Whether illusory or not, control makes us feel safe. As I write this, the nation is mourning the mass murder of 27 people, 20 of them children six or seven years old. Understandably, most of us long to understand why a 20-year-old male would murder his mother before going on a rampage at an elementary school in rural Connecticut. How can we prevent this kind of thing from happening again? We don’t want to admit that we probably can’t prevent mass murderers from going on killing sprees. We can’t accurately predict who will become a mass murderer. We can try to understand what happened, though, and even though our understanding will be an illusion that will provide us with little more than the illusion of control, we go through the exercise every time something like this occurs.

I’ve read and listened to several attempts at understanding what happened in Newtown and at advising us what to do to prevent such tragedies from happening again. The most common cry is the cry for gun control. It’s the obvious answer. If Adam Lanza didn’t have a gun, he couldn’t have done what he did. Anybody can get a gun, however, and there are other ways to commit mass murder than by use of guns. Would a ban on semi-automatic rifles and other assault weapons, along with restricting gun ownership to people who can show a genuine need to own a gun and members of licensed gun clubs stop the next mass murder? Nobody knows, but in the 15 years before such restrictions were imposed in Australia there had been a dozen mass shootings with at least five deaths. In the 16 years since, there have been none. Australia also collected some 700,000 guns from those who were no longer qualified to own them. Would similar restrictions in the U.S.A. have a similar result? There may be too many significant dissimilarities between Australia and the U.S.A. for such restrictions to have a similar effect in America.

Another cry we hear now is the cry for better mental health services. Little is known about Adam Lanza, but it has been widely reported that he was a loner, socially awkward, and had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. None of these characteristic, even if true, qualify one as being mentally ill. It is assumed, however, that nobody in his right mind would kill a room full of first-graders. I agree, but there are other ways to be out of your mind besides being mentally ill. Of course we should have better mental health services, but this topic seems way out of line in terms of understanding what happened and trying to prevent it from happening again. People high on methamphetamine and other drugs go out of their mind. In fact, drug and alcohol abusers are much more likely to go on deadly rampages than those who are mentally ill. According to a study by Seena Fazel and Martin Grann (2006) the mentally ill account for about 4% of violence in the U.S. Those who are not mentally ill but abuse drugs or alcohol are seven times more likely to commit violent acts (1990, National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study). Providing better services for the mentally ill and drug abusers would be a good thing, but it remains an open question whether that would prevent any mass murders from happening.

Lanza lived with his mother in what used to be called “a broken home.” His “nuclear family” was no more. His parents had divorced years ago and his father had remarried and lived in another state. One fellow wrote to my local newspaper that it was “moral decay” brought about by the demise of the nuclear family that led to Lanza’s murderous spree. The appeal to the breakdown of morals is without a doubt the most simpleminded attempt imaginable to understand and control mass murderers. Lanza’s destructiveness doesn’t represent the breakdown of society, of morals, or of anything else except perhaps his own connection to his humanity. I suppose it provides some comfort to believe in the illusion that if only we followed some moral code all would be right with the world. Remember Prohibition?

Another cry comes from those advocating the arming of teachers and school administrators. Knowing that there are people inside the school who have access to guns might frighten and deter a would-be assassin from attacking the school. If not, the armed school personnel could defend the school against intruders bent on murder. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the National Rifle Association. Lanza, however, was stopped by his own hand, as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who murdered 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Also, a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High when the murders took place. He took four shots at one of the “bad guys” while 11 of the 13 murder victims were still alive. He missed four times.  There might be a more effective way to protect ourselves—a way that doesn’t forebode dangerous unforeseen consequences of adding to the arsenal. Putting more guns out there in the hands of citizens, even if they are well trained in the use of firearms, would create a false sense of security. LaPierre, like the avid gun collector Nancy Lanza, did not ask the most important question anyone proposing a plan of action should ask: what might go wrong?

Adam Lanza’s mother had five guns at home to protect her against the inevitable collapse of law and order she envisioned. Friends and relatives described her as a paranoid survivalist, a “prepper” ready for the collapse. Now, it seems, Nancy Lanza’s arsenal—she owned five legally registered guns—provided only the illusion of safety. Her son used one of the weapons to shoot her several times in the head. One question Nancy Lanza failed to ask as she prepped for Armageddon was the one that most planners—being overly optimistic and self-confident—fail to ask: what could go wrong with the plan?

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. Economic Forecasting in The Skeptic’s Dictionary.  <www.skepdic.com/economicforecasting.html>, accessed 12/16/2012.

Fazel, Seena and Martin Grann. 2006. The Population Impact of Severe Mental Illness on Violent Crime. American Journal of Psychiatry. 163:1397-1403.

illusion of justice

We may not like it, but sometimes bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.

The illusion of justice is the notion that our natural sense of justice is the actual way of the world. Our natural sense of justice inclines us to approve rewarding good and punishing evil. Our natural sense of justice inclines us to disapprove of bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people. It goes against our natural sense of justice to see bad behavior rewarded or good behavior punished. If I’m kind to you, I expect you to be kind to me, and vice versa. I don’t expect you to cheat me and you don’t expect me to cheat you. In the real world, of course, it is quite obvious that good and evil are distributed indiscriminately among the good, the bad, and the indifferent, and cheaters regularly get away with their malfeasance. To correct the injustice of reality, humans have blinded themselves to it or created myths to explain it. I’ll leave discussion of the various myths to others, though most readers are familiar with stories of divinities handing out rewards and punishments in an afterlife, misfortunes due to actions in a previous life, fatalistic philosophies involving some sort of power that has ordained everything to be just as it is for some indecipherable but good reason, goddesses of Fortune, Lady Luck, and the like.

The illusion of justice makes us vulnerable to stories about people getting what they deserve, whether good or bad, and to stories about being able to bring about good results by being good and avoiding bad results by avoiding what we consider bad habits or practices. To some extent, it is true that we can avoid bad health, for example, by following good nutritional habits, exercising regularly, and avoiding such things as smoking and excessive alcohol. It is not true, however, that you can avoid cancer by eating lots of organic fruits and vegetables while taking copious amounts of vitamin and mineral supplements. When someone who has smoked cigarettes for forty years is diagnosed with lung cancer, we’re not surprised. We see not only a causal connection between his smoking habit and his cancer, we see justice being done. He deserves it. “It serves him right.” Or, if someone you know has been cheating his customers for years and he finally gets caught and is sent to prison, you don’t feel sorry for him. “He brought it on himself.” But when a person who eats sensibly, exercises regularly, doesn’t drink or smoke, and does all the kinds of things we associate with a healthy lifestyle develops breast cancer or a mental illness, we say “it’s not fair.” Yet, there are many people who, under the influence of the illusion of justice, think that your cancer must be your fault. If you lose your job, it’s your fault. Never mind that you served the company well for thirty years and you were let go a few weeks shy of the date after which the company would have had to pay you quite a nice retirement benefit. It happened, so you deserved it. Everything happens for a reason. There are no coincidences or accidents. Justice always prevails. We may not know the reasons why certain people get cancer or lose their jobs, but you can be sure these actions are fair and just because the universe is fair and just. There is an inscrutable Divine Providence watching over everything to make sure that justice is always done. That’s why my life and house were spared by the tornado and you and yours were destroyed. Some god likes me because I’m good and obey his commands. Apparently, you’re an Atheist or a Muslim.

An infant born with cancer does not seem reconcilable with a just universe, but those under the illusion of justice will find some way to justify such unfortunate events. The idea that a cancer could just happen randomly due to some fluke like a speck of asbestos getting trapped in a lung cell that later mutates and develops into cancer doesn’t seem just or fair. Smoking for twenty-five years and getting lung cancer seems more fitting and in line with a just universe. It fits with what has been called “major event-major cause” reasoning or the proportionality bias. We often assume that a significant event must have a significant cause (Leman). We “tend to infer big causes for extreme events and small causes for insignificant events….We are unconsciously biased towards seeking proportionally grand, intricate, complex, and significant causes for grand, intricate, complex, or significant events” (Brotherton). So-called conspiracy theorists are often driven by the proportionality bias, as well as confirmation bias, and attribution biases.

The illusion of justice often conflicts with the self-serving bias, the tendency to think our own accomplishments are due to our efforts and skill, while the accomplishments of others are due to luck. The other side of the self-serving bias is the tendency to think that our own failures are due to external circumstances beyond our control, while the failures of others are due to their incompetence. The fact is that luck plays a major role in the success of most people and corporations. We are reluctant to accept this fact because it does not fit with the illusion of justice. We want to believe that hard work pays off, that there is a recipe for bringing about good results and if we follow it we’ll be successful. People who fail do so because they deserve to fail, except for us—we fail because we had bad luck. Those we despise who are successful are just lucky. When they fail, we see it as fitting and just.

Most people interested in the world of finance, business, and economics find a story satisfying if it provides—in the words of psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics Daniel Kahneman—“a simple message of triumph and failure that identifies clear causes and ignores the determinative power of luck and the inevitability of regression.” Nowhere is Kahneman’s point more clearly illustrated than in stories about successes and failures of individuals and businesses.

As far as I know, nobody has had a bestseller called “The Seven Habits of Lucky People,” “From Good to Great Luck,” “Lucky to Have Lasted This Long,” or “In Search of Luck.” But there have been several bestsellers in the area of business management and success that have hinged on the power of the illusion of understanding combined with the illusion of justice. Identifying successful people or companies by some agreed-upon measure is relatively easy. Finding shared characteristics of the successful ones is also relatively easy. And even though the failures and the mediocre might also share those characteristics, authors can generally rely on a large market of uncritical thinkers who will overlook this fact as well as the fact that many successful people don’t share these characteristics. Witness the success of such books as Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Good to Great, Built to Last, and In Search of Excellence and Outliers: the Story of Success. Only the latter, as far as I know, gives due credit to luck, but it uses the same flawed methods as the other authors, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, hear what Kahneman has to say about these success gurus:

Because luck plays a large role, the quality of leadership and management practices cannot be inferred reliably from observations of success. And even if you had perfect foreknowledge that a CEO has brilliant vision and extraordinary competence, you still would be unable to predict how the company will perform with much better accuracy than the flip of a coin. On average, the gap in corporate profitability and stock returns between the outstanding firms and the less successful firms studied in Built to Last shrank to nothing in the period following the study. The average profitability of the companies identified in the famous In Search of Excellence dropped sharply as well within a short time. A study of Fortune [magazine]’s “Most Admired Companies” finds that over a twenty-year period, the firms with the worst ratings went on to earn much higher stock returns than the most admired firms.

Good to Great had sold over two million copies before I bought mine in 2005. The author, Jim Collins, claims to be able to tell us “why some companies make the leap … and other don’t.” First, they hire good people. However, neither Collins nor anyone else has a surefire way of doing that. Their leaders are humble: which is true, as long as you don’t count the ones that aren’t. It’s also rather pointless, since there are many humble leaders who are total flops. In fact, for all the reader knows there may be many companies exhibiting all the qualities Collins identified in his great ones but which went from good to collapsed. Circuit City, for example, was high on his list in 2001. Today, Circuit City stock isn’t worth a penny. They had some good years: 1982 to 1997 are the ones Collins used in his assessment.

Collins boasts that if you had invested $1 in 1965 in the good-to-great companies he identified, by 2001 your money would have multiplied by 471, which was eight times better than what the market in general had done. So what? Every mutual fund salesman in the world knows that if you pick different beginning and end points for buying and selling stocks you get totally different results.

The point isn’t that books like Good to Great don’t have anything of value to say. They do. But their success is largely due to the illusion of understanding and the illusion of justice.

People want to believe that they can understand how to be a success by doing the right things—that following the right steps and working hard will pay off in the end. People want to believe that somebody has figured out the recipe for success and that they can not only get that recipe for the price of a book, but they can be assured of success if only they follow the recipe. They don’t want to believe that luck has anything to do with their success. They want to believe that people fail because they deserve to fail and people succeed because they earned it. The truth, however, is that not all hard work pays off, not all successful people deserve it, and good and bad things happen to the good and bad indiscriminately.

The moral of the story is not slack off because hard work might not pay off. Nor is the moral don’t buy books about how to succeed. The moral of the story is to be critical when looking for advice on how to succeed in business or anything else in life. Look carefully at the method the success guru uses. Most of the successful authors I’ve mentioned use faulty methods. Their methods are guaranteed to confirm their biases. For instance, if somebody tells you that x, y, and z are the qualities of successful businesses or guitar players or mutual fund managers, this means nothing unless ‘successful’ is clearly defined and it can be shown that those same qualities are not found in unsuccessful people. It may be true that all the successful people you tell stories about put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before making it big, but if you make no effort to show that most failures didn’t put in 10,000 hours of practice, what have you discovered? If you make no effort to find successes who didn’t put in 10,000 hours of practice, what have you discovered? Not much of interest. Finding a shared characteristic among successful people, or a characteristic not shared by successful and unsuccessful people, is not the same thing as figuring out what makes those people successful, lucky or not.

Finally, there’s the philosophical problem concerning words like ‘successful.’ Just because we use the same word to describe certain baseball players, musicians, politicians, corporations, CEOs, and gamblers, doesn’t mean there is an essence they all share. What accounts for success in sports may have little in common with what accounts for success in architecture or child rearing. Finding common traits among successes in a variety of fields only fuels the illusion of understanding.

Source

Brotherton, Rob. 2013. The President is Dead: Why Conspiracy Theories About the Death of JFK Endure. <conspiracypsychology.com/2013/11/21/jfk-conspiracy-theories/>, accessed 11/29/2013.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. The Regressive Fallacy in The Skeptic’s Dictionary. <www.skepdic.com/regressive.html>, accessed 11/27/2013.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Leman, Patrick. 2007. The lure of the conspiracy theory. New Scientist.com. <blog.tcrouzet.com/images_tc/nsconspiracy.pdf>, accessed 11/29/2013.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Robert I. Sutton. 2006. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. Harvard Business Review Press.

Rosenzweig, Phil. 2009. The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. Free Press.

illusion of skill

Don’t underestimate the role of luck or overestimate the role of skill in matters that are highly unpredictable.

The illusion of skill refers to the belief that skill, not chance or luck, accounts for the accuracy of predictions of things that are unpredictable, such as the long-term weather forecasts one finds in farmers’ almanacs and the predictions of market gurus about the long-term ups and downs of the stock market. The illusion of skill also accurately describes the apparent accuracy of remote viewers (people who claim they have the “gift” of telepathy or clairvoyance). Given all the guesses remote viewers make about what they claim to see and the latitude with which interpretation of those guesses is given, chance alone would account for some of those guesses seeming somewhat accurate. Subjective validation creates an illusion of skill not only to remote viewers, but to “experts” in such fields as palm reading, mediumship, astrology, and criminal profiling.

Stock gurus—people who predict the rise and fall of the price of stocks and have large numbers of people who act on their predictions—are essentially part of an entire industry “built largely on an illusion of skill” (Kahneman 2011: 212). No market guru has gone broke selling advice, despite the fact that market newsletters are—in the words of William A. Sherden (1994: 102)—”the modern day equivalent of farmers’ almanacs.” In 1994, the Hurlbert Financial Digest found that over a five-year period only one out of 108 market-timing newsletters beat the market. You might think that that one did so because of skill, but you’d be wrong. Chance alone would predict that more than one out of 108 would beat the market. If the one who got it right could do so again and again, you might have a case that some skill was involved. The fact is nobody consistently beats the market. The reason is that the market is inscrutable. Given the number of people predicting the rise and fall of stocks and the stock market as a whole, a few are likely to hit the mark once in a while just by chance. One or two might even make accurate predictions several years in a row. It would take decades, however, to get enough data to reasonably conclude whether the string of correct predictions was more likely due to skill than to chance. On the other hand, it can’t be denied that several market gurus have such significant followings that their predictions can become self-fulfilling prophecies. The prediction of a market rise or fall by one of these gurus can trigger a massive sell-off or buy-in and cause the market to rise or fall as “predicted.”

“The stock market is a psychological soup of fear, greed, hope, superstition, and a host of other emotions and motives,” according to Sherden. The market doesn’t follow a set of consistent or rational laws. The market’s volatility is due to its being a complex system with both rational and irrational forces at work (Sherden 1994: 118). Daniel Kahneman writes:

Some years ago I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of financial skill up close. I had been invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of some twenty-five anonymous wealth advisers, for each of eight consecutive years. (2011: 215)

Using 28 correlation coefficients, Kahneman found that the “results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” He told the executives of the firm that it was rewarding luck as if it were skill. They saw the data and couldn’t deny it, but they ignored the findings. “Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed,” wrote Kahneman. “The mind does not digest them.”

The illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain “an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers” (Kahneman 2011: 217).

A study done by researchers at Duke University indicates the depth of the problem of these illusions of skill and validity rampant in the corporate world:

For a number of years, professors at Duke University conducted a survey in which the chief financial officers of large corporations estimated the returns of the Standard & Poor’s index over the following year. The Duke scholars collected 11,600 such forecasts and examined their accuracy. The conclusion was straightforward: financial officers of large corporations had no clue about the short-term future of the stock market; the correlation between their estimates and the true value was slightly less than zero! When they said the market would go down, it was slightly more likely than not that it would go up. These findings are not surprising. The truly bad news is that the CFOs did not appear to know that their forecasts were worthless. (Kahneman 2011: 261)

Kahneman wryly comments: “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”

It’s probably not fair to pick on one individual to illustrate the illusion of skill, but the case of Elaine Garzarelli is too salient to pass up. She became famous overnight for predicting Black Monday (the collapse of the stock market on October 16, 1987). At the time she was a research analyst and money manager at Shearson Lehman Brothers. She based her prediction on fourteen monthly indicators. Just four days before Black Monday, Garzarelli announced on Money Line her prediction of “an imminent collapse in the stock market.” Business Week described her prediction as “the call of the century.” After the collapse, she continued to predict that the Dow would drop even lower. What she didn’t predict, however, was that the market would quickly rebound. Her indicators failed her more often than not. Sherden analyzed her predictions about the market going up or down from 1987 to 1996 and found she was right 38% of the time. She’d have done better flipping a coin. Her fame and fortune were made, however, based on one lucky guess. The mutual fund she managed was eventually shut down and she was fired by Shearson Lehman, but her luck did not give out. She’s now president of Garzarelli Capital, Inc., and has a flashy website where she sells subscriptions to her forecast reports and announces where she has been in the news lately.

Another case too salient to pass up is that of Bill Miller, a mutual fund manager who beat Standard and Poor’s 500 Index fifteen years in a row. What are the odds? CNN claimed that the odds were 372,529 to 1. Leonard Mlodinow figured the odds at 3 out of 4. CNN based its figure on watching one analyst make picks for fifteen years. Mlodinow based his figure on considering that there are more than 6,000 mutual fund managers and calculating the odds that at least one of them would beat S&P for fifteen years in a row over forty years. Miller’s streak ended, by the way. A short profile of him on insidermonkey.com reads: “Bill Miller was on top of the investment world just 5 years ago. Since then his $3.85 Billion Legg Mason Capital Management Value (LMVTX) mutual fund lost nearly 40%” (accessed on 1/15/2013). Tom Lauricella of The Wall Street Journal commented: “William H. Miller spent nearly two decades building his reputation as the era’s greatest mutual-fund manager. Then, over the past year, he destroyed it.”

Should investment advisers be avoided at all costs? Not necessarily. Sherden writes: “The best thing that an investment adviser can do for you is to assess your financial needs and design a tailored investment program to meet them. A good financial adviser will consider your tax situation, cash flow needs, and risk tolerance.”

If your financial adviser tells you that she has figured out the market and if you follow her advice she guarantees you’ll make a fortune, walk away….unless, of course, you believe that this is your lucky day.

Sources

Burton, Robert. 2008. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. St. Martin’s Press.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mlodinow, Leonard. 2009. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Vintage.

Sherden, William A. 1999. The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions. Wiley.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House.

illusion of understanding

Success at something is no guarantee you understand how to succeed. Luck may have had more to do with your success than you are willing to admit.

The illusion of understanding occurs frequently due to confirmation bias. By selecting only data that support one’s position and ignoring relevant data that would falsify or compromise one’s position, one can produce a convincing but misleading argument. By seeking only examples that confirm one’s belief and by ignoring examples that disconfirm it or reveal the insignificance of the data you’ve put forth, one can easily create the illusion of understanding. The illusion of understanding is particularly prominent in the field of economic forecasting.

Economic forecasters employ a variety of methods and formulas. Some forecasters, some of the time, make successful predictions, apparently on the basis of their methods. They appear to have identified real patterns in the market. The reality, however, is that all forms of successful economic forecasting are illusory because the economy is a complex system significantly affected by irrational forces (Kida 2006). In short, there is no logical system that can predict the market because the market isn’t logical. Anyone who thinks he has discovered a system that can “beat” the market is deceiving himself. (Note: “beating the market” means doing better than an index of funds, such as Standard and Poor’s 500, over some period of time.)

One fact hinders acceptance of the claim that markets are unpredictable: some people have correctly predicted that the market would rise or fall and some have made a killing from time to time by following their unique and special method of prediction. Yes, and a broken clock is right twice a day and some people do win the lottery using the dates of their grandchildren’s birthdays as a guide to selecting their numbers. Even though some people have made correct predictions about the market, those predictions should not be taken as evidence of the power of any particular method of economic forecasting. Psychics make correct predictions from time to time. Does that mean they’re really psychic? Like psychics, economic forecasters who are right from time to time take full credit for their correct predictions. They made them on the basis of skill; luck had nothing to do with it. Right.

Think about it. If stock analysts could really beat the market consistently, wouldn’t they be stinking rich? Do you really think they are a clan of benevolent elves whose only goal is to help people like you get rich from their technical advice? Their nefarious cousins appear in infomercials all the time, telling stories about unfathomable riches that await you if you invest in their program. How do these folks make their money? They make their money not by using their program but by selling it to others.

What about the superstars? Aren’t there freelancers and top mutual fund managers who consistently beat the market because of their special expertise? Aren’t there investment managers from pension funds, insurance companies, and foundations that consistently beat the market because of their genius? No. It’s easy to pick a person or a fund and show its superiority to the market, as long as you are very selective about what time period you evaluate. Over the long haul, however, no one person and no fund does better than chance at beating the market (Sherden). It is true that some fund managers do better than others over certain periods of time. The few examples of consistently superior performance over a period of, say, four or five years, however, are what one would expect by chance (Malkiel). Analyses of the Forbes honor roll funds over the period 1973 to 1998 indicate that they underperformed the S&P 500 stock index. In short, there’s no scientific evidence that professionally managed funds, as a group, perform any better than a randomly selected group of stocks (Kida; Malkiel).

What about the geniuses at the Fed, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Congressional Budget Office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the National Bureau of Economic Research? Surely these top economic advisers with their large budgets and sophisticated tools of analysis are able to consistently make accurate predictions about such things as the gross national product and inflation. Wrong! “A review of twelve studies on forecasting accuracy, covering the periods 1970 to 1995, concluded that economists can’t even predict the major turning points in our economy. The top economic institutions listed above were wrong in their predictions of forty-six out of forty-eight turning points in our economy (Kida). That’s about a 4 percent success rate. Not too impressive. Nevertheless, nobody ever went broke claiming to understand the secret of the market. Books that make such claims might be a dime a dozen, but millions of people are standing in line to buy them (figuratively speaking, of course).

Sources

Kida, Thomas. 2006. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. Prometheus Books.

Burton Malkiel. 2007. A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing. Revised and updated. W. W. Norton and Company.

Sherden, William A. 1999. The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions. Wiley.

inattentional blindness

Sometimes we don’t see things that are right before our eyes.

Inattentional blindness is an inability to perceive something that is within one’s direct perceptual field because one is attending to something else. The term was coined by psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, though the phenomenon had been identified many years earlier by Ulric Neisser and Robert Becklen who called it selective looking. Mack and Rock were able to show that, under a number of different conditions, if subjects were not attending to a visual stimulus but were attending to something else in the visual field, a significant percentage of the subjects were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes:

Because this inability to perceive, this sighted blindness, seemed to be caused by the fact that subjects were not attending to the stimulus but instead were attending to something else ... we labeled this phenomenon inattentional blindness.

Mack and Rock argue that “there is no conscious perception without attention.” We might add that visual perception does not work like a video or any other kind of recorder. Objects or movements may occur in the visual field that are not attended to and may not be consciously or unconsciously perceived. Things can change in the visual field without our being aware of the changes. Perception, like memory, is a constructive process, and it seems that the brain builds its representations from a few salient details, often determined by our purposes or desires. Thus, two people may witness the same events but see and remember quite different things, even if both are good observers paying close attention to what is going on.

Simons and Chabris have replicated and extended the work of Mack and Rock with experiments that have subjects attending to a specific task while watching a film, such as counting how many times a basketball is passed from one team member to another while someone walks through the scene carrying an umbrella or wearing a gorilla suit. A surprisingly large percentage of subjects do not perceive something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they are observing, if they are attending to something else in their visual field.

The possibility of inattentional blindness should always be considered when dealing with conflicting eyewitness testimony where one of the parties claims that he did not see something that the other party saw and that might seem like something that anybody who was looking should have seen. The party who says he did not see what might seem too salient to miss may have been paying attention to something else at the time. Of course, one could be lying about not seeing something that one saw, but even the most honest person in the world might not see something that you think anybody should have seen.

Inattentional blindness may explain, for example, how a pilot with an interest in crop circles could fly right over one without even noticing it. The pilot had flown to see a recently discovered crop circle near Stonehenge. After visiting the site, he flew back to the airport to refuel before setting off on a trip that took him back over the site he had just visited. On the return flight he noticed another crop circle near the one he had visited earlier in the day and swears that the new circle was not there just forty-five minutes earlier. The new circle was very elaborate and could not have been produced by human hoaxers in such a short time. He concluded that some mysterious force must have been at work. Perhaps, but it seems more likely that the pilot experienced inattentional blindness when he was flying to the airport. He was focused on other tasks—such as checking his instrument panel and fuel gauge—when he flew over the site and didn’t notice what was right beneath him all the time. (See the 2002 film Crop Circles - Quest for Truth directed by William Gazecki.)

Research by Chabris and Simons indicates that inattentional blindness is a “necessary, if unfortunate, by-product of the normal operation of attention and perception” (2010: 38). They point out that even radiologists, who are highly trained experts at detecting visual signs of medical problems, “can still miss subtle problems when they ‘read’ medical images.” This may explain why my dentist didn’t see a crack in one of my teeth on an x-ray until I started to complain about the pain in a particular area. To eliminate inattentional blindness, we’d have to eliminate focused attention. That would not be a good idea. Even worse would be the condition of being able to attend to everything in our sensory field at once. It would drive us mad.

Research also shows that training people to improve their attention abilities may do nothing to help them detect unexpected objects. “If an object is truly unexpected, people are unlikely to notice it no matter how good (or bad) they are at focusing attention” (Chabris and Simons 2010: 32). Remember this the next time you’re at the airport watching the transportation security screener do his or her job. It should not be surprising to find that these folks miss a lot of contraband, some of which has been planted by their bosses to test them.

It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that magicians take advantage of inattentional blindness when doing sleight-of-hand tricks. The process of misdirection involves getting you to pay attention to one thing while the magician does something right before your eyes that you don’t see or pay attention to.

Sources

Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown.

Mack, Arien and Irvin Rock. 2010. Inattentional Blindness. A Bradford Book.

Neisser, Ulric and Robert Becklen. 1975. Selective looking: Attending to visually specified events. Cognitive Psychology. 7 (4), 480-494.

intentionality bias

We have an innate drive to see things as intentional and purposive. Unfortunately, not everything is as it seems.

Intentionality bias refers to the tendency to see intentions in the movements of both animate and inanimate objects. This bias serves us well in most interactions with purposive agents, such as other humans, but even then we often see intentionality or purposiveness where there is none. A drunk bumps into you at the bar and spills his drink on your back. You’re sure he did it on purpose, though it may well have been an accident.

In ambiguous situations, some people might view an act as unintentional, while others see it as intentional. Your sister helps clear the dishes after dinner and drops a cherished serving dish you brought back from a foreign country, shattering it into a dozen shards. Everyone else accepts her apology for the accident. You’re sure she did it on purpose to get back at you for some slight she may have felt during the course of the mealtime conversation.

Most adults who have learned the basics of science are likely to see processes in the natural world—such as thunderstorms, earthquakes, or the eruption of volcanoes—in mechanistic terms. We don’t think intentional agents bring about such events. We learned in school, however, that many of our ancient ancestors perceived the natural world as full of “spirits” or invisible intentional agents. It seems likely that intentionality bias emerged with the evolution of the earliest humans. Several studies on intentionality bias in children indicate that their instinctive way of perceiving and making sense out of the natural world is to see intentional agents behind the movements of many things that adults attribute solely to mechanistic forces. Intentionality bias in children has led Justin L. Barrett, a psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary, to claim that we are “born believers” in religious claims and that “religion comes nearly as naturally to us as language.”

I would argue that all that we’re justified in inferring from the natural bias toward perceiving intentional agents behind the movements of both animate and inanimate objects is that it is natural to think anthropomorphically about natural events and that it’s natural to think that others like us have intentions like we do. It is a long way from the intentionality bias to religion of any kind, though clearly some religions have taken advantage of this bias in promoting their beliefs. Seeing agents behind weather patterns or geologic events need not lead to personifying those agents into beings like ourselves, only more powerful. Attributing good looks, immortality, perfect health, and magical powers to gods may have been the next step for many early human societies, but was it inevitable that that step be taken? Once that step was taken, was it inevitable that humans would start trying to control these agents with bribes of virgins, burnt meat, and sizzling rice soup (ok, I made up the latter, but different cultures offered up different things to their gods based on local tastes). There are some logical gaps in moving from seeing intentions in a thunderstorm to seeing a “pure spirit” whose intentions created the entire universe to building worship houses to appease and honor this supreme being. It is a long way from seeing purpose in an earthquake to seeing earthquakes as direct acts by a supreme being to harm creatures that exist only because the being wills it. There is no necessary connection between seeing agents everywhere in nature and seeing everything in nature and human society occurring only because some invisible being with extreme powers wills it. Also, the leap to making claims that some of these invisible agents communicate with humans in dreams or visions and reveal the gods’ intentions wasn’t inevitable. Intentionality bias has not led inevitably to claims that one’s life and ambitions are part of some god’s plan. On the other hand, without belief in intentionality, no gods would likely have been created by humans.

The intentionality bias is stronger in some people than in others. Combined with the human need for significance and meaning, we have at one extreme people who see everything as purposive. Nothing happens by accident. Even apparent accidents have a meaning. An invisible supreme being not only watches over everything that happens, that being doesn’t let anything happen except according to plan. At the other extreme are those who see no intentionality at all in the natural world and who see all human acts, even intentional acts, as determined by causes. Many people see no need for gods, spirits, or any other invisible intentional agents to explain the natural world. In the social world, there seem to be some people who find it very difficult to “read the minds” of other humans, but who have little difficulty in “reading the minds” of cattle or other animals. Temple Grandin, who was diagnosed as autistic as a child and who says that today she would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, comes to mind. She partially attributes this ability to empathize more with cattle than with humans to the fact that she thinks in pictures. (Today, one-third of the cattle and hogs raised in the United States are handled in facilities Grandin designed.) There has been some research that suggests a deficit in the intentionality bias is related to autism and Asperger syndrome (Phillips et al.).

The tendency of early humans and modern children to see intentional agents behind mechanistic processes may be an expression of an essential adaptation for social creatures such as humans. The inability to perceive the intentions of others is a major hindrance to social development. It is obvious that the intentionality bias is a necessary condition for perceiving the intentions of others. If you can’t perceive intentionality, you certainly can’t perceive the specific intentions of others.

The advantages of the intentionality bias to social beings are many. Cooperative collective action may be fine for ants and termites functioning mechanistically and without conscious regard for the intentions of their comrades in building or carrying supplies. But the scope of their actions is severely limited by the inability to perceive purposiveness in each other’s behaviors. Instinctive reactions to others, unaided by a natural tendency to perceive their intentions, would have kept our species from evolving into the creatures that built pyramids, aqueducts, skyscrapers, and cathedrals. The inability to determine whether another animal’s intentions are benign or malevolent would be a great disadvantage to just about any mammal.

Some have linked mirror neurons to the intentionality bias. Mirror neurons allegedly discharge both when a person (or monkey) executes a motor act and when it observes another individual (a human being or another monkey) performing the same or a similar motor act. The following abstract might help clarify the idea that mirror neurons, if they are real, are linked to intentionality bias:

Our social life rests to a large extent on our ability to understand the intentions of others. What are the bases of this ability? A very influential view is that we understand the intentions of others because we are able to represent them as having mental states. Without this meta-representational (mind-reading) ability their behavior would be meaningless to us. Over the past few years this view has been challenged by neurophysiological findings and, in particular, by the discovery of mirror neurons. The functional properties of these neurons indicate that intentional understanding is based primarily on a mechanism that directly matches the sensory representation of the observed actions with one’s own motor representation of those same actions. These findings reveal how deeply motor and intentional components of action are intertwined, suggesting that both can be fully comprehended only starting from a motor approach to intentionality.

The tendency to infer intentionality in the behavior of others has been the subject of much study. There have been several experiments with both children and adults that have shown that both have little difficulty in seeing the movement of computer generated colored shapes as intentional. I see several benefits stemming from such research. One is to determine how strong the intentional bias is in people; the other is to try to help those who suffer socially because they do not have a strong intentional bias. Another benefit is that such research helps establish just how natural and strong the tendency to find causal relationships, even misguided intentional relationships, is in human beings. Intuitively, an adult might see one triangle as “chasing” a circle, but on reflection most adults recognize that chasing requires intentionality and triangles aren’t intentional agents. Intuitively, one might perceive invisible agents guiding natural processes or watching over what happens to you, but on reflection adults should recognize the implausibility of these agents actually existing. After all, if you found yourself unable to recognize intentionality in others, the last place you’d think to look to rectify this problem would be for intentional agents controlling the situation.

If humans had not abandoned the belief that everything in nature is intentional—sometimes called the teleological view of the universe—science could not have developed. Well, it could have developed if we had posited some sort of Leibnizian universe where the mechanistic and the teleological are synchronized by a supreme agent in control of everything. I’ll leave it to others to try to explain why Leibniz’s attempt to harmonize materialism and idealism, mechanism and teleology, and mind and body didn’t catch on. Suffice it to say that his ideas are a bit farfetched and rather implausible. In any case, if everything in nature is an effect of some intentional agent, order and predictability become a problem. Some might think this problem disappears if we posit a single agent for everything, which might work provided the agent isn’t whimsical. In any case, such an agent is an unnecessary hypothesis for science.

It may be of interest to those trying to connect intentionality bias with religious belief that psychology, which began as the study of the mind or psyche, became widely accepted as a science when it became the study of behavior. Why? Because minds seem hidden from observation, whereas behavior is measurable and observable. With the development of various technologies in neuroscience, the invisible mind has been shelved in favor of the brain, whose functions can be made visible by various scanning devices. Whether this reliance on scanning devices to uncover the mind in the brain is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

So, I wouldn’t claim that intentionality bias explains why belief in gods is popular or why religions evolved into the major social institutions they’ve become. But the appeal to intentional agents behind natural events is enhanced for many people because of this bias. The appeal of gods and religions, however, must involve other things besides being in harmony with our natural instinct to see movements in animate and inanimate objects as being caused by the will of intentional agents. I’ll leave it to others, however, to address such issues as the desire for immortality, justice, protection, and meaning. There is one topic, however, that I won’t leave to others to discuss: the connection, if any, between intentionality bias and the belief that plants, animals, planets, and even the whole universe is designed and purposive. If it is natural to believe in design, it is natural to believe in a designer.

Some researchers have found evidence that children naturally perceive the world as designed. It should not be surprising that evolution by natural selection is not intuitive, since the idea didn’t emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century. So, it should not be surprising that education in science would be a necessary precursor to giving up the idea of a designed universe in favor of one that looks like it’s designed but is actually the result of natural forces playing out over billions of years. It may be intuitive to perceive order as coming about from intentional agents, while disorder can be perceived as coming about with or without the intervention of intentional agents. But in addition to our natural, instinctive way of seeing the world, we also have the ability to reflect on what we observe and overcome our natural instincts. Just because it is natural to see the world as designed doesn’t mean the world is designed. We need not be a slave to the brain, which, after all, deceives us about many things. Why should we be surprised if the brain tricks us into believing in gods and other intentional agents as the designers of plants, animals, and the vast expanse we call our universe?

Sources

Barrett, Justin L. 2012. The God issue: We are all born believers. NewScientist. March 21 <www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328562.000-the-god-issue-we-are-all-born-believers.html>, accessed 12/17/2012.

Burton, Robert. 2013. A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves. St. Martin’s Press.

Phillips, Wendy, Simon Baron-Cohen and Michael Rutter. 1998. Understanding Intention in Normal Development and in Autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology. 16, 337-348.

Rizzolatti, G and C. Sinigaglia. 2007. Mirror neurons and motor intentionality.  Functional Neurology. Oct-Dec;22 (4):205-10.

law of truly large numbers

There really are chance or random events—coincidences, if you will. You may think the odds of some things happening together are improbable and meaningful, but somebody who knows about numbers and statistics might tell you otherwise.

Humans are very good at finding meaning or significance where there is none. It doesn’t take much mental effort to validate words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate and personally meaningful and significant. Psychologists call this process subjective validation. Since most of us are innumerate, we often find significance in purely coincidental events. If you think of all the pairs of things that can happen in a person’s lifetime and add to that our very versatile ability to find meaningful connections between things in ambiguous situations, it is likely that most of us will experience many meaningful coincidences, but we are the ones who give them meaning. Given the fact that there are billions of people and the possible number of meaningful coincidences is millions of billions, it is inevitable that many people will experience some very weird and uncanny coincidences every day. Put another way, with a large enough sample size, just about any possible weird coincidence will happen. This is sometimes called the law of truly large numbers.

In their article on coincidences in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller write about a woman who won the New Jersey lottery twice. The New York Times called her chances of doing so “1 in 17 trillion.” However, statisticians Stephen Samuels and George McCabe of Purdue University calculated the odds of someone winning the lottery twice to be something like 1 in 30 over a four-month period and better than even odds over a seven-year period. Why? Because players don’t buy one ticket for each of two lotteries, they buy multiple tickets every week.

Most people are surprised when they discover that in a random selection of twenty-three persons there is a 50 percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthday.

Mathematician John Littlewood (1885-1977) defined a miracle as something deemed to have special significance and occurring with a probability of one in a million. Littlewood calculated that a typical person would experience about ten miracles a year during his or her lifetime. He based his calculation on assuming that the typical person is awake and alert about eight hours a day and that events occur at the rate of about one per second.

The odds of something happening at a million to one might strike you as being so large as to rule out chance or coincidence. However, with over 7 billion people on Earth, a million to one shot will occur frequently. Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of something happening, soon afterward something similar happens. With 7 billion people having an average of five dreams a night, there should be about 35 billion dreams each night. That many of those dreams can be matched up with real events isn’t that surprising. Each person has thousands of thoughts and experiences each day. That some of them can be found to match up to real events seems more likely than not, especially if one considers that we are not too stringent in setting criteria for what counts as a dream come true.

When we think of coincidences as meaningful, we should remind ourselves that the meaning or significance of events is provided by us, not by the events. It is natural to think magically, to think that events which we connect in some meaningful way happen for a reason. For many people, it is nearly impossible to accept that most of the time stuff just happens.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Martin, Bruce. 1998. Coincidences: Remarkable or Random? Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 22.5, September / October.

Rosengren, Karl S. et al. Editors. 2000. Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children. Cambridge University Press.

Stevens, Jr., Phillips. 2001. Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Skeptical Inquirer. November/December.

Vyse, Stuart A. 2000. Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. Oxford University Press.

Zusne,  Leonard and Warren Jones. 1989. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking 2nd edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

magical thinking

When you were a child, all things were interconnected in ways that defy physical laws. Grown up scientists can show you that physical laws that govern the universe are more magical than any superstition you had as a child.

Magical thinking is a belief in the interconnectedness of all things through forces and powers that transcend physical connections. It is “a fundamental dimension of a child’s thinking” (Zusne and Jones). Magical thinking invests special powers and forces in things and sees them as symbols on various levels. According to anthropologist Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr., “the vast majority of the world’s peoples ... believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them.” He believes there is a neurobiological basis for this, though the specific content of any symbol is culturally determined.

One of the driving principles of magical thinking is the notion that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that defies scientific testing (the so-called law of similarity—that like produces like or that effect resembles cause). Another driving principle of magical thinking is the belief that “things that have been either in physical contact or in spatial or temporal association with other things retain a connection after they are separated” (the so-called law of contagion) (Frazer). Think of relics of saints that are supposed to transfer spiritual energy. Think of psychic detectives claiming that they can get information about a missing person by touching an object that belongs to the person (psychometry). Or think of the pet psychic who claims she can read your dog’s mind or contact your dead pet’s soul by looking at a photo of the dog. Or think of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, the idea that there are mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and collective memories within species. (Coincidentally, Sheldrake also studies psychic dogs and parrots.)

According to psychologist James Alcock, “‘Magical thinking’ is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link. For example, if you believe that crossing your fingers brought you good fortune, you have associated the act of finger-crossing with the subsequent welcome event and imputed a causal link between the two.” In this sense, magical thinking is the source of many superstitions. Alcock notes that because of our neurobiological makeup we are prone to magical thinking and that therefore critical thinking is often at a disadvantage.

Zusne and Jones define magical thinking as the belief that:

(a) transfer of energy or information between physical systems may take place solely because of their similarity or contiguity in time and space, or (b) that one’s thought, words, or actions can achieve specific physical effects in a manner not governed by the principles of ordinary transmission of energy or information.

Three of the more obvious examples of magical thinking are astrology, graphology, and palmistry.

Other sciences have led us away from superstition and magical thinking; parapsychology, on the other hand, tries to lead us into it. Dean Radin, a foremost apologist for parapsychology, notes that “the concept that mind is primary over matter is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy and ancient beliefs about magic.” However, instead of saying that it is now time to move forward and give up the magical thinking of childhood, he rebuffs “Western science” for rejecting such beliefs as “mere superstition.”

Sources

Alcock, J. 1995. The Belief Engine. Skeptical Inquirer. 19 (3): 255-263.

Frazer, James George. 1922. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. (Touchstone 1995 reprint edition).

Radin, Dean. 1997. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperCollins.

Rosengren, Karl S. et al. Editors. 2000. Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children. Cambridge University Press.

Stevens, Jr., Phillips. 2001. Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Skeptical Inquirer. November/December.

Vyse, Stuart A. 2000. Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. Oxford University Press.

Zusne,  Leonard and Warren Jones. 1989. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking 2nd edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

motivated reasoning

You’re not as unbiased and objective as you think you are. You not only pay more attention to anything that supports your beliefs than to evidence contrary to your beliefs, you try to turn evidence against your beliefs into evidence in favor of your beliefs. You, in short, are unbelievable. There might be some comfort in knowing that you are not alone.

We’re all familiar with the kind of biased perception that occurs in players and their fans during sporting events. Everybody sees the same play—say a close play on a runner in baseball trying to beat out a bunt—but one side sees the runner as safe, the other side sees the runner as out. Whatever the umpire sees, his judgment—as well as his ancestral lineage—will be called into question by one side or the other. This kind of biased perception might be called motivated perception because of its similarity to what social psychologists call motivated reasoning.

Motivated reasoning takes confirmation bias to the next level. Ordinary confirmation bias makes it cognitively easy to recognize data that support what we already believe. Ordinary confirmation bias makes it difficult for us to perceive data that disconfirm what we believe. Motivated reasoning takes disconfirming data and turns it into confirming data. For example, in a study of “30 committed partisans during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004,” Drew Westen et al. “presented subjects with reasoning tasks involving judgments about information threatening to their own candidate, the opposing candidate, or neutral control targets.” Even though the evidence was made up and presented equally to the partisan subjects, they took evidence against their own candidate and made it favorable and they took evidence favorable to the opposing candidate and made it unfavorable. Other studies have found something similar: when we have a strong emotional commitment to a belief, we don’t just dismiss disconfirming evidence, we rationalize it and twist it so that it becomes confirming evidence. This all happens at the unconscious level. Consciously, we think we are being objective and unbiased in our evaluations. Psychologists call this the illusion of objectivity.

Consider the following research on the death penalty. People who either supported or opposed capital punishment because they believed it deterred crime (or didn’t) were shown two phony studies. Each study employed a different statistical method to prove its point. Let’s call them method A and method B. For half the subjects, the study that used method A concluded that capital punishment works as a deterrent and the study that used method B concluded that it doesn’t. The other subjects saw studies in which the conclusions were reversed. If people were objective, those on both sides would agree that either method A or method B was the best approach regardless of whether it supported or undermined their prior belief (or they’d agree that it was a tie). But that’s not what happened. Subjects readily offered criticisms such as “There were too many variables,” “I don’t think they have complete enough collection of data,” and “The evidence given is relatively meaningless.” But both sides lauded whatever method supported their belief and trashed whatever method did not (Mlodinow).

This is disconcerting. We think we’re unbiased and objective, but unconsciously we are being driven to evaluate data to confirm what we already believe and further disconfirm what we already believe is wrong regardless of the nature of the evidence.

There are two main ways that motivated reasoning manifests itself: by selective use of evidence and by giving improper weight to various kinds of evidence (Cf. Carroll 2011, chapter 8, “The Fallacy-Driven Life”). Many times, these two biases work together. For example, many anti-vaccination folks not only give more weight to anecdotal evidence than to scientific studies, they ignore all anecdotes that are contrary to their beliefs. The only evidence some people need to convince them that vaccinations cause autism is that their child or some child they’ve read about was diagnosed with autism after getting a vaccination. They not only ignore the scientific studies that have found no link between vaccinations and autism, they also ignore both the individual cases of children who were vaccinated and never developed autism and the individual cases of children who were not vaccinated but developed autism anyway.

People who make a living as mediums claiming to get messages from the “spirit” world depend on believers ignoring both the medium when she errs and also the scientific studies that disconfirm psychic abilities of mediums in general. There are also those who will appeal to scientific studies to support their belief in psychic powers, regardless of the quality of those studies; these believers will also ignore or belittle all the studies that don’t support their beliefs.

Young Earth creationists (YECs) provide an excellent example of motivated reasoning. To maintain their position that the universe is only a few thousand years old, YECs must reject nearly all science and confabulate new laws of nature and new rules of logic and evidence, as well as subject themselves to ridicule for their willful ignorance and irrational adherence to the myths of an ancient, pre-scientific people. Anti-evolutionists who accept that the universe is billions of years old are another example of motivated reasoning, though their rationalizations need not be nearly as convoluted as those of the YECs.

Anthropogenic global warming deniers demonstrated motivated reasoning when they put more weight in the views of 31,000 scientists—few of whom were climate scientists—than in the views of the vast majority of climate scientists. It would not take much investigation to find out that what motivates the deniers is not the evidence but their political and economic beliefs. (Here we are not talking about disagreements over policy, but over whether human behaviors and practices are largely responsible for global warming.)

Nobody is immune to motivated reasoning. Worse, it is often accompanied by an attitude of mistrust regarding the motives of those who disagree with us. Combine motivated reasoning with our own sense of being unbiased and objective, while being sure that our opponent is biased and not objective, and you have a recipe for predictable obstinacy. It’s amazing anybody ever changes his mind about anything he feels strongly about! Yet, it happens.

Evolutional biologist Stephen Jay Gould noted with obvious admiration that a distinguished stratigraphy professor at Columbia University (where Gould did graduate work), who had initially ridiculed the theory of continental drift, “spent his last years joyously redoing his life’s work” (Gould 1979: 160) after the evidence from the field now known as plate tectonics became available.

Psychiatrist Dr. Robert Spitzer, a proponent of “reparative therapy,” the treatment of homosexuals aimed at changing their sexual orientation, changed his mind about this highly emotional issue. Spitzer not only changed his mind, he issued a public apology to the gay community:

I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.

In 2001, Spitzer delivered a paper before the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and claimed his study of 200 homosexuals found that 66% of the men and 44% of the women had achieved “good heterosexual functioning” through therapy. The APA officially disavowed the paper and when it was published in the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2003, the paper was heavily criticized in the psychiatric community for its sampling method and for the criteria used to measure success. Spitzer now (April 2012) admits that his critics were right. His apology was published in the same journal as his original paper. In part, he writes:

The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.

So, it is possible to change one’s mind about issues one has a deep emotional investment in. Why some people change their minds when they re-examine the evidence while others will never change their mind is puzzling. We know that some people do change their minds about highly emotional issues and that many people are on the fence about many such issues. This should give hope to those of us who engage in public argumentation on these kinds of topics that our efforts are not always in vain.

Sources

Bloom, Paul and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. 2007. Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science. Science. May 18, vol. 316.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2011. Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! James Randi Educational Foundation.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1979. Ever Since Darwin. W.W. Norton & Company.

Kunda, Ziva. 1990. The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin. Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498.

Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. 2011.Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34, 57–111.

Mlodinow, Leonard. 2012. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Random House, Inc.

Mooney, Chris. 2011. The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science. Mother Jones. May/June.

Prasad, Monica et al. 2009. “There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification. Sociological Inquiry. <sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf>, accessed 12/18/2012.

Westen, Drew et al. 2006. Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. vol. 18 no. 11, pp. 1947–1958.

negativity bias

We’re designed by nature to pay more attention and react more quickly and more strongly to negative than to positive news.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.—Marc Antony, Julius Caesar by Shakespeare (act 3, scene ii)

I hate losing more than I love winning.—Billy Beane

Brief contact with a cockroach will usually render a delicious meal inedible. The inverse phenomenon—rendering a pile of cockroaches on a platter edible by contact with one’s favorite food—is unheard of.” So begins a classic paper by Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman.

You might think you’re weird when a thousand good things happen but you focus on the one bad thing. You’re not. That’s the way our brains are hardwired. We’re designed by nature to pay more attention and react more quickly and more strongly to negative than to positive news. One salient misdeed by a person will often outweigh years of good works. Years of building up a positive image can be destroyed in an instant by a single misstep. This tendency to give more weight to the negative is called negativity bias and is defined as “the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.” Our brain evolved to react more quickly to fear than to hope, to respond to a threat more quickly and more intensely than to an opportunity for pleasure. This trait has carried over into modern times in ways that are not always beneficial.

A friend of mine is a headhunter for executives in the field of education. His latest job ended with members of a College Board split between two candidates for the position of president. Their solution? Each board member would call someone who works with one of the candidates and ask the one called questions about the candidate. The Board also plans to ask the former president of the college for his opinion on the finalists. It is very likely that one negative comment about either candidate will outweigh several positive comments and that that one negative comment, even if just a personal opinion and not even true will probably doom one candidate or the other. It is unlikely any investigation will be made to verify whatever the Board members are told over the telephone.

Daniel Kahneman writes:

The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.

However, negativity bias makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those who would play on our fears. For example, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor under president George W. Bush, may not have had any evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but she could put the fear of Zeus into many people just by warning us that the “smoking gun of evidence for WMDs in Iraq could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (Remember the anti-Goldwater ad with the mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb explosion following a scene with a little girl plucking daisy petals off a flower? It’s called “the Daisy girl ad” and you can find it on YouTube and Wikipedia.)

Loss aversion is another way that negativity bias manifests itself. Paul Rozin writes in “Bad is Stronger Than Good”:

Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. (Quoted in Kahneman)

Potential losses affect us more deeply than potential gains. This can lead to some irrational behavior, as is evidenced by those many times that we pass up an opportunity to benefit either financially or psychologically because we are afraid to take the risk of a loss. Long term investors who put large chunks of their portfolio in bonds are a prime example. Over the past 80 years, stocks have provided a 6.5% return (adjusted for inflation), while bonds have returned 0.5% (Lehrer). Bonds are considered a safer investment because there is a greater chance of losing money in stocks. For many people, the chance of losing money has a larger effect on their decision making than the chance of gaining money by investing in what may be riskier in the short run but more profitable in the long run. Most people, if offered a chance to win $150 or lose $100 on a coin toss won’t take the deal. The potential loss, though less than the potential gain by a substantial amount, isn’t worth the risk.

Loss aversion may explain why Pascal’s wager seems reasonable to many people. People don’t want to take the risk of losing eternal life by not believing in the god of Abraham. The safe bet is to believe. The 17th century mathematician argued that it would be wise to believe in the god of Abraham because you risk eternal life by not believing and if this god doesn’t exist, you lose nothing in comparison to eternal life. If eternal life with this god is not attractive to you, then the potential loss by not believing isn’t likely to affect you much. Also, if you have no fear of hell (i.e., eternal suffering of some sort) because you consider its actual existence to be near zero in probability, then it is unlikely that loss aversion will drive you to believe in this god, even though your wager is just your life, i.e., you must act as if this god exists. On the other hand, the general principle behind the wager seems sensible: only a fool wouldn’t wager next to nothing when the prize, if you win, is of infinite value. You might not bet $100 for a chance to win $150 on a coin toss, but you would be a fool not to bet $1 on a chance to win, say, $1,000,000 on a coin toss.

One effect of negativity bias is that we are likely to give more credence and more weight to negative claims about positions or candidates that we oppose than we are to positive claims about them. We are not likely to be very critical in our examination of such negative claims, certainly not as critical as when negative claims are made against views we cherish.

Another effect of negativity bias is that we are likely to be afraid of things disproportionately to the evidence, e.g., most people who are afraid of flying in airplanes have little fear of driving in an automobile even though it is more likely that they will die in a car accident on the way to the airport than that they will die in a crash of the plane they plan to catch.

Negativity bias manifests itself in various ways involving contagion. For example, in India a person of the Brahmin (priestly) caste can be sullied by contact with a member of the Shudra (servant) class, but Shudras are not purified or elevated in status by contact with the Brahmins. Rozin and Royzman write:

The contamination often occurs by eating food prepared by a lower caste. On the other hand, when people of lower castes consume foods prepared by higher castes, there is no corresponding elevation in their status. Stevenson summarized this feature of the caste system with the phrase “pollution always overcomes purity”).

On the other hand, an argument has been made for a positivity bias by Matlin and Stang. They claimed that their research showed that people are more likely to expose themselves to positive stimuli than they are to avoid negative stimuli and that they encounter more positive stimuli than negative stimuli, which seems intuitively what you’d expect from pleasure-seeking animals averse to pain.

As noted in the entry on the Forer effect, people tend to agree with positive statements made about themselves (whether they’re true or not) and these kinds of statements are more likely to be accepted than negative statements about themselves. Studies on self-deception consistently find most people overestimate their possession of positive traits. So, when it comes to evaluating oneself, the negativity bias seems to be overpowered by the positivity bias.

When it comes to politics, however, negativity bias reigns supreme. The overwhelming appeal in ads for candidates or ballot propositions is to arouse negative feelings about an opponent or a position on an issue. After the last national election, there were several letters to the editor of my local newspaper decrying the negativity of Republicans, who did much more poorly than they had expected in the election that saw Barack Obama re-elected. (Some cynics might say that Obama beat Romney because Romney aroused slightly more fear about himself in a certain segment of the electorate and he didn’t arouse enough fear about Obama.) One letter-to-the-editor said that negativity “dominates the Republican attitude of the 21st century. Everything is bad, everything government touches is poison—there’s no positive policy regarding the economy, women’s rights, minority rights, environmental issues, etc.” On the same day in an op ed piece, Paul Krugman bemoaned the Republican method of using threats as their main negotiating tool regarding the economy: “They’re threatening to block any deal on anything unless they get their way.” Some even call the Republican Party the “party of ‘No’.” Whether these criticisms are true or not, negativity bias is, and probably always will be, the lifeblood of politics.

Finally, I recall several years ago that my local newspaper responded to a reader request that it print more good news by agreeing to set aside a segment of the paper for the “Good News” once a week. The only catch was that the readers were given the responsibility of finding the good news and reporting it to the Sacramento Bee editors. The column never got off the ground.

Sources

Lehrer, Jonah. 2010. How We Decide. Mariner Books.

Matlin, Margaret and David Stang. 1978. The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought. Schenkman Publishing Company.

Rozin, Paul and Edward B. Royzman. 2001. Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Vol. 5, No. 4, 296–320.

Occam’s razor

The fewer assumptions you make, the fewer questionable assumptions you’ll make.

What is known as Occam’s razor was a common principle in medieval philosophy. The principle came to be named after the English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349) because of his frequent use of the principle.

Like many Franciscans, William was a minimalist in this life, idealizing a life of poverty and like St. Francis himself, battling with the Pope over the issue. William was excommunicated by Pope John XXII. He responded by writing a treatise demonstrating that Pope John was a heretic. Why get angry when you can get even?

In Latin, the principle reads: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate or “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Those words have come to mean something quite different from what William meant by them. Today, the principle is often referred to as the principle of parsimony. Perhaps on the principle that less is more, Ockham is usually referred to as Occam.

William’s use of the principle of unnecessary plurality occurs in debates over the medieval equivalent of psi. For example, in Book II of his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, he is deep in thought on the question of “Whether a Higher Angel Knows Through Fewer Species than a Lower.” Using the principle that “plurality should not be posited without necessity” he argues that the answer to the question is in the affirmative. He also cites Aristotle’s notion that “the more perfect a nature is the fewer means it requires for its operation.” Applying Aristotle’s notion to the universe, one seems forced to conclude that no perfect being could reasonably be held accountable for its existence. In any case, Occam’s razor has been used by some Atheists to reject the idea of a god as the creator of the universe. To some Atheists, gods are unnecessary pluralities. The existence and form of the universe can be explained without positing gods. William would not have approved of such thinking.

William did argue, however, that natural theology is impossible. Natural theology uses reason alone to understand such concepts as Abraham’s god (AG), and is contrasted with revealed theology which is founded on alleged scriptural revelations. According to Occam, the idea of AG is not established by evident experience or evident reasoning. All we know about AG we know from revelation, i.e., the Bible. The foundation of all theology, therefore, is faith—faith that what we take as revelation is actually the word of AG. It should be noted that while others might apply the razor to eliminate the entire spiritual world, Occam did not apply the principle of parsimony to the articles of faith. Had he done so, he might have become a Socinian like John Toland (Christianity not Mysterious, 1696) and pared down the Trinity (AG is three persons in one god) to a unity and the dual nature of Jesus (divine and human) to a single nature.

William was a minimalist in philosophy as well as in life, advocating nominalism against the more popular view of realism. That is, he argued that universals have no existence outside of the mind; universals are just names we use to refer to groups of individuals and the properties of individuals. Words like ‘man’ and ‘dishonest’ do not name things that have their own independent existence in addition to individual men and individual dishonest men. Realists claim not only that there are individual objects and our concepts of those objects, but that there are also universals existing independently of things and our concepts. William thought that this was one too many pluralities. We don’t need universals to explain anything. To nominalists and realists there exist, for example, Socrates the individual and our concept of Socrates. To the realist there also exist such realities as the humanity of Socrates, the animality of Socrates, etc. That is, every quality that may be attributed to Socrates has a corresponding “reality”, a “universal” or eidos (Form), to use Plato’s term. William might be said to have been skeptical of this realm of plurality called the realm of universals. It is not needed for logic, epistemology, or metaphysics, so why assume this unnecessary plurality? Plato and the realists could be right. Perhaps there is a realm of Forms, of universal realities that are eternal, immutable models for individual objects. But we don’t need to posit such a realm in order to explain individuals, our concepts, or our knowledge. Plato’s Forms are unnecessary metaphysical and epistemological baggage.

One might argue that Bishop George Berkeley applied Occam’s razor to eliminate material substance as an unnecessary plurality. According to Berkeley, we need only minds and their ideas to explain everything. Berkeley was a bit selective in his use of the razor, however. He needed to posit AG as the mind that could hear the tree fall in the forest when nobody is present. Subjective idealists might use the razor to get rid of all gods. Everything can be explained with just minds and their ideas. Of course this leads to solipsism, the view that I and my ideas alone exist, or at least they are all I know exist. Materialists, on the other hand, might be said to use the razor to eliminate minds altogether. We don’t need to posit a plurality of minds as well as a plurality of brains.

As noted above, Occam’s razor is also called the principle of parsimony. These days it is usually interpreted to mean something like “the simpler the explanation, the better” or “don’t multiply hypotheses unnecessarily.” In any case, something like Occam’s razor is a principle that is frequently used outside of ontology, e.g., by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from among theories with equal explanatory power. When giving explanatory reasons for something, don’t posit more than is necessary. For example, von Däniken could be right: maybe extraterrestrials did teach ancient people art and engineering, but we don’t need to posit alien visitations in order to explain the feats of ancient people. Why posit pluralities unnecessarily? Or, as most would put it today, don’t make any more assumptions than you have to. We can posit the ether to explain action at a distance, but we don’t need the ether to explain it.

Oliver W. Holmes and Jerome Frank might be said to have applied Occam’s razor in arguing that there is no such thing as “the Law.” There are only judicial decisions and individual judgments, and the sum of them makes up the law. To confuse matters, these eminent jurists called their view legal realism, instead of legal nominalism. So much for simplifying matters.

Occam’s razor is sometimes called the principle of simplicity, which has been misinterpreted by some creationists to mean that the simpler the explanation the better. These creationists have argued that Occam’s razor means we should accept creationism over evolution since it’s a simpler explanation of how species got here and came to be what they are. After all, having an eternal, non-material AG create everything out of nothing is much simpler than a universe emerging out of nothing or always existing and evolving over billions of years. Or is it? But Occam’s razor does not say that the more simple a hypothesis, the better. If it did, Occam’s would be dull razor for a dim populace indeed.

Today, we think of the principle of parsimony as a heuristic device. We don’t assume that the simpler theory is correct and the more complex one false. We know from experience that more often than not the theory that requires more complicated machinations is wrong. Until proved otherwise, the more complex theory competing with a simpler explanation should be put on the back burner, but not immediately thrown on the trash heap of history.

Some have even found a use for Occam’s razor to justify budget cuts, arguing that “what can be done with less is done in vain with more.” This approach seems to apply Occam’s razor to the principle itself, eliminating the word “assumptions.” It also confuses matters by confusing “less” with “fewer.” Occam was concerned with fewer assumptions, not less money.

The original principle seems to have been invoked within the context of a belief in the notion that perfection is simplicity itself. This seems to be a metaphysical bias that we share with the medievals and the ancient Greeks. For, like them, we find that most of our disputes are not about this principle but about what counts as necessary. To the materialist, dualists multiply pluralities unnecessarily. To the dualist, positing a mind as well as a body is necessary. To Atheists, positing a god and a supernatural realm is to posit pluralities unnecessarily. To the theist, positing a god is necessary. And so on. To von Däniken, perhaps the facts make it necessary to posit extraterrestrials. To others, these aliens are unnecessary pluralities. In the end, maybe Occam’s razor says little more than that for Atheists any god is unnecessary but for theists that is not true. If so, the principle is not very useful. On the other hand, if Occam’s razor means that when confronted with two explanations, an implausible one and a probable one, a rational person should select the probable one, then the principle seems unnecessary because so obvious. But if the principle is truly a minimalist principle, then it seems to imply the more reductionism the better. If so, then the principle of parsimony might better have been called Occam’s chainsaw, for its main use seems to be for clear-cutting ontology.

Source

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

optimistic bias

The world isn’t as swell as you think it is and neither are you, but it’s a good thing you think otherwise.

The optimistic bias is an expression used by Daniel Kahneman to describe the idea that “most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.” Furthermore, most of us have an unrealistic view about predicting the future: we think we’re much better at it than we really are. Study after study has found that self-deception is pervasive: the vast majority of people think they are above average, less biased, more congenial, less susceptible to improper influence, and more competent than the majority of their peers.

Kahneman thinks that many of us suffer from (or are blessed with, depending on how you see things) “optimistic overconfidence.” He writes that “the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.”

Generally speaking, the optimistic bias is a good thing. Life is much more pleasant for an optimist than for a pessimist:

Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer....Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders.... (Kahneman)

That may be true for mature adults, but we should not forget that many teenagers are optimists and have impaired judgment due to not having fully developed frontal lobes. The optimism of young people often drives them to engage in risky, dangerous behaviors, especially regarding sex, alcohol and other mind-altering drugs.

Even for adults, however, there are times when too much optimism can be delusional. Optimistic bias can lead to unrealistic evaluation of prospects and overconfidence in taking risks. Kahneman notes that even though only 35% of small businesses survive for five years in the U.S., entrepreneurs rate the chances of success of any business at 60% and the chances of success for their own enterprise at 81%. One-third of entrepreneurs think their chance of failing is zero. While it is certainly important for someone in business to be confident, it is also important to be realistic.

The optimistic bias commonly gives rise to the illusion of skill. On the other hand, without optimism not too many projects would get off the ground nor would many risks be taken. Still, after one has set goals and objectives, collected and studied carefully a set of relevant cases similar to one’s own, and developed a plan of action, one should try to debias excessive optimism. How? One way is to force yourself to consider what might go wrong. This was one conclusion of a study by Sara Lichtenstein, Baruch Fischhoff, and Lawrence D. Phillips. It may not come naturally, but considering what might cause you to fail might just save you from plowing ahead in the Big Muddy as you and your acolytes sink into the quicksand.

Some people make unrealistic risk assessments because they are ignorant: they lack the necessary knowledge to make a realistic judgment. Such people often engage in risky sexual behaviors and develop unhealthy habits. These folks are optimistic about their chances, say, of not getting AIDS from unprotected sex or not getting cancer from smoking. It is possible that their optimism is due to willful ignorance rather than to an unrealistically benign view of the world around them, though willful ignorance and an overly benign view of the world are not mutually exclusive.

Many teenage drivers have an unrealistic view of the risks involved in drinking alcohol (or using other drugs) and driving. Many Driver Education classes have used DUI Shock Films to scare young drivers. These films are known for their gory realism of DUI car crashes that kill and mutilate people. Is there strong evidence that such films have a significant effect on the optimistic bias of teen drivers that leads to thousands of deaths in DUI car crashes each year? I couldn’t find any, and I’m not that optimistic about the evidence being out there.

Sources

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Knox, Richard. 2010. The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet. NPR. March 1 <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124119468>, accessed 12/19/2012.

Sara Lichtenstein, Baruch Fischhoff, and Lawrence D. Phillips. 1982. Calibration of probabilities: The state of the art in 1980, in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, eds. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, 1982, Cambridge University Press. Part VI of this book is devoted to the topic of overconfidence.

positive-outcome bias

You and I may be more influenced by negative news, but scientific journals are more likely to publish articles with a positive statistical outcome, yet we might benefit from knowing that A doesn’t work any better than B or that C doesn’t work at all.

Positive-outcome bias is a type of publication bias. Authors are more likely to submit their work to journals if the work has a strong positive statistical outcome. Furthermore, both journals and the mass media are more likely to publish articles about scientific studies that have a positive statistical outcome. (You might consider a study that finds a strong correlation between not smoking cigarettes and not getting lung cancer to have a negative outcome, but a study that finds a significant statistical correlation—that is, a correlation not likely due to chance—between not smoking and not getting lung cancer is a positive-outcome study.) Studies that find nothing of statistical significance or of possible causal consequence often don’t get published. Because of various types of publication bias, the scientific community and the general public are often presented with a skewed and biased view of findings by scientific researchers.

Researchers who find nothing of statistical significance in small studies usually do not present their findings at scientific meetings nor do they submit their work to journals. Such behavior is known as the file-drawer effect, since these studies get filed rather than submitted for publication. Large studies—whether observational or control group studies—will usually get published unless they have some obvious methodological flaw. Small studies are more susceptible to statistical flukes than large studies, other things being equal. The most common statistical formula used in the social sciences and medical studies considers a statistic significant if there is a one in twenty (5%) chance of it being a fluke. Statistical significance does not mean that a statistic is important; it means that according to some formula the statistic is not likely due to chance. The smaller the sample in a study, the greater the chance of finding statistical significance when a larger study would find nothing of statistical significance. Also, the smaller the study the greater the chance of missing a correlation that a larger study would find at some level of statistical significance. The latter situation will occur with more frequency with small correlations. Again, statistical significance does not mean important. It may be true that your study had a sample of 18,000 and found a statistically significant difference in heart attacks between subjects taking a dummy pill and subjects taking rosuvastatin (to lower cholesterol), but that doesn’t mean the difference is important. (The difference was 0.2 events per 100 person years. What the side effects of taking the statin over a period of years might be is unknown, but they might outweigh the small benefit of taking it.)

Publishing large studies that have positive but unimportant outcomes is one way scientific journals can bias the information the mass media filters for our consumption. Another way to bias information is to publish small studies with positive outcomes and expect journalists and the general public to recognize that nothing much should be made out of a single small study.

When scientists do submit work with negative findings—such as not finding any evidence for precognition—their work is often rejected simply because it is not positive. A recent example of this bias occurred with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2011, this journal published work by parapsychologist Daryl Bem that purported to find positive evidence in support of precognition (“Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect”). When scientists Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Christopher C. French submitted a paper that replicated the best of Bem’s work but which resulted in no evidence for precognition, the journal refused to consider the research paper for publication. (A study is considered a ‘replication’ of another study if it replicates the methods of that study, regardless of the results found in the new study.) They were told that the journal does not publish replications. We will never know what the journal would have done had the negative study been submitted first, but my guess is that it would not have been published because its results harmonize with what most psychologists take for granted: there is no precognition. The failed replication was published online at PLOS ONE.

Mass media articles about scientific work often mislead the public because they do not report on negative-outcome studies. (Again, I remind the reader that a negative-outcome study is one that finds nothing of statistical significance.) Worse, many of the studies covered by the mass media are small studies that should not be generalized from. The most outrageous recent example of turning a small study into a major catastrophe by the mass media is the Andrew Wakefield report on 12 children. Wakefield claimed he found a connection between the MMR vaccine and developmental disorders. This led to members of the anti-vaccination movement using this report to incite a panic regarding vaccines and autism. Because of the concern raised over vaccines and developmental disorders, several large studies were conducted and they all failed to find evidence of a correlation between vaccines and developmental disorders. These studies were published and widely publicized by the mass media. Nevertheless, the damage had been done and the subsequent reports in both scientific journals and the mass media have done little to quell the panic. Also, rather than change their minds about vaccines, the anti-vaccinationists have found many reasons to reject the studies that show their position is wrongheaded, thereby exemplifying the backfire effect.

One of the ways in which positive-outcome bias skews our understanding of the results of scientific research is in how it affects systematic reviews, such as those done by the Cochrane Collaboration. This large group of academics from around the world tries to examine all the scientific studies that have been done on a particular medical treatment, conventional or unconventional. Different studies are given different values depending on how they were designed, how large they were, etc. The group tries to determine in an unbiased way what the best evidence is for any particular treatment. But their work can be very misleading because often negative studies don’t get published, which they admit:

Systematic reviews aim to find and assess for inclusion all high quality studies addressing the question of the review. But finding all studies is not always possible and we have no way of knowing what we have missed. Does it matter if we miss some of the studies? It will certainly matter if the studies we have failed to find differ systematically from the ones we have found. Not only will we have less information available than if we had all the studies, but we might come up with the wrong answer if the studies we have are unrepresentative of all those that have been done.

We have good reason to be concerned about this, as many researchers have shown that those studies with significant, positive results are easier to find than those with non-significant or ‘negative’ results. The subsequent over-representation of positive studies in systematic reviews may mean that our reviews are biased toward a positive result.

The value of scientific studies is often measured by how many scientists make reference to the study. Citation bias, an inevitable consequence of positive-outcome bias, magnifies the skewing problem. The Cochrane Collaboration uses the funnel plot to estimate the significance of positive-outcome bias in a systematic review. “It assumes that the largest studies will be near the average, and small studies will be spread on both sides of the average. Variation from this assumption can indicate publication bias.” Of course, if large studies with negative results are stuck in the file drawer, the funnel plot will be misleading. This is not likely to happen as long as the studies are methodologically sound. But, some of these large studies may mislead us into thinking that some small difference, though statistically significant, is important when it isn’t.

Finally, a study that tried to measure positive-outcome bias in the peer review process of a medical journal found small but significant ways in which reviewers evaluated positive and negative studies (Gever).

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Gever, John. 2010. ‘Positive Outcome’ Bias Found in Peer Review. MedPage Today, November 23 <www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/Ethics/23568>, accessed 12/19/2012.

Ritchie, Stuart J., Richard Wiseman, and Christopher C. French. 2012. Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem’s ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect, PLOS ONE. <tinyurl.com/cb56hzu>, accessed 12/19/2012.

post hoc fallacy

You know it and I know it, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because one thing happens after another does not mean that the first thing caused the second to happen.

An astrologer asks: “Do you think it was a coincidence that the tsunami hit Japan just a few days after the moon was closer to the Earth than it has been in years?” He thinks that the moon somehow caused the tsunami. Why? I don’t know, but it is true that the one came after the other. (An astronomer asks “Who cares what an astrologer thinks about the moon and earthquakes?”)

A dowser finds water or a golf ball after using his dowsing rod. He claims the rod led him to the find. Did it? I doubt it, but it is true that one thing came after the other.

A gambler blows on the dice before he rolls them. They come up a winner. He thinks his blowing on the dice affected the outcome of the roll. Did it? Probably not, but it is true that one thing came after the other.

A woman claims that a vaccine caused her child’s autism. Why? Her baby squirmed and cried while getting the shot and was later diagnosed with autism.

A man claims that his knee pain diminished significantly after receiving acupuncture treatment. What caused his pain to lessen? I don’t know, but he thinks it was the acupuncture.

A woman’s headache went away after taking a homeopathic potion for headaches. Why did her headache go away? I don’t know, but she thinks it was due to the homeopathic pill. It is true, though, that the one came after the other.

Desiree Jennings was a young cheerleader when she became the poster child for the anti-vaccination movement based on her claim that a flu shot caused her dystonia. Her evidence? She started showing symptoms ten days after she got the shot. She once had her own website (www.desireejennings.com) where she wrote:

On August 23, 2009, I received a seasonal flu vaccine at a local grocery store that drastically, and potentially irreversibly, altered my future. In a matter of a few short weeks I lost the ability to walk, talk normally, and focus on more than one stimuli [sic] at a time. Whenever I eat I know, without fail, that my body will soon go into uncontrollable convulsions coupled with periods of blacking out.

Each day is a battle to control the symptoms triggered by the flu vaccine and a reminder that my life will never be the same. I set up this site to tell my story and warn people of the neurological side effects than can result from vaccinations; especially knowing that in the majority of cases, these stories are seldom heard outside of immediate families and friends.

I hope everyone that reads my story will heed my warning and think very carefully, including seeking out consultations with your family doctor, before making the decision to receive a vaccination.

Jennings claims that about ten days after she received the seasonal flu vaccine, she developed a severe respiratory illness that required hospitalization. Shortly after that she had difficulty speaking and walking, with involuntary muscle contractions and contortions. Her symptoms were relieved, she claimed, by walking backward or by running.

There is no known way that the flu (which is what probably hospitalized her) or a flu vaccine could cause dystonia and there is not a single case in the medical literature of such a thing ever happening. Still, there is always a first time, I suppose. But getting bogged down in that discussion is a red herring because it is very unlikely that Jennings suffered from dystonia, much less that the flu vaccine caused her symptoms. (For more on Jennings, see the entry for Rashid Buttar in the Skeptic’s Dictionary <www.skepdic.com/buttar.html>.)

The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based on the mistaken notion that because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs. The examples of poor causal reasoning listed above were each probably combined with preconceived ideas about such things as a causal connection between astronomical events and tsunamis, dowsing and finding things, superstitious actions and outcomes of dice or cards, vaccines and autism or other disorders, acupuncture and pain relief, and homeopathy and headaches.

Post hoc reasoning is one of the most common cognitive biases and one of the more difficult to overcome because the personal experience of immediacy seems to intuitively justify the making of a causal connection. After all, when you hit your finger with a hammer or bump your head on a kitchen cabinet door, you know what caused the pain. When you watch somebody else do the same thing, you’re not surprised that you don’t feel any pain.

As noted above, if one already has a belief about a causal connection between two unrelated things, it is natural that she would confirm her bias by seeing a sequence of events as an example of her belief in action. Contrary to what some people might think, making hasty conclusions about causal connections is not a sign of stupidity or idiocy. It is natural and the norm, which is why it is so difficult to overcome.

It may be true that your engine blew up two days after you lent your car to your brother-in-law, but it isn’t necessarily the case that he did anything to the car that caused the engine to fail.

It may be true that you aced your physics test after forgetting to shave, but you would be foolish to think that not shaving had anything to do with your score on the test.

Just because one thing happens after another does not mean that there is any causal connection between them. On the other hand, it is not a coincidence that your car won’t start after you filled the gas tank with water. Sometimes when one thing happens after another, it’s because the first thing caused the second. What justifies making a causal connection is knowledge. That knowledge can come from experience or from experiments. When a doctor prescribes a medication for a urinary tract infection, she bases her treatment on knowledge. When the patient gets better and thinks the medicine helped in her recovery, she is not committing the post hoc fallacy because her connection between the two is justified. Unfortunately, many people think they have knowledge (about dowsing, vaccines, astrology, etc.) when all they really have is misinformation.

Scientists have developed various ways to test causal claims. For example, many people believe that vaccines cause autism. Yet, study after study has not found what should be found if vaccines cause autism. Vaccinated children should have a significantly higher rate of autism than non-vaccinated children, but they don’t. Nor do dowsers find water at a greater than chance rate when tested under controlled conditions.

post hoc parables

Andy’s story: For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to an acupuncturist and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended the alkaline diet. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried aromatherapy, dolphin therapy, and therapeutic touch. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from a chiropractor. Chiropractic was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Betty’s story: For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended the alkaline diet. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried aromatherapy, dolphin therapy, and therapeutic touch. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from an acupuncturist. Acupuncture was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Chuck’s story: For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended the alkaline diet. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried acupuncture, dolphin therapy, and therapeutic touch. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from an aromatherapist. Aromatherapy was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Dora’s story: For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended aromatherapy. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried acupuncture, dolphin therapy, and therapeutic touch. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from the alkaline diet. The alkaline diet was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Edgar’s story:  For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended aromatherapy. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried acupuncture, dolphin therapy, and the alkaline diet. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from therapeutic touch. Therapeutic touch was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Fiona’s story:  For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended aromatherapy. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last. Another friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me but to no avail. I tried acupuncture, therapeutic touch, and the alkaline diet. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from dolphin therapy. Dolphin therapy was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Gary’s story:  For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. My science-based medical doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. They didn’t do any good. I went to a chiropractor and got some relief but it didn’t last. A friend recommended aromatherapy. At first I thought this was the answer, but again it didn’t last.  I tried acupuncture, therapeutic touch, dolphin therapy, and the alkaline diet. Still, I suffered. I finally got relief after six years from healing prayer. A friend thought her prayer group could cure me. I went to several sessions and had hands laid all over me. Finally, I was cured. Healing prayer was the only thing that relieved me of my pain. I am now able to work and brush my teeth with minimal pain.

Harriet’s story:  For years I suffered a debilitating pain in my neck. I couldn’t work and even the slightest activity (like brushing my teeth) was painful. I went to my science-based doctor. She sent me to a psychiatrist who prescribed pills. I didn’t take them but my pain went away a few months later and now, unhappily, I am back at work. My mother thinks it’s a miracle, but I think the pain just went away on its own.

Source

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

priming effect

Many things influence us indirectly by priming us to accept what follows or what is implied by what follows.

The priming effect is a biasing effect on judgment or action by the cognitive meaning or emotive aura of memories, words, images, or symbols. Most of us have had an experience where we misheard some words in a song, a prayer, or a pledge and then continued to mishear the same words—sometimes for years—until somebody corrects us. We might call such cases examples of self-priming. (This kind of mishearing is called a mondegreen.)

Another example of priming comes from backmasking. What at first sounds like gibberish becomes a clear message after somebody tells you what to listen for. Another example of priming comes from allegedly outraged parents and a talking doll: “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo” doll from Fisher-Price. Some folks swear the doll mumbles “Satan is king” and “Islam is the light.” Some might even hear “Palin is a terrorist who is perpetrating voter fraud” once they’re told that’s what the doll is saying.

A person’s prejudices, preoccupations, or vital interests might prime one to mishear or misread words. For example, an evolutionary biologist might misread a headline in a magazine article as saying that Charles Darwin committed fraud when the headline actually says that Charles Dawson (of Piltdown infamy) was the miscreant. Because the headline would strike the scientist as false, however, a quick review would probably correct the misreading. In most cases of priming, we are unaware of the influence. Many studies have demonstrated that we are influenced in our judgments and actions both by words themselves and by the order in which words, images, or statements are presented to us or which present themselves to us naturally.

Just hearing someone utter the word ‘beautiful’ before you view a sunset or a work of art may influence both your judgment and the speed with which you make the judgment. Psi researcher Daryl Bem tested for precognition by modifying a standard test of priming. Instead of showing subjects a word like ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful’ before they viewed a picture of something like a sunset or a sex act and then testing how long it takes to respond either favorably or unfavorably to the picture, Bem showed the picture first, measured response time, and then showed the “priming word.” He claimed he had proof that some people had precognitive knowledge of the priming word when they saw the picture. Other scientists tried to replicate Bem’s work but found no evidence of precognitive priming.

Sometimes we see or hear things without being conscious of seeing or hearing them. Evidence of unconscious perception may become clear at a later time. For example, a person may go many years without understanding why seeing a road sign with the words “hidden meadow” in it produces sexual arousal. Then, one day she returns to a place she hadn’t been in many years. She remembers that this was where she met her first lover and the place is called Hidden Meadow.

The priming effect is evident in the unconscious influence of beliefs on actions, such as the hearing of intelligible speech by bird owners and devotees of EVP (electronic voice phenomena), and the ideomotor effect on dowsers, Ouija board users, table tilters in séances, assistants in facilitated communication, subjects of hypnotic suggestion, and both parties in applied kinesiology.

Priming has been shown to be powerful enough to create false memories. Priming is especially problematic in hypnotherapy. Many hypnotherapists seem unaware that they are priming their patients. The dangers of this practice are stated by Martin Orne: “The cues as to what is expected may be unwittingly communicated before or during the hypnotic procedure, either by the hypnotist or by someone else, for example, a previous subject, a story, a movie, a stage show, etc. Further, the nature of these cues may be quite obscure to the hypnotist, to the subject, and even to the trained observer.”

The priming effect is also evident in the unconscious influence of symbols and metaphors, as Sigmund Freud noted long ago. There is a reason that presidents pose for photos while sitting at a desk with a shelf of books in the background guarded by a hanging American flag and fronted by a family photo. A recent study found that a person will usually vote more politically conservative if he or she votes or completes a survey near or in a church location. “These same voters are also more negative toward non-Christians, as compared to people who vote or answer polls near government or non-Christian buildings” (Kahneman). Also:

A study of voting patterns in precincts of Arizona in 2000 showed that the support for propositions to increase the funding of schools was significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when it was in a nearby location. A separate experiment showed that exposing people to images of classrooms and school lockers also increased the tendency of participants to support a school initiative. The effect of the images was larger than the difference between parents and other voters!

It’s easy to understand why a person won’t pick up a wallet with a red circle drawn around it or how photo cameras on traffic signals would have an effect on the number of drivers who go through red lights, but it is not so obvious why putting a poster of two eyes looking down at you above an “honesty box” for dropping money to cover the cost of tea or coffee taken would increase the amount of money collected in the same office over the same length of time when there was no poster.

Pollsters know, or should know, that they will get different results from a random sample of adults who are asked if they support affirmative action or preferential treatment of underrepresented groups. Differences in opinion will also occur if the question is put negatively rather than positively. Apparently, opposing something is not understood as the direct opposite of supporting something.

Pollsters know, or should know, that how people answer a question is affected by what question or questions were asked previously. That is why professional pollsters should and usually do have their pollsters ask the same questions to members of the sample, but ask them in different orders to different segments of those polled.

Pollsters know, or should know, that set-up questions can bias the answers to poll questions. In 1999, when Juanita Broaddrick publicly alleged that 21 years earlier William Jefferson Clinton had acted indecently toward her, CNN/Gallup/USA and Fox News/Opinion dynamics both polled the American people about whether they believed her. The CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 34% believed and 54% did not believe Broaddrick. The Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that 54% believed her and 23% didn’t believe her. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal explained the difference as due to the fact that the CNN poll used the word ‘rape’ in its question, while Fox used ‘sexual assault.’ The WSJ’s assessment is plausible, but some of the difference might have been due to the fact that the polls were done at different times and Broaddrick had not used the word ‘rape’ until after the CNN poll but before the Fox poll. She used the word ‘rape’ in a widely-viewed television program and this probably had some impact on the Fox poll.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows published one of the classic studies on the priming effect in 1996 with the imposing title “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action.” They found that “participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants, consistent with the content of that stereotype.” On January 18, 2012, Stéphane Doyen et al. published a study on PLOS ONE that attempted, in part, to replicate the Bargh study. The Doyen group concluded that while priming motivates behavior, some of the priming comes from suggestions by the experimenter:

Here, we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study. Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and experimenters’ expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect.

According to Kahneman, Bargh et al. asked students at New York University to put together four-word sentences from sets of five words. One group was given words like Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, and wrinkle—words associated with aging and the elderly. The other group was given age-neutral words. After constructing their sentences the students were told to go to another room for another experiment, but the real experiment was to see how long it took the students to walk from one room to the other. Bargh et al. predicted that the words with an aura of elderliness about them would prime the subjects to walk slower than those who weren’t so primed. The researchers found what they were looking for.

Doyen et al. give a different description of the students’ task:

Bargh et al.’s demonstration involved asking participants to indicate which word was the odd one out amongst an ensemble of scrambled words a number of which, when rearranged, form a sentence. Unbeknownst to participants, the word left out of the sentence was systematically related to the concept of “being old.”

I’ve looked at the Bargh study and it isn’t clear to me what procedure they used. Here is how they describe their procedure:

The task consisted of 30 sets of five-word combinations. The participant was instructed to write down a grammatically correct sentence using only four of the five words given. Participants were also informed that the task was self-paced. After giving the instructions, the experimenter left the room so that the participant could complete the task in privacy.

The Bargh report also lists the elderly nuanced words and explains how they were selected:

For the elderly prime version, the critical stimuli were worried, Florida, old, lonely, grey, selfishly, careful, sentimental, wise, stubborn, courteous, bingo, withdraw, forgetful retired, wrinkle, rigid, traditional bitter, obedient, conservative, knits, dependent, ancient, helpless, gullible, cautious, and alone. These prime words were obtained from previous research that examined the components of the elderly stereotype….In the neutral version, the elderly prime words were replaced with the words unrelated to the elderly stereotype (e.g., thirsty, clean, private).

In any case, the real issue at this point in the research is not whether there is a priming effect but what kinds of things induce it, how powerful are the various influences, and is there any way to know when we’re being motivated to act by priming factors?

The idea of the priming effect—that our conscious choices, decisions, judgments, and behaviors are being biased by unconscious factors—is unsettling to many people. Kahneman writes:

The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring effects are threatening in a similar way. You are always aware of the anchor and even pay attention to it, but you do not know how it guides and constrains your thinking, because you cannot imagine how you would have thought if the anchor had been different (or absent).

What is unsettling is not so much the possibility that all our thoughts and actions might be determined by factors over which we have no control, but that they might be determined by factors we are unaware of and are inherently unknowable. It may well be true, as Freud allegedly said, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes a cigar may be a symbol or stand-in for something else and the fondling, licking, and sucking actions of the smoker may represent unconscious desires or portend future actions. I hesitate to guess what might be represented by crushing a cigar butt on the pavement with the sole of one’s shoe or the snipping action taken with a cigar cutter while admiring a stick of tobacco before torching it.

I am sorry to report, however, that priming your youngster’s brain with the music of Mozart won’t make your child more intelligent. The so-called Mozart effect is a hoax.

I’ll conclude by referring the reader to an interesting study on priming by Kathleen D. Vohs et al. The researchers did several experiments on the priming effects of money. Here’s their abstract:

Money has been said to change people’s motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

Now, what do you make of that?

Sources

Bargh, John, Mark Chen and Lara Burrows. 1996. Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 71, No. 2, 230-244.

Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts. 2006. Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting. Biology Letters, 2 (3), 412-414.

Doyen, Stéphane,  Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans. 2012. Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind? PLOS ONE.

Orne, Martin T. 2009. On the Simulating Subject as a Quasi-Control Group in Hypnosis Research: What, Why, and How. Chapter 16 in Hypnosis: Developments in Research and New Perspectives by Erika Fromm and Ronald E. Shor, editors.

Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole L. Mead and Miranda R. Goode. 2006. “The Psychological Consequences of Money.” Science. 17 November.

recency bias

As much as we dislike uncertainty, we must face the fact that the future is largely unpredictable.

Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we have observed in the recent past will continue in the future. Predicting the future in the short term according to events in the recent past works fine most of the time, even for highly changeable events like the weather or the stock market. Predicting the future in the long term according to what has recently occurred has been shown to be no more accurate than flipping a coin in many fields, including meteorology, economics, investments, technology assessment, demography, futurology, and organizational planning (Sherden).

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that with all the intelligence supposedly going on that such things as the breakup of the Soviet Union, the crumbling of the Berlin wall, the former head of Sinn Fein meeting with the Queen of England, the worldwide economic collapse of recent years, the so-called Arab Spring, the recent (2012) attacks on U.S. embassies in several Muslim countries, and a host of other significant historical events were not predicted by the experts? Wait, you say. So-and-so predicted this or that. Was it a lucky guess or was the prediction based on knowledge and skill? If the latter, we’d expect not just one correct prediction out of thousands, but a better track record than, say, flipping a coin. Find one expert who’s consistently right about anything and we still have a problem. How can we be sure that this sharpshooter isn’t just lucky? If thousands of people are making predictions, chance alone tells us that a few will make a right call now and then. The odds in favor of successful prediction diminish the more events we bring in, but even someone who seems to defy the odds might be the one a million who gets lucky with a string of guesses. You flip the coin enough times and once in a while you will get seven heads in a row. It’s not expected, but it is predicted by the laws of chance. Likewise with predicting how many hurricanes we’ll have next year or what stocks to buy or sell this year.

Recent events and trends are easier to remember and discern than either events in the distant past or unknown events that will occur in the future. Rather than do the hard work of studying the past or accepting the fact that despite our best efforts at predicting events far into the future for such things as the weather, technological advances, and population trends, these and many other areas of human interest are beyond our ability to predict at much better than chance levels or naive estimates. (A naive estimate of weather prediction uses either today’s weather to predict tomorrow’s weather or it uses a seasonal average to predict this season’s weather.)

Some of the most amazing technological advances that have occurred during my lifetime weren’t predicted by any of the experts: the Internet, the personal computer, the smart phone, digital music, to name just a few. And I’m still waiting, along with millions of others, for my jet pack.

I’m willing to make a prediction about the future, despite what I know about my biases. I predict that the current (December 2012) darling of prognosticators, Nate Silver, will be brought back to Earth eventually by a string of failed predictions. Silver makes his predictions on his blog FiveThirtyEight.com and sings his own praises in his book The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail-But Some Don’t (2012 Penguin). His latest amazing feat was to correctly predict the results of the 2012 presidential election in 50 out of 50 states in the U.S.A. Silver even claims that it shouldn’t be that difficult to predict financial bubbles before they burst. He applies a Bayesian method to show how he could have predicted the crash of early 2000. Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, doesn’t agree. He says Silver ignored all the false positives in his retroactive analysis. False positives? What does that mean? Malkiel explains while going through a standard example of the Bayesian method:

1% of 40-year-old women have breast cancer: Bayes’s rule tells us how to factor in new information, such as a breast-cancer screening test. Studies of such tests reveal that 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammograms, and 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammograms (so-called false positives). What is the probability that a woman who gets a positive mammogram will in fact have breast cancer? Most people, including many doctors, greatly overestimate the probability that the test will give an accurate diagnosis. The right answer is less than 8%. The result seems counterintuitive unless you realize that a large number of (40-year-old) women without breast cancer will get a positive reading. Ignoring the false positives that always exist with any noisy data set will lead to an inaccurate estimate of the true probability.

I predict that Silver will not predict the next stock market crash. He’s a pretty smart guy, though, so I doubt that he’ll go out on that limb.

In the fall of 2013, a fellow named Rany Jazayerli made a prediction that the St. Louis Cardinals would win the World Series of baseball. He based his prediction partly on recency bias and partly on trusting a method of predicting winners in baseball playoffs devised by Nate Silver. Jazayerli argued:

1.     The Cardinals’ pitching is currently the best it has been all year. (True, but the Red Sox pitching was better in the World Series.)

2.     Allen Craig is returning just in time. (True, but he was injured again and even at his best he would have had a very hard time matching MVP David Ortiz’s performance: 11 hits in 16 at bats (.688) with two home runs and six RBIs.)

3.     The Cardinals are as well-suited to playing with the DH as any National League team can be. (So?)

4.     The Cardinals don’t strike out, and in recent years, teams that don’t strike out don’t lose in the playoffs. (Boston struck out 165 times in 16 playoff games to set a new record. Boston struck out 59 times in 6 games against the Cardinals.)

5.     The Cardinals have Carlos Beltran; the Red Sox do not. (True, but the Red Sox have David Ortiz. Beltran batted .294 in the Series but he did make a great catch of a ball hit by Ortiz that would have been a grand slam.)

After his claim about the importance of not striking out, Jazayerli wrote:

Trying to find the magic formula for postseason success has been the sabermetric community’s version of trying to turn lead into gold: Many have tried, but none have entirely succeeded.

Nate Silver came close, publishing an analysis of playoff results in the Baseball Prospectus book Baseball Between the Numbers in 2006. Silver found that three factors had an outsize effect on a team’s playoff performance: the pitchers’ strikeout rate, the quality of the closer, and the quality of the defense. While Silver’s “secret sauce” formula worked very well in predicting playoff outcomes historically, it has been no better than a coin flip at predicting the winner since it was released.

I think we can safely say that Jazareli’s prediction was also no better than a coin flip, but we should have known that before the Series started.

Sources

Jazareli, Rany. 2013. Why the Cardinals Will Win the World Series. Grantland. <www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9865211/why-cardinals-win-world-series>, accessed 11/1/2013.

Malkiel, Burton. 2012. Telling Lies From Statistics, The Wall Street Journal. September 24 <tinyurl.com/dyl5dvf >, accessed 12/20/2012.

Sherden, William A. 1999. The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions. Wiley.

regressive fallacy

Some problems are hard to solve because they involve things that fluctuate. Failure to take account of those fluctuations can lead us to make illusory causal connections.

The regressive fallacy is an error in causal reasoning: the failure to take into account natural and inevitable fluctuations when ascribing causes to events (Gilovich 1993: 26). Golf scores and chronic back pain, for example, inevitably fluctuate. Periods of low scores or little or no pain are eventually followed by periods of higher scores or more intense pain. Ignoring natural fluctuations can easily lead to the availability bias driving one to confirm a favored causal explanation based on little more than that one thing happened after the other (the post hoc fallacy).

A professional golfer with chronic back pain or arthritis, for example, might try wearing a copper bracelet on his wrist or putting magnetic insoles in his shoes when he is not playing or feeling well. He notices that his scores are improving and his pain is diminishing or gone. He concludes that the copper bracelet or the magnetic insole is the cause of his feeling and playing better. He doesn’t consider that the scores and the pain may be improving due to natural and expected fluctuations. Nor does it occur to him that he could check a record of all his golf scores to see what kind of fluctuation in scoring has occurred in the past. Millions of Americans buy supplements that promise to relieve them of joint pain and arthritis, yet the billions of dollars spent each year on these items are largely wasted.

This tendency to move toward the average away from extremes was called ‘regression’ by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) in a study of the average heights of sons of very tall and very short parents. (The study, published in 1885, was called “Regression Toward Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature.”) He found that sons of very tall or very short parents tend to be tall or short, respectively, but not as tall or as short as their parents. On reflection, Galton’s discovery seems like common sense: it seems obvious that children can’t get taller or shorter ad infinitum.

Many people are led to believe in the causal efficacy of questionable therapies and treatments because of the regressive fallacy. The intensity and duration of an illness or of pain from arthritis, bursitis, chronic backache, gout, etc., fluctuate. A remedy such as acupuncture, a chiropractic spinal manipulation, a homeopathic potion, a well-marketed supplement, or a magnetic belt is likely to be sought when the illness or pain is at its worst. The illness or pain in most cases would begin to lessen after it has peaked. It is easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that the remedy we sought caused our reduction in suffering. It is because of the ease with which we can deceive ourselves about causality in such matters that scientists do controlled experiments to test causal claims. Such experiments reduce the chances of self-deception and confirmation bias that inevitably accompany personal experience.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Gavura, Scott. 2011. Collagen: An implausible supplement for joint pain. Science-Based Medicine. <www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/collagen-an-implausible-supplement-for-joint-pain/>, accessed November 12, 2013.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1993. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press.

Hall, Harriet M.D. 2008. Does Glucosamine Really Work? Science-Based Medicine. <www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-glucosamine-really-work/>, accessed November 12, 2013.

Pollack, Peter. 2007. Joint supplements: Is there hope behind the hype? American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. <www.aaos.org/news/bulletin/may07/cover3.asp>, accessed November 12, 2013.

representativeness bias

Don’t assume that everything fits a stereotype or can be quickly classified according to what’s in your memory or fits with your immediate past experience.

Many of our judgments involve classifying or categorizing individual persons or things. The representativeness bias manifests itself when we take a few traits or characteristics of someone or something and fit them to a stereotype or model. For example, when told that a man is quiet, shy, reserved, and self-effacing, and forced to guess whether he is a salesman or brain surgeon most people would probably choose brain surgeon because their stereotype of a salesman is of an outgoing, gregarious person. But the odds of any given man being a salesman are much higher than the odds of his being a brain surgeon, so the probability is greater that the fellow is a salesman. This example is representative of the examples of representativeness presented by Tversky and Khaneman. In real life, a snap judgment about a person’s occupation based on knowing a few personality traits would be hasty and unwarranted. A reflective judgment would require at least some assessment of the accuracy of the reported traits (how reliable is the source of information?) and the base rate for salesmen and brain surgeons. Most people would not know what percentage of the population are salesmen and what percentage are brain surgeons, but most people would know that the base rate for salesmen is much higher than that for brain surgeons.

If told that a woman is quiet, shy, reserved, and self-effacing and forced to guess whether she is a sales clerk or a brain surgeon, I think many people would guess that she’s a sales clerk because their stereotype of a brain surgeon is of a male and their stereotype of a sales clerk is of a female. The guess would be right most of the time, but for the wrong reason.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s at the University of California at San Diego, the philosophy department hired its first black professor. I arrived there about the time Angela Davis was finishing up her work with Marxism scholar Herbert Marcuse. The daily news was filled with stories about civil rights and anti-war protests. Students were coming from all over the world to study political philosophy with Marcuse and Stanley Moore. I remember how most of the graduate students assumed the new black teacher would be coming to teach political philosophy and would be radical like Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver. He didn’t fit the model at all. I don’t remember his name, but I remember he came from a Midwestern university and his interest was in analytic philosophy, much to our shock and dismay. He didn’t fit our stereotype at all.

The key to avoiding the representativeness bias is to be open to the possibility that the case before you isn’t typical. Force yourself to consider other possibilities. Jerome Groopman, M.D. gives the example of a doctor who failed to diagnose a cardiac problem with a patient because the patient did not fit the model of a person likely to have a heart attack. The patient complained of all the things a person with angina would complain of, but he was the picture of health. He was in his forties, fit, trim, athletic, worked outdoors, didn’t smoke, and had no family history of heart attack, stroke, or diabetes. The doctor wrote off the chest pains the patient complained of as due to overexertion. The next day the patient had a heart attack.

We should remember the representativeness bias when we read things like the following:

Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to. (Grewal)

When people are polled about “atheists” (or “Christians,” “Jews,” or “Muslims”) the concept that comes to mind for those words will differ depending on what stereotype is at work. Many people who say they would not vote for an Atheist might actually vote for an Atheist. Why? The Atheist who runs for president will be a real human being, not a stereotype. There will, of course, be many people who cannot overcome their prejudices against Atheists, gays, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, adulterers, etc., and no amount of empirical data or experience will change their minds. But not everyone who thinks of a stereotype when asked a question about a group by a pollster is hidebound and bigoted. Some will be open to changing their minds as they find out more about an individual who is an atheist, gay, Christian, Mormon, adulterer, black, etc.

Will Gervais of the University of British Columbia, the one whose study found that 45% of Americans say they wouldn’t vote for an Atheist running for president, thinks Atheists are not trusted as much as theists. I would temper this comment with a reminder that this opinion applies to stereotypes not to real individuals. If a corrupt Christian were running against an upright Atheist, I suspect that many people who trust “theists” more than “atheists” would vote for the Atheist. But many people can’t be trusted when they answer poll questions and it would not be surprising to find that many religious people who say they trust African-Americans more than adulterers would vote for the adulterer rather than the African-American in certain circumstances.

Sources

Grewal, Daisy. 2012. In Atheists We Distrust. Scientific American. January 17 <www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-atheists-we-distrust >, accessed 12/20/2012.

Groopman, Jerome. 2008. How Doctors Think. Mariner Books.

Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky. 1982. “Belief in the law of small numbers” and “Judgments of and by representativeness,” in Kahneman, Daniel. Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds. 1982. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press.

selection bias

If your sample’s biased, so is any inference based on that sample.

Selection bias is selecting a sample that is likely to favor one proposition over another. For example, by asking only those who have bought Chevrolets which car is better, Chevy or Ford, you will most likely get overwhelming support for Chevy. By asking only those who have made a full recovery after back surgery whether back surgery is a good option for people with back problems, you are likely to get overwhelming support for the surgery. If you ask only those whose back problems continued after the surgery, you are likely to get an overwhelming response against the surgery.

Selection bias partly explains why there are reports of many satisfied customers who go to psychics, tarot card readers, palm readers, faith healers, acupuncturists, homeopaths, energy healers, and others who provide bogus treatments such as mistletoe for cancer. The unsatisfied customers are not asked for their opinion, they’re too embarrassed to give it or they’re dead.

Edzard Ernst, M.D., who was trained in various non-conventional medical therapies, provides an example of selection bias that occurred while he was studying the therapeutic effects of mistletoe injections on cancer patients. He was told that the effect would be a lessening of suffering:

Whenever I gave mistletoe injections, the results seemed encouraging. But young doctors are easily impressed, and I was no exception. What I didn’t appreciate then was a relatively simple phenomenon: the hospital where I worked was well known for its approach across Germany; patients went there because they wanted this type of treatment. They were desperate and had very high expectations - and expectations can often move mountains, particularly in relation to subjective experience and symptoms. We call this “selection bias”. It can give the impression that a therapy causes a positive health outcome even when it has no positive action of its own.

Patients receiving questionable treatments or clients seeking advice from questionable soothsayers are highly motivated to be helped and to have the healer or reader succeed. Such people are often extremely generous in their efforts to personally validate the words, images, or advice of the reader/healer. Some will even assent to claims they know are false, as one of Gary Schwartz’s subjects did with a medium who got the subject to agree that her husband was dead when in fact he was still alive. Schwartz engaged in selection bias again when he omitted much of his data in published papers in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research that supported the hypothesis of survival of consciousness after death. In his book, The Afterlife Experiments, he describes numerous subjects in his experiments who are conspicuously not mentioned in the published papers on those experiments. Rupert Sheldrake showed selection bias when he omitted 40% of his data in a study claiming to provide statistical evidence for the psychic abilities of a parrot.

The best way to avoid selection bias regarding questionable treatments and various divination techniques is to randomize samples, use control groups, and do double-blind experiments. The best way to reduce selection bias by scientists is to expose its occurrence and publicly chastise offenders.

Skeptics and parapsychologists have accused each other of selection bias in determining which studies to include in the ganzfeld meta-analysis. Skeptic Ray Hyman did the first meta-analysis of 42 ganzfeld experiments and found no evidence of ESP. Parapsychologist Charles Honorton, on the other hand, found evidence of “anomalous information transfer.” In 1994, Daryl Bem and Honorton published the results of a meta-analysis of 28 ganzfeld studies and once again found evidence for anomalous information transfer. In 1999, Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman published their own meta-analysis of ganzfeld studies and concluded that “the ganzfeld technique does not at present offer a replicable method for producing ESP in the laboratory.” Much of the disagreement in analysis centered on what criteria to use in deciding which studies to select for the meta-analysis.

selection bias in polls and surveys

Researchers can bias the results of polls and surveys by using a biased method of selecting subjects for their study. Selecting subjects from a non-representative section of a population is a common way to bias a sample. Using samples that are too small to be representative is a frequent error made by researchers.

Misconceptions of chance are not limited to naive subjects. A study of the statistical intuitions of experienced research psychologists revealed a lingering belief in what may be called the “law of small numbers,” according to which even small samples are highly representative of the populations from which they are drawn. The responses of these investigators reflected the expectation that a valid hypothesis about a population will be represented by a statistically significant result in a sample with little regard for its size. As a consequence, the researchers put too much faith in the results of small samples and grossly overestimated the replicability of such results. In the actual conduct of research, this bias leads to the selection of samples of inadequate size and to overinterpretation of findings. (Kahneman)

Alfred C. Kinsey’s famous studies on sexual behavior in the 1950s have been repeatedly cited as the basis for the claim that 10% of the population is gay. This statistic has been widely cited in both the mass media and in scientific publications though it is based on a biased selection of samples. Kinsey gathered his data, in part, by distributing questionnaires to prisoners and to people who attended his lectures on sexuality, neither of which was likely to be a good cross section of Americans (Carroll 2005: 140). For his studies on male sexuality, “he interviewed only white men, and these respondents were disproportionately from lower socioeconomic classes” (glbtq 2004).

Numerous studies have been done since Kinsey’s work was published and these later studies put the percentage of adults who describe themselves as exclusively gay as much lower than the 10% figure. Some have found the rate to be between one and two percent. It should be noted, however, that “survey research methodologies often result in underreporting of stigmatized behaviors” (glbtq 2004).

In 1994, sociologist Edward Laumann headed a team of sociologists that studied U.S. sexual behavior. They interviewed a representative sample of the U.S. population between the ages of 18 and 59. Laumann found that over a five-year period, 4.1 percent of U.S. men and 2.2 percent of U.S. women had sex with someone of their own sex. If the time period is extended to include their entire lives, these totals increase to 7.1 percent of the men and 3.8 percent of the women (Henslen).

Paul and Kirk Cameron reported: “The 1994 University of Chicago ‘definitive’ survey of adults estimated prevalence of homosexuality among males at 2.8% and among females at 1.4%. Corrected for the exclusion of those over the age of 59 years, the estimates should be 2.3% and 1.2%.” A study in Britain in 2000 found that about 2.6% of men and women reported having had a same-sex partner within the previous five years and 8.4% of the men and 9.7% of the women reported having had at least one sexual experience with a member of the same sex <www.avert.org/gay-people.htm>.

One wonders, however, if anything approaching unbiased data is possible for determining what percentage of any human population is homosexual. Given the long history of religious prohibition of homosexuality and the widespread revulsion of homosexual behavior that has often led to torment and persecution, it is likely that researchers in this area will be motivated by something other than a genuine search for the truth. Results will differ depending on how one defines ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘homosexual’. Methods of gathering data samples will vary widely and the participants in such studies may not be highly motivated to reveal much about their sex lives.

There is some irony in the fact that the Kinsey studies are cited as the source of the statistic that 10% of the population is gay. As Michael Shermer notes, Kinsey made it clear that he did not believe human males “represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.” Kinsey maintained that “it is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes” (Shermer 2005: 246). Nature has a bias toward variation. The idea that people should fall into neat categories as ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, or even ‘male’ and ‘female’, is not consistent with the lessons of evolution. Any study that creates such false dichotomies will be misleading.

Many politically biased websites and organizations poll their readers or members and then pass on the data as if it were representative of the general population. Norman Bradburn, former director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, coined the acronym SLOP to describe polls that use selection bias to get their samples. SLOP is an acronym for self-selected listener opinion polls. Bradburn compares SLOP to radio talk shows: they attract a slice of America that is not representative of the country as a whole. “As a result, SLOP surveys litter misinformation and confusion across serious policy and political debates, virtually wherever and whenever they are used” (Morin).

The inaccuracy of such polls should be obvious. Those who call in to give their opinion are self-selected rather than randomly selected. It appears that people who are willing to call in their opinion will sometimes call in their opinion more than once. For example, in a USA Today call-in poll 81 percent of the more than 6,000 respondents said that “Donald Trump symbolizes what made the U.S.A. a great country.” However, 72 percent of the favorable calls came from two telephones in one insurance company office.

CBS tried the gimmick of call-in polling in “America on the Line,” which featured two surveys conducted immediately after President [George Herbert Walker] Bush’s State of the Union speech. There were 314,786 self-selected callers in one survey and 1,241 adults previously selected by a more scientific method in the other survey. The latter was to act as a check on the call-in survey. CBS’s Dan Rather commented on the similarity of results in the surveys, a sentiment that was echoed the next day in the Washington Post, which wrote, “by and large, the two polls produced the same or similar results.” The facts, however, do not support this judgment. “On two of the nine questions asked in both polls, the results differed by more than 20 percentage points. On another five, the differences were 10 percentage points or more” (Morin, cited in Carroll 2005: 147).

Sources

Cameron Paul and Kirk Cameron. 1998. “Definitive” University of Chicago sex survey overestimated prevalence of homosexual identity. Psychological Reports. June.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2005. Becoming a Critical Thinker. Pearson.

Ernst, Edzard. 2004. Medicine man: Mistletoe - viable alternative cancer treatment, or just a placebo with dangerous side-effects?  The Guardian, 20 December <www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2004/dec/21/healthandwellbeing.health >, accessed 12/20/2012.

glbtq. 2004. “Sociology.” <tinyurl.com/c8k872a>, accessed 12/20/2012.

Henslen, James M. n.d. The Sociology of Human Sexuality. <tinyurl.com/cc8p3zl>, accessed 12/20/2012.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Morin, Richard. 1992. Call-in polls: Pseudo-Science debases journalism, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 12, p. B11.

Schwartz, Gary. 2003. The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death. Atria Books.

Sell R. L et al. 1995. The prevalence of homosexual behavior and attraction in the United States, the United Kingdom and France: results of national population-based samples. Archives of Sexual Behavior.  June, 24 (3):235-48.

Shermer, Michael. 2005. The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule. Holt Paperbacks.

self-deception

Like almost everybody else, you probably think you’re above average in just about everything you consider important. This may enhance self-esteem but it does little good for critical thinking.

Study after study has found that the vast majority of people think they are above average, less biased, more congenial, less susceptible to improper influence, and more competent than the majority of their peers.

Ninety-four percent of university professors think they are better at their jobs than their colleagues. Seventy-percent of college students think they are above average in leadership ability. Only two percent of college students think they are below average in leadership ability. Twenty-five percent of college students believe they are in the top one percent in terms of their ability to get along with others (Gilovich).

Eighty-five percent of medical students think it’s improper for politicians to accept gifts from lobbyists, but only forty-six percent of medical students think it’s improper for physicians to accept gifts from drug companies. A study of medical residents found that eighty-four percent thought that their colleagues were influenced by gifts from pharmaceutical companies, but only sixteen percent thought that they were similarly influenced (Wazana).

Most people believe that those who agree with them on issues they consider important are high-minded, diligent, and keen observers of the human condition, while those who disagree with them are biased, sloppy thinkers acting on selfish motives with little concern for the truth.

Self-deception is natural and pervasive, and while it may sometimes provide a boost to our sense of well-being to have an exaggerated opinion of our abilities or characteristics, self-deception is probably always detrimental to critical thinking. Those who consider themselves immune to cognitive biases, while supposing their opponents are biased and ill-motivated, are not likely to be corrected of any errors they maintain. Those who think they are immune to the effects of bribes, while their colleagues are not, are likely to deceive themselves into thinking they are acting properly when, in fact, their behavior crosses the line into immorality. Those who think they are immune to flattery and appeals to their vanity are likely to be suckered into taking actions they will later regret.

The human brain evolved to be a great deceiver. One of the most common deceptions we face is thinking we see patterns and meaning in random events or coincidences. We like to fit our perceptions into a running narrative that holds our worldview together, whatever that worldview might be. Because of this natural tendency to confirm our biases and disconfirm beliefs that conflict with our beliefs, science has developed methods such as the double-blind, randomized control group study to minimize self-deception. The likelihood of self-deception increases for those who give greater weight to the evidence from personal experience than they do to the evidence from scientific studies.

Does this mean that scientists are free from self-deception? Of course not. Scientists can unconsciously bias experiments to confirm their beliefs while convincing themselves that they are unbiased and objective. Experimenters can unconsciously influence human subjects with their expectations and biases, and thereby skew their data to favor a treasured hypothesis. One of the more famous examples of self-deception by a scientist is that of French physicist René Blondlot, who thought he had discovered a new form of radiation. He named it the N-ray, after his university and home town of Nancy. The N-ray was a delusion, however. Actually, it was a “self-induced visual hallucination,” as Martin Gardner noted. Recent examples of self-deception in science have been provided by Pons and Fleischmann, who claimed to have produced energy from cold fusion, and Jacques Benveniste, who claimed to have proof that water in homeopathic potions has selective memory.

There are numerous ways that scientists can deceive themselves about their objectivity and fairness in designing and evaluating experiments. One common way that many scientists deceive themselves is in the way that they use statistics. Many parapsychologists and spirit scientists—those who study ESP, psychokinesis, distance healing with chants or prayers, energy medicine, and the like—have deceived themselves regarding the value of statistical significance and meta-analysis. They assume if the data from a single study show results unlikely due to chance according to some arbitrary mathematical formula, then they have found convincing evidence for their hypothesis. Or they lump together the data from several small studies and apply an arbitrary statistical formula to the data as if it were collected from a single larger study. If they find statistical significance in the meta-study, then they think they’ve found strong evidence for their beliefs.

Unlike those who rely solely on personal experience for a guide, however, scientists have other scientists to criticize their work and who publish their criticisms in peer-reviewed journals, at public meetings, and in the mass media. Personal biases are easier to reinforce by associating with people who share your biases and by distancing yourself from those you disagree with. Scientists can do this, too, but it is much more difficult for a self-deceived scientist to get away with his or her deceptions since science is essentially self-correcting over the long haul. Science, as Jacob Bronowski put it, “is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.” Even so, science journals and scientific researchers should be doing a better job at weeding out bad science and correcting errors. (See The Economist, October 19, 2013.)

Self-deception encrusts the worldviews of the arrogant, whether they are highly intelligent or simply incompetent. Highly intelligent people who are arrogant are capable of fending off any counterevidence to their beliefs. These are the folks described by Michael Shermer in his attempt to explain why smart people believe dumb things. They are the great rationalizers. At the other extreme are those who are cognitively incompetent: they are incapable of recognizing their erroneous judgments. The cognitively incompetent are not necessarily stupid. Often enough they are of average intelligence, but lack knowledge and experience relevant to understanding how self-deception works and how we are all susceptible to many cognitive illusions and biases.

So, even though it might be true that if we were too brutally honest and objective about our own abilities and about life in general, we might become debilitated by depression, we should not forget that there is a dark side to self-deception. Our ability to think critically depends on our ability to overcome the many biases that lead us to self-deception.

Sources

Bronowski, Jacob. 1973. The Ascent of Man. Little, Brown and Company.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Economist. 2013. October 19. “How science goes wrong” <www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong> and “Trouble at the lab,” <www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble>, accessed November 12, 2013.

Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications, Inc.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1993. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press.

Shermer, Michael. 2002. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Revised and enlarged edition. Holt Paperbacks.

Wazana, Ashley.  2000. Physicians and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Is a Gift Ever Just a Gift? JAMA Vol. 283 No. 3, January 19.

shoehorning

We are very skillful at retrofitting events to vague predictions made earlier. We should consider that there might be another explanation besides the one we favor.

Shoehorning is the process of force-fitting some current affair into one’s personal, political, or religious agenda. So-called psychics frequently shoehorn events to fit vague statements they made in the past. This is an extremely safe procedure, since they can’t be proven wrong and many people aren’t aware of how easy it is to make something look like confirmation of a claim after the fact, especially if you give them wide latitude in making the shoe fit. It is common, for example, for the defenders of such things as psychic dreams, remote viewing, or the “prophecies” of Nostradamus to shoehorn events to the texts, thereby giving the illusion that the texts were accurate predictions.

A classic example of shoehorning involves alleged psychic Jeanne Dixon. In 1956 Parade magazine interviewed her and reported: “As for the 1960 election Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office though not necessarily in his first term.” John F. Kennedy was elected and was assassinated in his first term. This fact was shoehorned to fit her broad prediction and her reputation was made as the psychic who predicted JFK’s violent death. In 1960 she apparently forgot her earlier prediction because she then predicted that JFK would fail to win the presidency (Tyler; Hines). Many psychic detectives take advantage of shoehorning their vague and ambiguous predictions to events in an effort to appear more insightful than they really are.

Court TV exploited the interest in so-called psychic detectives with a series of programs, one featuring Greta Alexander. She said that a body had been dumped where there was a dog barking. The letter ‘s’ would play an important role and there was hair separated from the body. She felt certain the body was in a specific area, although searchers found only a dead animal. She asked to see a palm print of the suspect—her specialty—and the detective brought one. She said that a man with a bad hand would find the body. Then searchers found a headless corpse. The head and a wig were found nearby. The man who found it had a deformed left hand. The letter ‘s’ can be retrofitted to zillions of things. Many scenarios could be shoehorned to fit “hair separated from the body” and “bad hand” (Ramsland). (Fans of psychics will overlook the fact that Alexander’s reference to the bad hand was supposedly made after looking at the palm print of the victim.)

After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, fundamentalist Christian evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson shoehorned the events to their agenda. They claimed that “liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion rights supporters bear partial responsibility...because their actions have turned [Abraham’s] god’s anger against America.” According to Falwell, Abraham’s god allowed “the enemies of America...to give us probably what we deserve.” Robertson agreed. The American Civil Liberties Union has “got to take a lot of blame for this,” said Falwell and Robertson agreed. Federal courts bear part of the blame, too, said Falwell, because they’ve been “throwing [Abraham’s] god out of the public square.” Also “abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because [Abraham’s] god will not be mocked,” said Falwell and Robertson agreed.

Neither Falwell nor Robertson had any way of proving any of their claims. But such claims can’t be disproved, either. Their purpose is simply to call attention to their agenda and to get free publicity in the news media. It is a way to take advantage of the fear and anger of people without fear of being proved a liar. It is a hit and hide tactic, as no rebuttal is possible. One might respond, though, by saying that if there is an omniscient, all-powerful being who governs the universe, the likelihood that such a being would be allied with people like Falwell, Robertson, or suicide killers seems absurd on its face and unworthy of serious discussion.

After one has been roundly criticized by nearly everyone on the planet for egregious shoehorning of the Falwell/Robertson type, it is typical of the hypocrites to issue denials and claim their statements were taken out of context. Falwell issued the following statement: “I sincerely regret that comments I made during a long theological discussion on a Christian television program yesterday were taken out of their context and reported, and that my thoughts—reduced to sound bites—have detracted from the spirit of this day of mourning.” Robertson, however, is unrepentant, and has added Internet pornography to his list of things that have so angered Abraham’s god that he had to murder thousands of innocent people to express his displeasure. If we don’t change our ways, he says, Abraham’s god is going to kill a lot more of us. Thus, when the carnage mounts in the years ahead as the U.S. and its allies try to eliminate terrorism and the terrorists continue murdering the innocent, we can look back at the dead and say that Pat Robertson predicted it.

Finally, astrology is probably the second-most widely practiced superstition in the world today. Nevertheless, there are many who defend astrology by pointing out how accurate professional horoscopes are. Astrology “works,” it is said, but what does that mean? To say astrology works means that there are a lot of satisfied customers. There are a lot of satisfied customers because, thanks to subjective validation, it is easy to shoehorn any event to fit a chart. To say astrology “works” does not mean that astrology is accurate in predicting human behavior or events to a degree significantly greater than chance. There are many satisfied customers who believe that their horoscope accurately describes them and that their astrologer has given them good advice. Such evidence does not prove astrology so much as it demonstrates the Forer effect and confirmation bias. Good astrologers give good advice, but that does not validate astrology. (They also make ambiguous claims like the oracle of Delphi who told Croesus before he attacked Persia: “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed.” Croesus, buoyed by the good news, attacked, resulting in the destruction of his own empire.) There have been several studies that have shown that people will use selective thinking to make any chart they are given fit their preconceived notions about themselves. Many of the claims made about signs and personalities are vague and would fit many people under many different signs.

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Hines, Terence. 2003. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.  Prometheus Books.

Ramsland, Katherine. n.d. Psychic Detectives. <www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/psychics/7.html?sect=21>, accessed 12/21/2012.

Robertson, Pat and Jerry Falwell. 2001. transcript of the September 13 700 Club telecast <www.actupny.org/YELL/falwell.html>, accessed 12/21/2012.

Tyler, J. 1977. “The Unsinkable Jeane Dixon.” Humanist, 38 (3):6-9.

straw man fallacy

When attempting to refute an argument, refute the strongest argument that has been made, not some weak or distorted version of the argument.

The straw man fallacy is a common rhetorical tactic whereby one gives the impression of attacking a position or argument that another has taken while actually attacking a false, distorted, misleading, weakened, or exaggerated version of that position or argument. For example, President Obama is regularly called a socialist by conservative pundits and politicians whenever he proposes any government action, but they are attacking a straw man. Obama’s proposals on health care, business bailouts and other government interventions in public life are not part of a socialist agenda. Obama is no more a socialist than Rick Santorum or any of the Catholic Supreme Court Justices are agents of the Vatican. Obama’s defenders also attack a straw man when they characterize his critics as claiming that “Obama wants to seize the money of hardworking Americans and redistribute it to single mothers and jobless crackheads ... until we resemble the Soviet Union” (Luciano). Obama’s critics have distorted his proposals, but to say they’re portraying him as wanting to redistribute the wealth to support jobless crackheads is an exaggeration.

An important consequence of attacking straw men instead of real arguments in their strongest form is that doing so prevents serious discussion of whatever issue is at stake. The bar for moral, social, and political discourse in America isn’t that high to begin with, but attacking straw men lowers the bar even further.

One-time Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum provided us with some examples of the straw man fallacy in his attacks on President Obama’s position on education and John F. Kennedy’s position on separation of church and state. Here is what Santorum said regarding Obama’s views on college education:

President Obama said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob! There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

Obama did not say he wants everybody in America to go to college, so attacking him for holding this position is irrelevant to either proving Obama’s position is wrongheaded or for proving any of the other claims Santorum makes about getting a college education, creating jobs, or indoctrination. What Obama actually said was:

I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American.

Santorum’s straw man ploy was matched by others who characterized Santorum’s position as being against education, which it isn’t. Comedian Jon Stewart, for example, asked of Santorum: “You’re against people educating their kids because it’s fancy?” We can forgive Stewart, perhaps, since exaggeration is an expected part of comedy. But others who distorted Santorum’s position are as guilty of the straw man fallacy as he is.

Regarding JFK’s position on separation of church and state, Santorum said:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live [in] that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president [sic], someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.

I admit that it is difficult to follow what Santorum is saying, but it seems clear that he is characterizing Kennedy’s position on the separation of church and state as saying that people of faith have no role to play in our political life. In actuality, Kennedy’s position was put forth to defend the position that a person’s faith should not disqualify him from public office. Kennedy never said that he wanted people of faith to have no role in the public square. I remember the speech well and Kennedy’s point was clear: if elected I will not be taking orders from the Vatican. Here’s what Kennedy actually said:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Nothing in this speech comes close to Santorum’s distortion.

It may seem obvious that the popularity of straw man attacks is due to the ease with which one can dispose of a distorted or false position compared to dealing fairly with complex issues and arguments. But we shouldn’t underestimate the role of incompetence, indifference to the truth, or ignorance. Some may use this tactic because they don’t know the actual position of the one they’re attacking, but they may not care, either. Their goal is to look good or make some point of their own and the fact that to do so means misrepresenting another is of little concern to them. Some, like Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart, have little concern for egregious distortion, partly because of their role as political pundits and partly because of their role as entertainers. One of Limbaugh’s straw man attacks was aimed at a Georgetown University law student, Sandra Fluke, who took public her campaign for contraceptive coverage at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington. Many Republicans and Catholic Church leaders denounced the Obama administration’s contraception mandate without distorting the mandate significantly in the process, but also without generating much useful debate on contraception as a moral and political issue or on the right of government to mandate insurance coverage. Limbaugh, on the other hand, in his trademark coarseness lowered the bar several notches by saying on his syndicated radio program: “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” Fluke’s stated position is that the university health plan for students should cover the cost of contraceptives. Limbaugh’s characterization of that viewpoint as paying her to have sex is a gross distortion of what Fluke was arguing for. To add insult to the straw man attack, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and then complained that Democrats were outraged at his gratuitously vulgar and hurtful choice of words.

Sometimes people falsely accuse others of committing the straw man fallacy. Leonard Pitts, for example, accused Rick Santorum of making a straw man argument on gay marriage:

Santorum took the same header into non sequitur and illogic that gay marriage opponents often take, i.e., if we legalize this, then we must also legalize polygamy.

It is a line of “thinking” which conveniently ignores a glaring fact. Namely, that there is not and never has been a large culture of people who felt biologically driven toward polygamous behavior, much less who seek social sanction for it. Santorum raises a classic straw man argument, tries to win the debate by stoking fear of what has not and will not happen.

The reference is to a response Santorum gave to a question:

Asked by a college student why he opposed the right of same-sex couples to wed, he responded that there was no compelling reason to allow it and suggested that it was akin to legalizing polygamy.

“So, everybody has the right to be happy?” he said. “So, if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that OK?”

I agree that Santorum has created a straw man: he is suggesting that the best argument in support of gay marriage is that everyone, including every gay person, has a right to be happy regardless of the consequences. This is not a very good reason for supporting gay marriage. It may be true that one of the reasons in support of gay marriage is that gays have a right to the pursuit of happiness and not allowing them to marry infringes on this right. But the pursuit of happiness has never been considered justification in itself to do whatever one thinks will make one happy. In any case, there are much better reasons that have been given in support of gay marriage, but Santorum ignores them. Maybe he doesn’t know what they are. Maybe he doesn’t care what they are. His comparison of legalizing same-sex marriage to polygamy is irrelevant and just muddies the water. But Pitts suggests that the straw man is created by Santorum’s appeal to fear about what has not and will not happen. Claiming that some terrible consequence will occur if an action is taken but providing no evidence that the awful thing will happen is usually called a slippery slope argument. Pitts also seems to be suggesting that the biological attraction many people have for members of their own sex is the main reason, or at least one of the main reasons, in support of gay marriage. That view is about on par with Santorum’s view that the pursuit of happiness is the main reason defenders of same-sex marriage give. Pitts seems to be suggesting that if a significant number of people were biologically driven to have several partners at once, polygamy would be justified. I don’t think so. On the other hand, there might be some good arguments other than the biological one in defense of polygamy that both Santorum and Pitts are overlooking.

One of the more reprehensible forms of straw man attack is the one conjoined with the availability bias and the representativeness bias. I’m referring to the times that opportunistic media vultures take advantage of some catastrophe or tragedy. Liberals and conservatives are equally blameworthy on this count. See the example of shoehorning by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. A similar abuse of fairness occurred after U. S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were shot—six fatally—in a supermarket parking lot near Tucson, Arizona, by a mentally ill young man. Jane Fonda and other liberals put the onus on Sarah Palin and Glen Beck, blaming their harsh rhetoric and Palin’s use of crosshairs on a map targeting Gifford’s congressional district. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who chairs the Democratic National Committee, blamed the Tea Party movement for the shooting. It should go without saying that Robertson, Falwell, Wasserman, and Fonda did not make their claims based on evidence, but on the first thing that popped into their heads, which was a stereotype of people and groups they consider enemies or opponents and whose views they then went on to misrepresent. There was some discussion in the media and the blogosphere about mental illness, violent crime, and the ease with which guns can be acquired, but the discussion of these important issues could hardly be heard above the din of media vultures with agendas.

Finally, a refutation does not become a straw man attack simply because it contains an occasional exaggeration or error in representation of another’s argument. You are not excused from answering a critic’s strongest arguments against you simply because your opponent didn’t get every little detail about your argument correct. A refutation that confronts several of the main points of an argument, but which also attacks a minor point or gets some detail incorrect, does not thereby become a straw man attack.

Sources

Luciano, Mike. 2012. Bank Bailouts: Why Barack Obama Very Much is a Socialist, PolicyMic <www.policymic.com/articles/4095/bank-bailouts-why-barack-obama-very-much-is-a-socialist>, accessed 12/21/2012.

Pitts, Leonard Jr. 2012. Commentary: Santorum’s straw man on gay marriage. January 13. Miami Herald.

subjective validation

Know thyself. Sounds easy, but the more we learn about the human brain, the more we realize that we may never know ourselves very well. One of our strongest natural abilities is the ability to find patterns and meanings in events, even events that don’t have patterns and aren’t meaningful.

Most of us think we know ourselves better than anyone else could. After all, we’re here in our head and everybody else is out there beyond the limits of our body. Only we have first-hand knowledge of what we experience and what thoughts are going on in our heads. So, who could know us better than we know ourselves?

On the other hand, how objective can we be when evaluating our own personalities? Is it possible that we are biased in predictable ways when asked to describe ourselves? In any case, very few adults shy away from taking a personality test. Presumably, such tests reveal character traits such as introversion and extroversion, which you would think most of us already have noticed by now. In any case, few people shy away from the opportunity to learn more about themselves. Psychologists have exploited this self-love by enticing generations of students to participate in experiments under the guise of giving them a free personality analysis. (See the Forer effect.)

Furthermore, in many formal and informal tests of such disparate activities as psychic readings, palm readings, biorhythm chart readings, graphology readings, and tarot card readings—which claim to reveal personal information for a client—the accuracy assessments are consistently high. In short, people will validate a set of statements allegedly about themselves as highly accurate even if those statements were not generated by a scientifically validated personality test and were not based on any specific knowledge of the person. Psychologists call this phenomenon subjective validation. This tendency to find personal meaning and significance in statements not based on personal knowledge extends to words, symbols, initials, and objects as well. It’s as if we are driven to find everything we experience centered on us. But there is more to subjective validation than just our tendency to be egocentric.

“Enough about me. What do you think of me?”

Some of the statements or other items we find personally meaningful—even when they’re not—seem meaningful because of our desires. For example, the drugstore astrological reading that Forer told his students was the result of an individualized personality test contains some statements that were validated by his students not because the students thought they were really true but because they wished they were true.

Who among us doesn’t wish she had vast amounts of unused potential? Who doesn’t want to think that they believe things because the evidence supports them? We might believe we have unused potential, but most of us would be hard-pressed to specify exactly what kind of potential we think we have, nor would be able to provide a great deal of evidence regarding that potential. We might think we’re evidence-based inquirers, but do we really know why we believe the things we do?

Forer thought that people rate impersonal statements as highly significant to them because they’re gullible. He thought that people tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard. We tend to accept questionable, even false, statements about ourselves if we deem them positive or flattering enough.

Being gullible and prone to wishful thinking may partially explain the tendency to subjective validation. Another key element is selective thinking, the tendency to focus on and remember evidence that supports one’s beliefs, while ignoring or forgetting the evidence that conflicts with one’s beliefs. Some of the statements in the drugstore astrology reading may be false for you, but you ignore, downplay, or forget those statements when making your overall assessment of accuracy. Subjects who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, and the like will often ignore false or questionable claims and, in many cases, by their own words or actions provide most of the information they erroneously attribute to such counselors. Many subjects will often believe that information they themselves provided the counselor was actually profound and personal information that the counselor couldn’t possibly have known.

Another important element in subjective validation is the natural human tendency to find meaning and significance. We will often give very liberal interpretations to vague, ambiguous, or inconsistent claims about ourselves in order to make sense out of the claims. In fact, we will often work hard to figure out some significance or meaning for statements that aren’t even about us when told that they’re somehow important. Mentalists and unscrupulous people claiming to be psychic take advantage of our desire to find meaning everywhere.

Ian Rowland, for example, makes his living as a mentalist, someone who entertains others by playing the role of psychic. Rowland has written the book (literally) on cold reading. In his Full Facts Book of Cold Reading 3rd edition, he lists 38 different ploys to use, eleven of which are designed to extract information from the client. He gives a telling example of the essence of cold reading in explaining “the push statement” (statements designed to be rejected by the client at first). He was demonstrating cold reading in a TV production meeting and used “the shoe and the party” push statement (a narrative about an impression involving a shoe and a party) and the name “Charles.” Nobody in the meeting could connect the name with a shoe or a party. Ten minutes after the meeting ended, a young woman very excitedly told him that she now remembers a party from her teen years at which she broke her shoe while dancing with Charlie! She was very impressed that Rowland had perceived this detail from her past that even she could hardly remember. Rowland hadn’t perceived any such thing, but no matter. The story exemplifies the essence of a successful cold reading: This works because our species is hardwired to find significance, and sometimes the brain works overtime in reading more into things than is there.

There is at least one more key to understanding subjective validation: motivation. Many people seek fortune tellers of all sorts or psychic mediums because they desperately desire to have someone tell them what is in store for them or they desperately wish to make contact with a dead loved one. The following story illustrates how motivation drives the success of fortune tellers and psychics.

Psychologist Ray Hyman explains how he got interested in the psychology of self-deception. He was a college student, earning money as a palm reader. He’d read several books on the art but didn’t believe any of it. He got so much positive feedback from his customers, however, that he started to think that maybe he did have psychic powers. The self-deception didn’t last long, however. In an interview with Michael Shermer, Ray explained:

The late Stanley Jaks convinced me to do a palm reading on someone and tell them the exact opposite of what I would normally say. So I did this. If I thought I saw in this woman’s palm that she had heart trouble at age 5, for example. I said, “well, you have a very strong heart,” that sort of thing. In this particular case, though, it was really spooky, because she just sat there poker faced. Usually I get a lot of feedback from the subject. In fact, I depend on the feedback, and this woman was giving me nothing. It was weird. I thought I bombed. But it turns out the reason she was so quiet was because she was stunned. She told me it was the most impressive reading she had ever had. So I did this with a couple more clients, and I suddenly realized that whatever was going on had nothing to do with what I said but with the presentation itself. This was one of the reasons I went into psychology—I wanted to find out how it was that people, including myself, could be so easily deceived. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I am not as confrontational as Randi, because I actually see that “there but for the grace of god go I.”

Ray found that no matter what he told his clients, they would figure out a way to make him right. Ray would later become an expert in understanding cold reading and subjective validation, the words we now use to describe the process of making claims with no basis in fact or study and having them validated as true by others. As a palm reader, Ray had become an adept cold reader, assisted by the efforts of his customers to selectively ignore his errors and misses and to focus on items they could make sense out of or give meaning to. As Ray notes, his clients wanted him to succeed in his reading and they would do everything in their power to help him.

The following example demonstrates how motivated “sitters” (as the clients of mediums and fortune tellers are called) make the job of being psychic a very easy one, requiring no special talent at contacting spirits or other dimensions.

Gary Schwartz tested John Edward’s ability to get messages from dead people. Here is what Edward claimed he was “being shown” (supposedly by some spirits):

The first thing being shown to me is a male figure that I would say as being above, that would be to me some type of father image....Showing me the month of May....They’re telling me to talk about the Big H ... um, the H connection. To me this is an H with an N sound. So what they are talking about is Henna, Henry, but there’s an HN connection....Very strong symbolism of teaching and books….The books come up where there may be something published.

This list of items was validated by one of Schwartz’s sitters. To validate is not the same as to confirm that messages have truly come from a spirit. It means that the sitter in a reading can find meaning here, can connect the dots, so to speak. The ability to validate depends on several factors. The sitter must be willing to validate. The stronger the desire to make contact, the harder the sitter will work to find meaning and connections in the medium’s items. There may also be another mechanism at work here: the desire to please the medium. This may be due partly to the consideration that by pleasing the medium, the odds increase that the medium will make contact. But it may also have to do with a strange phenomenon that occurs in settings where a person gives up control of the situation to another, as in hypnosis or when being asked to assist a magician do a trick. There is sometimes a kind of loss of self in those situations and, combined with a desire to please, a kind of submission to the will of another—up to a point. If such a mechanism is at work in psychic readings, the sitter may acquiesce to the suggestions or items thrown out by the medium, not because they are true or truly significant, but out of a desire to please.

In one reading, for example, Edward got the sitter to validate the claim that her husband was dead. Schwartz admitted that the sitter’s husband was alive at the time of the reading. However, since the husband was killed a few weeks later, Schwartz indicates he thinks it is more likely that Edward has precognitive powers than that the sitter made a false claim to please the medium.

Because the motivation of the sitter is so high that it might lead her to validate false or ambiguous statements, experiments should be designed in such a way that the experimenter always checks factual claims made by sitters. The word of the sitter should not be sufficient. Nor should the sitter’s validation of the word of others be sufficient. Schwartz sometimes checks factual claims and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he takes the word of the sitter. Sometimes he accepts the sitter’s validation of the words of others.

Even though the concern with factual accuracy is important in verifying the success of the medium, one should not lose sight of the importance of the studies that have been done on how the human mind works when it comes to making sense out of and giving significance to disparate data presented to it. The overall effect of subjective validation would show up in the way the sitters rate the accuracy of the mediums’ claims. There might well be a rater bias toward any reading done face to face or where the sitter can hear the medium do the reading (even if they are not visible to one another). To eliminate this kind of bias, Schwartz, in one experiment, had the readings done from remote locations, so that the sitter wasn’t present and didn’t hear what the medium was saying during the readings.

Schwartz is aware that sitters might be biased in their ratings and might give higher ratings of accuracy to items than they deserve, so he asked the sitters to rate down rather than up. Schwartz also has a procedure in some of his experiments and presents a challenge several times to the reader (or any skeptic) to see if they can connect the dots for a given reading. If he or the other experimenters can’t, or if subjects he calls “controls” in one experiment can’t, he takes that as strong evidence that the data is sitter-specific. He often works up conditional probability calculations, where he shows that the odds of several contingent conditions being related are millions or billions or trillions to one and he takes this as strong evidence that the data is sitter-specific.

The problem with this method is that the rest of us don’t have the interest in contacting the dead that the sitter does, but even if we do, we don’t have any reason to believe that the items for one sitter would apply to us. Some sitters not only have a strong will to succeed with the reading, they are better suited for readings because of factors such as how many dead friends and relatives they have, which would be related to such things as age and size of extended family, whether one is a sociable type or not, being a gay male at a time when many gay males were dying of AIDS, and so on.

Schwartz seemed particularly impressed by the above quote from a John Edward reading because he couldn’t relate much of it to his own life. Ray Hyman has done a pretty good job of connecting the dots of this passage in his life:

When I put myself in the shoes of a possible sitter and try to fit the reading to my situation, I can find a good fit to my father, who was physically large, whose last name was Hyman, and for whom, like any human on this planet, experienced one or more notable events in the month of May. Other things in the reading also can easily be fitted to my father. Neither the original sitter nor anyone else would fit this cluster of facts! Schwartz makes much of the fact that the cluster of facts that a sitter extracts from a reading tend to be unique for that sitter. He even calculates the conditional probabilities of such a cluster occurring just by chance. Naturally, these conditional probabilities are extremely low—often with odds of over a trillion-to-one against chance.

I can also connect these dots pretty well. I was born in the month of May and my father, who was stocky and often compared to a gentle bear, died more than 40 years ago of the Big H: a heart attack. Henry was one of my high school buddies. Maybe Henry’s dead and is with my dad. Or maybe my dad is trying to let me know it’s him by bringing up the name of good friend from my youth. Hyman and I were both teachers and have been surrounded by books for most of our adult lives. Ray and I have published books and this reference could be our fathers’ way of letting us know that they know what we’ve been up to these past many years.

Schwartz relates the teaching and books to “literature and education.” I’m sure it could be related to several other things as well, such as libraries, bookstores, any kind of school, visiting anyone with a library (such as a lawyer or doctor), and so on. Schwartz asserts that “the probability of getting just this pattern of hits is on the order of a million to one.” How he knows this is not revealed. But my guess is that the odds are more favorable than he thinks. If there is a dead male, a good guess would be older rather than younger, and if older, a father rather than a son. To throw out the notion that one senses a father figure does not seem to defy all odds, especially when the sitter recognizes her husband, not her father, as a father figure. I wouldn’t call the father image very specific. Nor would I call it correct. I’d call it common. (This point is more obvious in a reading with feedback from the sitter. If you get no positive response on the father figure, the medium can insist on the image and give the impression that the sitter isn’t trying hard enough. Or, the medium can change directions and hope for a better response, with initials for example, or two names, one male and one female, and see what response that generates.)

Schwartz dismisses the possibility that Edward was simply guessing, but I think the main issue isn’t whether Edward is guessing. He could be passing on things that are going through his mind, but that wouldn’t mean they necessarily came from outside his mind, either telepathically from the sitter or from the spirit world. He and many other “good” mediums might be people with very active imaginations, who generate words and images that originate in their own brains. What they do may be similar to dreaming out loud. But the focus shouldn’t be just on the medium and whether he or she is guessing or cheating; the focus should be on the sitter. Again, the focus shouldn’t be on whether the sitter is cheating, but on the dynamics of subjective validation. Schwartz says almost nothing about this well-known psychological phenomenon, except to dismiss the charge of cold reading on the part of the mediums on the ground that they are not using the standard tricks of magicians and mentalists. Schwartz seems to miss the point that although cold reading may sometimes be tricky, it doesn’t always involve trickery.

Finally, the drive to find personal meaning or significance in impersonal or insignificant coincidences may be related to the powerful natural drive to create stories, narratives that string together bits and pieces of information into a tale. Of course, truth matters much of the time, but many of our narratives satisfy us regardless of their accuracy. Psychologists call this tendency to connect things and create plausible narratives out of partially fictitious items confabulation. We’re driven to make up stories, true or false, as long as they seem to make sense and give significance and order to the amazing array of experiences we call life.

Sources

Hyman, Ray. 2003. How Not to Test Mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments. Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 27.1, January / February.

Schwartz, Gary. 2003. The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death. Atria Books.

Shermer, Michael. n.d. The Truth is Out There & Ray Hyman Wants to Find It: An Interview with a Co-Founder of Modern Skepticism. <www.theeway.com/skepticc/archives03.html>, accessed 12/21/2012.

suppressed evidence

Don’t hide evidence. If there is evidence against your position, face it and try to deal with it honestly and fairly. On the other hand, try to anticipate when somebody might not be motivated to reveal the whole truth to you.

A cogent argument presents all the relevant evidence. An argument that omits relevant evidence appears stronger and more cogent than it is.

The fallacy of suppressed evidence occurs when an arguer intentionally omits relevant data. This is a difficult fallacy to detect because we often have no way of knowing that we haven’t been told the whole truth.

Many advertisements commit this fallacy. Ads inform us of a product’s dangers only if required to do so by law. Ads never state that a competitor’s product is equally good. The coal, asbestos, nuclear, and tobacco industries have knowingly suppressed evidence regarding the health of their employees or the health hazards of their industries and products.

Occasionally scientists will suppress evidence, making a study seem more significant than it is. In the December 1998 issue of The Western Journal of Medicine scientists Fred Sicher, Elisabeth Targ, Dan Moore II, and Helene S. Smith published “A Randomized Double-Blind Study of the Effect of Distant Healing [DH] in a Population With Advanced AIDS—Report of a Small Scale Study.” (See Carroll 2012 for more details.) The authors do not mention, nor has The Western Journal of Medicine ever acknowledged, that the study was originally designed and funded to determine one specific effect: death. The 1998 study was designed as a follow-up to a 1995 study of 20 patients with AIDS, ten of whom were prayed for by psychic healers. Four of the patients died, a result consistent with chance, but all four were in the control group, a statistic that appeared anomalous enough to these scientists to do further study. I don’t know whether evidence was suppressed or whether the scientists doing the study were simply incompetent, but the four patients who died were the four oldest in the study. The 1995 study did not control for age when it assigned the patients to either the control or the healing prayer group. Any controlled study on mortality that does not control for age is by definition not a properly designed study. Why the National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary Medicine continued to fund this research is a mystery.

The follow-up study did suppress evidence, yet it is “widely acknowledged as the most scientifically rigorous attempt ever to discover if prayer can heal” (Bronson). The standard format for scientific reports is to begin with an abstract that summarizes the contents of the report. The abstract for the Sicher report states that controls were done for age, number of AIDS-defining illnesses, and cell count. Patients were randomly assigned to the control or healing prayer groups. The study followed the patients for six months. “At 6 months, a blind medical chart review found that treatment subjects acquired significantly fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses (0.1 versus 0.6 per patient, P = 0.04), had lower illness severity (severity score 0.8 versus 2.65, P = 0.03), and required significantly fewer doctor visits (9.2 versus 13.0, P = 0.01), fewer hospitalizations (0.15 versus 0.6, P = 0.04), and fewer days of hospitalization (0.5 versus 3.4, P = 0.04).” These numbers are very impressive to those who don’t understand anything about statistics. They seem to indicate that the measured differences were not likely due to chance. Whether they were due to healing prayer (HP) is another matter, but the scientists concluded their abstract with the claim: “These data support the possibility of a DH effect in AIDS and suggest the value of further research.” Two years later the team, led by Elisabeth Targ, was granted $1.5 million of our tax dollars from the National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary Medicine to do further research on the healing effects of prayer.

What the Sicher-Targ study didn’t reveal was that the original study had not been designed to do any of the measurements they report as significant. Of course, any researcher who didn’t report significant findings just because the original study hadn’t set out to investigate them would be remiss. The standard format of a scientific report allows such findings to be noted in the abstract or in the discussion section of the report. It would have been appropriate for the Sicher report to have noted in the discussion section that since only one patient died during their study, it appears that the new drugs being given AIDS patients as part of their standard therapy (triple-drug anti-retroviral therapy) were having a significant effect on longevity. They might even have suggested that their finding warranted further research into the effectiveness of the new drug therapy. However, the Sicher report abstract doesn’t even mention that only one of their subjects died during the study, indicating that they didn’t recognize a truly significant research finding. It may also indicate that the scientists didn’t want to call attention to the fact that their original study was designed to study the effect of healing prayer on the mortality rate of AIDS patients. Since only one patient died, perhaps they felt that they had nothing of significance to report.

It was only when they mined the data after the study was completed that they came up with the suggestive and seemingly impressive statistics that they present in their published report. The Texas- sharpshooter fallacy seems to have been committed here. Under certain conditions, mining the data would be perfectly acceptable. For example, if the original study was designed to study the effectiveness of a drug on blood pressure but you find after the data is in that the experimental group had no significant decrease in blood pressure but did have a significant increase in HDL (the “good” cholesterol), you would be remiss not to mention this. You would be guilty of deception, however, if you wrote your paper as if your original design was to study the effects of the drug on cholesterol and made no mention of blood pressure.

It would have been entirely appropriate for the Sicher-Targ group to have noted in the discussion section of their report that they had discovered something interesting in their statistics: Hospital stays and doctor visits were lower for the HP group. It was inappropriate to write the report as if that was one of the effects the study was designed to measure when this effect was neither looked for nor discovered until Moore, the statistician for the study, began crunching numbers looking for something of statistical significance after the study was completed. That was the most significant stat he could come up with. Again, crunching numbers and data mining after a study is completed is appropriate; not mentioning that you rewrote your paper to make it look like it had been designed to crunch those numbers isn’t ethical.

It would have been appropriate in the discussion section of their report to have speculated as to the reason for the statistically significant differences in hospitalizations and days of hospitalization. They could have speculated that prayer made all the difference and, if they were competent, they would have also noted that insurance coverage could have made all the difference as well. “Patients with health insurance tend to stay in hospitals longer than uninsured ones” (Bronson). The researchers should have checked this out and reported their findings. Instead, they took a list of 23 illnesses associated with AIDS and had Sicher go back over each of the forty patient medical charts and use them to collect the data for the 23 illnesses as best he could. This was after it was known to Sicher which group each patient had been randomly assigned to, prayer or control. The fact that the names were blacked out, so he could not immediately tell whose record he was reading, does not seem sufficient to justify allowing him to review the data. There were only 40 patients in the study and he was familiar with each of them. It would have been better had an independent party, someone not involved in the study, gone over the medical charts. Sicher was “an ardent believer in distant healing” and he had put up $7,500 for the pilot study on prayer and mortality. His impartiality was clearly compromised. So was the double-blind quality of the study.

Thus, there was quite a bit of significant and relevant evidence suppressed in the Sicher-Targ study that, had it been revealed, might have diminished its reputation as the best designed study ever on prayer and healing. Instead of being held up as a model of promising research in the field of spiritual science, this study might have ended up in the trash heap where it belongs.

In an effort to encourage reporters to be more critical of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, encouraged reporters to determine the wastefulness of the package by getting “out your calculators” and dividing the amount of money being spent by the number of jobs created or saved. Doing so produces the ridiculous figure of nearly a quarter of a million dollars per job. (The White House had estimated that $160 billion in stimulus money was spent and that 650,000 jobs were created or preserved.) Fortunately, many reporters didn’t take the bait.

Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press, for example, responded by writing an article on some of the things that Stewart was not considering. When you consider all the relevant evidence, the notion that Obama is spending about $250,000 per job can be seen for the distortion that it is. Woodward notes:

The calculations ignore the fact that the money doesn’t go directly to each job holder, but also goes toward material and supplies as well.

The contracts being made will fuel work for months or years. Jobs begun with stimulus money will probably stimulate more jobs in the future, e.g., a construction project may only require a few engineers to get going, but the work force may swell “as ground is broken and building accelerates.”

The stimulus package approved by Congress includes money for “research, training, plant equipment, extended unemployment benefits, credit assistance for businesses and more.”

Editors at The Washington Examiner, however, didn’t do any critical thinking and wrote:

Even if we take at face value the White House claim that it created or saved all these jobs with approximately $150 billion of the economic stimulus money, a little simple math shows the taxpayers aren’t getting any bargains here: $150 billion divided by 650,000 jobs equals $230,000 per job saved or created. Instead of taking all that time required to write the 1,588-page stimulus bill, Congress could have passed a one-pager saying the first 650,000 jobless persons to report for work at the White House will receive a voucher worth $230,000 redeemable at the university, community college or trade school of their choice. That would have been enough for a degree plus a hefty down payment on a mortgage.

MediaMatters for America took The Examiner to task for their “misleading cost-per-job stimulus math.” The simplistic math doesn’t capture the complexity of the effects of the stimulus package.

Finally, it is an unfortunate fact that some prosecutors subvert the criminal justice system by not disclosing exculpatory evidence. As a result, many languish in prison unlawfully and can only hope that the suppressed evidence will be exposed and their convictions overturned by courts. Police fabrication often goes hand in hand with suppressed evidence in such cases, e.g., the case of the Birmingham Six and the case of the Central Park Five.

false charge of suppressed evidence

Cranks often make a false charge of suppressed evidence to support claims that their alternative view of science, history, or current affairs is justified. The drug industry has a cheap cure for cancer it won’t reveal. The petroleum industry has a cheap fuel it won’t tell us about. The energy industry can provide nearly free electricity but it won’t reveal its secret. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson in Forbidden Archeology (1993) claim that scientists have been suppressing evidence of all kinds rather than give up the standard model for the age of the human species. The evidence includes a nail found in Devonian sandstone, metallic tubes found in Cretaceous chalk, a gold thread found in Carboniferous stone, a small Carboniferous gold chain found in a lump of coal, a Carboniferous iron cup from a chunk of coal, a Cambrian ‘shoe print’, a metallic vase from Precambrian rock, and Precambrian grooved metallic spheres from South Africa. Unfortunately, none of this evidence exists because it’s been suppressed, according to the authors, and we have to rely on reports of its existence from a variety of sources who are long dead.

NASA and the U.S. government have been falsely accused of suppressing evidence regarding alien visitations, the Apollo moon landing, and who knows what else. Conspiracy theorists frequently accuse the U.S. government and Big Pharma of suppressing evidence on a number of things including the conspiracy behind 9/11 and the use of vaccinations to harm us. This should not surprise us since both government and Big Pharma have suppressed evidence many times in the past. The government and Big Pharma won’t tell us that the flu shot promotes Alzheimer’s, according to Russell Blaylock, M.D. Former dentist Leonard Horowitz warns us that the evidence has been suppressed that proves that the AIDS and Ebola epidemics were intentionally caused by the U.S. government and that the H1N1 vaccine causes sterility. The master of self-serving nonsense, Kevin Trudeau, has been telling the world for years that “they” have been suppressing evidence for “natural” cures, good diets, and how to get out of debt.

To prove that evidence has been suppressed one must do more than provide suggestions, implications, and claims from others who can’t be cross-examined and who can’t produce the evidence that relevant data has been suppressed. One must produce the evidence that relevant evidence has been suppressed. That has not been done by one of the weirdest conspiracy theory/alternative medicine cranks I’ve ever come across: QuantumMAN at www.quantummansite.com, which claims to have created the “world’s first downloadable medicine.” The characters behind this scheme, who go by names such as J S Van Cleave, Michael H. Uehara, and Nicholas Brandon Zynda, also call their operation Extraterrestrial Technology. They recently appeared at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, touting their quantum computing based on extraterrestrial technology that allows medicine to be digitized and downloaded to your cell phone and magically teleported to your body. The world of science-based medicine has been duping us for centuries with its chemical-based approach, according to these quantum experts.

The QuantumMan folks use the slogan “Treat disease with data not drugs.” They claim, contrary to all known science, that quantum physics allows them to use a special quantum computer to directly transfer data to your phone that then somehow is magically digitized and directly uploaded to your body exactly where it’s needed. Never mind that such geniuses should be able to eliminate the physical device (smart phone, computer, or tablet) as an intermediary. Anyway, they claim that chemical-based treatment systems are not compatible with human physiology. How do they know this? “The universe, including the human body and conditions that afflict it, all operates [sic] according to the principles of quantum physics. Chemical based treatment systems do not operate according to those principles and, as such, are not compatible with the human host.” (Nice contradiction, don’t you think? On the one hand everything operates according to the principles of quantum physics but chemical treatments don’t operate according to the principles of quantum physics.) If these claims were true—which they are not—it would mean that there has been a vast conspiracy involving the entire scientific community for several centuries to suppress not only scientific evidence but logical principles as well.

The quantum/extraterrestrial folks also claim that they have a humanitarian research group called ZAG (Zürich Alpine Group):

ZAG understands that quantum problems require a quantum solution and has found a way to transfer bioinformation from its quantum computer via quantum teleportation to the brain, [and?] also [has made?] a quantum computer, [sic] to reprogram the brain to effect positive medical changes within the body and mind. These technological advancements have thus given birth to the world’s first downloadable medicines.

They’ve kept their work quiet because Big Pharma is lurking in the wings ready to steal their secrets. Anyway, none of these downloadable “medicines” are free (including the one that supposedly gives protection against malaria) and I would bet that the claim that all profit is going to charity is as true as the rest of the claims on their websites. If you’re still paying attention, you should know that your pet can be protected, too:

Use your cell phone (your pc, laptop or tablet) to instantly diagnose and medically treat your pet at home with guaranteed results with a radical new technology of extraterrestrial origin. Using pure data, QuantumVET Tricorder Plus treats by programming the brain of the species with biodirectives.

It should be noted that what the quantum/extraterrestrial folks claim about effecting physiological changes by a quantum computer via quantum teleporting is false because the mass of biological molecules and the speed with which they communicate via ion channels and mechanically are several orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to matter. See The Unconscious Quantum by Victor Stenger and The Spark of Life by Frances Ashford.

It is possible, of course, that QuantumMan is an elaborate hoax. Let’s hope so.

Sources

Bronson, Po. 2002. “A Prayer Before Dying.” Wired. December. <www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer.html>, accessed 2/7/2013.

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2012. “Sicher-Targ distant healing report” in The Skeptic’s Dictionary <www.skepdic.com/sichertarg.html>, accessed 2/7/ 2013.

Texas-sharpshooter fallacy

Don’t be fooled by statisticians who mine data after a study is completed. If you set up enough targets after the fact, you’re bound to hit a few bulls’ eyes, i.e., find a few items that seem statistically significant.

The Texas-sharpshooter fallacy is the name epidemiologists give to the clustering illusion. Politicians, lawyers and some scientists tend to isolate clusters of diseases from their context, thereby giving the illusion of a causal connection between some environmental factor and the disease. What appears to be statistically significant (i.e., not due to chance) is actually expected by the laws of chance. The term refers to the story of the Texas sharpshooter who shoots holes in the side of a barn and then draws a bull’s-eye around the bullet holes. Individual cases of disease are noted and then the boundaries are drawn.

Of the thousands of studies of cancer-clusters investigated by scientists in the United States, “not one has convincingly identified an underlying environmental cause” (Gawande).

Some scientists mine their data after their study is completed by compiling a long list of variables and searching for any that might appear to have a statistically significant (at the p=0.05 confidence level) relationship with something near and dear to them. (The 0.05 confidence level means a 5% chance, i.e., one in twenty, of being a fluke.) For example, if your study on whether prayer has any effect on the mortality of AIDS patients finds nothing significant, you then draw up a list of illness-related variables and search for some evidence that one or more of them correlates favorably with the prayer group in your study. (This maneuver was used by Sicher and Targ. See the entry on suppressed evidence for details.)

Sources

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Gawande, Atul. 1999. “The Cancer-Cluster Myth,” The New Yorker, February 8; pp. 34-37.

Gilovich, T., R. Vallone, and A. Tversky. 1985. “The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences,” Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1993. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. The Free Press.

wishful thinking

One of our strongest urges is to see things as we’d like them to be rather than as they are.

Wishful thinking is interpreting facts, reports, events, perceptions, and the like according to what one would like to be the case rather than according to the actual evidence. Wishful thinking is often coupled with self-deception. A person who is afraid of surgery and believes that chemotherapy is a hoax perpetrated by Big Pharma and the AMA may want to believe that the alkaline diet, mistletoe, or Gerson therapy is her best chance at cancer survival, despite the lack of scientific evidence for those so-called alternative treatments. Her desire to believe in alternatives to surgery and chemotherapy may lead her to ignore the evidence in favor of the treatment recommended by science-based medical doctors. She may be taken in by glorious stories of people who were diagnosed with this or that kind of cancer that went away after doing the alternative treatment. The stories may be true, but the causal link between the alternative treatment and the remission of cancer is made in the mind of the believer. Rather than admit that just because one thing happened after another it isn’t necessarily the case that the first thing caused the second—the post hoc fallacy—she believes that anyone who doesn’t agree with her about the causal connection must be a shill for Big Pharma and the AMA.

Wishful thinking should not be confused with positive thinking, which, in its most absurd form is a kind of magical thinking that involves trying to make things happen by willing them to happen. In its best form, positive thinking is hopeful and optimistic, but realistic.

Wishful thinking sometimes evolves into motivated reasoning, which not only interprets data according to preferences but actually takes disconfirming data and turns it into confirming data.

Motivated reasoning is a major obstacle for rational argument. If someone wants to believe that President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, or if someone wants to believe that virtually all of the world’s climate scientists have conspired to make up a huge global “climate change hoax,” then it is very difficult to change their minds even when the actual evidence is overwhelming.

When confronted by someone whose belief system seems to be built mainly on wishful thinking, perhaps the best one can do is provide alternative interpretation(s) of the data without insisting that the believed interpretation is wrong. Direct challenges to such a belief system may backfire. Actually, even the mere suggestion that valuing personal experience over scientific facts and probabilities might be harmful to your health is often met with self-serving dismissal.

Source

Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Wiley.

Kahane, Howard. 1997. Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life, 8th edition. Wadsworth.

Appendix 1

The Wisdom of Not Thinking Too Much

Sometimes it is better to stop thinking, stop gathering more data, and either wait or act.

We know that we have evolved to make quick decisions and that following our instincts has served the species well, at least in terms of survival. The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary focuses on the cognitive short cuts and logical fallacies that often accompany thinking that comes naturally. The focus is on the importance of reflective thinking for making good judgments and coming to decisions that we won’t regret. But there are times when a person will do better to stop thinking, stop reflecting, and simply act. Not everyone arrives at this stage where the wise thing to do is to put critical thinking aside. Those who do arrive at this stage have spent many years gaining knowledge, expertise, or performing ability. Their training, practice, and the skillful development of their talents have eliminated the need for reflection in order to do the right thing or make the right call. When it comes time to sing that aria before an adoring audience or swing at a 98 mph fastball in front of 50,000 baseball fanatics, thinking about what you are doing will hinder rather than help you succeed. When you have analyzed a problem to death in chemistry or physics, sometimes the best thing to do is to stop thinking about the problem and divert your attention to something else. There is no guarantee, but sometimes unconscious processes will provide you with the solution out of the blue. When an unexpected situation arises for which none of your years of training or experience has prepared you, following your instincts may be your best policy. All of these situations presuppose that you are extremely knowledgeable, have many years of experience, or have reached a performance level recognized as the highest level in your field. Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics, put it this way: for the true expert, “intuition is nothing more than recognition.” For the true expert, the situation provides cues and the cues give “the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer” (Kahneman 2011: 11).

Experts in fields where reliable predictions occur with some regularity—such as physics, math, and chemistry—should be looked at differently than experts who make predictions in low-validity fields where long-term predictions are just guesswork because of the complexity of the system they are trying to master. Political and economic experts, for example, actually do worse than dart-throwing monkeys when it comes to making long-term predictions. (Tetlock; Tetlock is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studied expert predictions over a twenty-year period.) The intuition of such experts is about as reliable as the intuition of the “average citizen” when asked to make long-term predictions about politics or the economy. It should go without saying that having high subjective confidence in one’s knowledge or intuition is not a good sign of being accurate or wise.

People who are ignorant and have no experience and little talent but who follow their instincts are as likely to make bad decisions as stumble upon a good decision. But people who have vast amounts of knowledge, experience, or performing history should do little or no thinking while acting and should trust their instincts when working in their field of expertise. Outside their fields of expertise, of course, experts and talented artists are as vulnerable to the snares and lures of uncritical thinking as the rest of us.

There are also times when each of us should stop gathering more information to help us make a decision or judgment. Information overload can hinder our ability to make good judgments at times. Often we are better off making a decision by considering only a few obviously important factors rather than by introducing as many pertinent items as we can come up with. The more variables we bring into play, the greater our chances of giving more weight to minor items and less weight to important items. This point was made clear by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in experiments that showed giving people more information about a subject led them to poorer decisions. One example has become a classic. Subjects are told that Linda is “thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they are asked which of several statements they thought would be true of Linda. In test after test, subjects thought it more likely that Linda was a feminist bank teller than that she was a bank teller. There is a fundamental logical error here, which Kahneman and Tversy called the conjunction fallacy. (A conjunction is the joining of two statements with words like ‘and’ or ‘but’.) It should be obvious that there is a greater probability of a single conjunct being true than there is of both conjuncts being true (Kahneman 2011: 156). These conjunction error studies have been replicated by Christopher Hsee and John List with different scenarios presented to test subjects but with identical results to Kahneman and Tversky. (See Kahneman 2011: 160-161.)

Gathering more and more information can give one the illusion of understanding. American psychologist and philosopher Paul Meehl compared the predictions of trained counselors versus a simple algorithm that used just two or three variables and found that the simple programs were significantly more accurate in their predictions than the more complex programs of the experts. A typical test might involve trying to predict the grade point average for various freshmen at the end of the school year. A simple formula that looked only at high school GPA and the results of one standardized college entrance test were compared with the predictions of counselors who had interviewed each student for 45 minutes and also had access to the results of several standardized tests and a four-page personal statement from each student. In that study, the simple algorithm outperformed 79 percent of the experts. American economist Orley Ashenfelter did a similar experiment involving predicting prices for fine Bordeaux wines. He pitted the experts against a simple formula that considered only weather, average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. Ashenfelter’s formula outperformed the world-renowned experts. (Ashenfelter’s work is discussed in Kahneman: 224ff.)

In matters of personal taste, the less information the better. Just drink the wine, taste the jam, let your feelings tell you which print you prefer. Don’t be influenced by how much the wine costs. Don’t get hung up on the various qualities one might list to distinguish different jams. Don’t get too many details about the various prints you have to choose from. If the one you like is affordable to you, buy it no matter what your friends or the critics say.

In decisions that are more or less trivial in the big picture—this would include everything from buying a new pen to deciding where to go on vacation or what new couch to buy—the less information the better. We’ve all heard the expression “paralysis by analysis.” When a decision is a minor one, the wisest path is often to focus on two or three important points, rather than drum up a list of every pro and con you can think of and then apply your list to dozens of possible choices.

In decisions that are monumental, such as the decision to send troops to fight in a foreign country or to take a loved one off life support, one should get as much information as possible from trustworthy sources that aren’t likely to be biased. In such cases, we should consult with both those who are likely to think in ways we are likely to agree with and with those who are likely to disagree with us. Important decisions require diversity of input. In the end, the evidence may seem to weigh equally for going to war and not going to war or for taking a loved off life support and keeping a loved one on life support. You may have no choice but to rely on your gut feeling at that point. The only other alternative I can see is to take a vote among one’s advisers or family members (or whatever group is relevant to the decision-making process) and go with whatever the majority thinks.

So, while wisdom requires devotion to critical thinking, it also requires knowing when to turn off critical thinking and rely on intuition, gut feeling, instinct, or whatever you choose to call that non-reflective preference percolating in our ever-fascinating brains.

sources

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Tetlock, Philip. 2006. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press.

Appendix II

Evaluating Personal Experience

...the self is hardly a neutral observer of the world. –Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory

Experts in the psychology of human error have long been aware that even highly trained experts are easily misled when they rely on personal experience and informal decision rules to infer the causes of complex events. –Barry Beyerstein

There are sound reasons for preferring the data from randomized, double-blind, controlled experiments to the data provided by anecdotes when we are searching for causes. Even well-educated, highly trained experts are subject to many perceptual, affective, and cognitive biases that lead us into error when evaluating personal experiences. Many of our beliefs are driven by our biases and are generated for their comfort-value rather than for their truth-value. Formal methods of causal analysis are especially necessary when the causal claim is not particularly comforting or attractive. All things being equal, the more impersonal and detached we are in evaluating potential causal events, the less likely error becomes.

Thus, when personal experience conflicts with the data of well-designed and executed controlled studies, it behooves us to examine our personal experience for bias. We should be especially wary of any product promising beneficial effects that is marketed before controlled studies have been done. When there is no compelling supportive evidence from controlled studies, we should subject a causal claim to a detailed critical evaluation before considering that there might be a causal connection between two events. For example, what evidence there is from controlled studies indicates that the claims of applied kinesiology (AK) are bogus. This fact has not diminished the attractiveness of AK for many people. In fact, some chiropractors reject controlled experiments on the ground that they don’t work, i.e., the results conflict with their beliefs about and their personal experience with AK. This response is irrational, however. Instead of rejecting formal, scientific testing, a rational person would inspect his conflicting belief and make every effort to discover the source of his error.

The benefits of formal analysis and the pitfalls of anecdotal evidence are illustrated in the following e-mail I received from “Mike”:

Hello!

I can’t attest to the validity of David Hawkins’s assertions or opinions, but I will share my personal experience with applied kinesiology with you. [Hawkins is an AK practitioner, among other things.]

Twenty-five years ago (age 30) I began suffering from serious food allergies. I began reacting to common foods that I had eaten for most of my life with increasing severity including a couple of potentially life threatening anaphylactic shocks that resulted in my being rushed to nearby hospital emergency wards and saved with injections of epinephrine.

I exhausted the best traditional medical resources available in Boston without results. Out of desperation, I visited a practitioner of applied kinesiology on a recommendation from a local nutritionist. It was the strangest thing. This very professional female in a white lab coat had me lie down on a medical-style table in what looked like a traditional doctor’s office. She placed dozens of small amounts food substances enclosed within what looked like small plastic pill boxes on my stomach while I laid down face up. She asked me to extend my right arm and resist her efforts to press my arm down toward the ground. In most instances, I easily resisted her pressure. In some instances my arm collapsed, which was astounding to me at the time both physically and mentally. She meticulously created a list that included several food substances to eliminate from my diet. I did so.

From that day forward I stopped having allergic food reactions. After a few months I visited her again. She tested me for the items I showed sensitivity to during our first visit. I tested as cured. Cautiously, I reintroduced those food items back into my diet without any repercussions. I have been fine ever since.

I don’t know how or why this worked. I do know that very sophisticated lab work conducted in a highly regarded hospital in Boston by a renowned physician was unable to determine what I was allergic to and how to pursue relief.

I am a conservative executive, a practicing Catholic, and have undergraduate and graduate degrees in business.

Feel free to use my comments although I am not on a crusade for the credibility of applied kinesiology. If you do so, please withhold my last name.

Mike says he doesn’t know how or why AK worked. However, from this anecdotal evidence alone we can’t justifiably say that AK worked. Mike also implies that AK worked better than the best science available at the time. After all, AK found what caused his allergies and scientific medicine did not. The problem here is that at this point it is just an assumption that Mike suffered from food allergies identified by the AK lady.

It is understandable that a person suffering from some problem would infer that since the problem went away after the treatment that the treatment was effective. The only evidence we have that the treatment worked (i.e., was effective) is that the problem went away after the visit to the AK lady and after Mike stopped ingesting the foods on the list she made for him. The fact that scientific medical tests did not indicate that Mike’s symptoms were due to an allergy is not evidence in favor of the view that AK is superior to conventional scientific methods. Had Mike not visited the AK lady, his symptoms might have ceased without any intervention at all. We have no way of knowing what would have happened to Mike had he not gone to the AK lady.

Mike’s anecdote illustrates why scientists prefer controlled studies to the details of personal experience, even though those details are important for medical diagnosis. The first problem with the anecdote is that we have to rely on Mike’s memory for details. The events happened twenty-five years ago. A lot of things can conspire to corrupt even a recent memory. The accuracy of the details may not be reliable. Memory can be selective and important details may not be recalled. Things that Mike experienced in the past twenty-five years might get mixed up with the old memory. Time sequences can get confused. A properly designed and executed controlled study can eliminate these problems.

Then there is the problem of interpreting the data. Mike seems convinced that he suffered from food allergies. It would be relatively easy to test AK’s effectiveness at diagnosing food allergies. All we have to do is put the food or a known non-allergen (for the client) in a pill box and lay it on the client’s stomach and subject him to the arm pressure test. As long as neither client nor AK practitioner knows what is in the box we should be able to do a fair test, expecting distinctly different reactions to the pressure on the arm routine depending on what’s in the box. We could do a significant number of such tests with various clients, randomly assigning pill boxes and their contents, which would give us enough data to determine whether there is likely anything to the AK claims.

To prevent complaints from the AK person that the test wasn’t fair, we’d let her do a few unblinded trials to make sure she thinks she can do what she claims. John Renish suggests that, to throw a monkey wrench into the mix, he would “put a compressive strain sensor between the practitioner’s hand and the patient’s for both the known and double-blinded materials: the record of force would demonstrate the variation due to the practitioner’s ideomotor or unconscious effort, or possibly the practitioner’s knowingly fraudulent actions.”

On the other hand, with the anecdote we have some problems. We can probably trust Mike’s memory about the anaphylactic shocks and the treatment with injections of epinephrine. But we have no way of knowing whether the AK practitioner’s pill box routine reliably identified food allergies. The list she gave Mike could have been determined by her pill box routine, but she could have just made it up based on general knowledge of foods that might be problematic. The amount of pressure she exerted might have been unconsciously determined by her beliefs about the allergenic potential of what she knew was in the pill box for each test. Even more problematic is the fact that there is no compelling scientific evidence to support the claim that this AK practitioner’s method of identifying food allergens is reliable.

Furthermore, we can’t be sure that the absence of further symptoms was due to the absence of the foods removed from Mike’s diet. One thing happened after the other, but that is not enough to support a causal connection. For all we know, some X-factor caused the anaphylactic shocks, some event or substance not controlled for and completely independent of any of the foods Mike believes caused his symptoms. The best medical people in Boston couldn’t identify the cause of Mike’s symptoms, he tells us. It is possible but unlikely that such competent medical people couldn’t identify a simple food allergy. The belief that food caused his medical problems seems based on little more than the claims of the AK practitioner and the fact that his symptoms did not recur after visiting her and he stopped eating the foods on her list.

I find it puzzling, however, that even though he received no therapy, he was told by the AK lady several months after his first visit with her that he was “cured” of his allergies and could now return to eating the foods that nearly killed him. He says he returned to eating these foods and hasn’t had any more problems. This evidence is consistent with the claim that an X-factor, not the foods he avoided for a few months, caused his symptoms.

A properly controlled study would produce unambiguous results. This anecdote, however, can be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps Mike can now eat the killer foods because he never had an allergic reaction to them in the first place. Perhaps his symptoms weren’t caused by an allergic reaction at all. Something else that we know nothing about may have actually caused his symptoms. Whatever it was, it was temporary. The symptoms might have been produced by voodoo or they may have been a punishment from a god. Maybe stress or an infection caused the symptoms. Maybe aliens were experimenting on Mike, unbeknownst to him.

I am no expert on food allergies but from what I do know, it seems unlikely a person could go thirty years without a reaction to certain foods that suddenly nearly kill him and then a few months later find that the killers have returned to their former gentle selves.

This anecdote illustrates the power of experience to deceive us into thinking we have identified a causal agent when, in fact, we have very little evidence in support of our belief. The astute reader will have noticed that I made no mention of the placebo effect to explain Mike’s relief. In my Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on homeopathy I review Wendy Kaminer’s defense of the rationality of going to a homeopath even if there is no compelling scientific evidence that homeopathic remedies are effective. They may have some benefit due to the placebo effect, she argues, and so it would be irrational not to go to the homeopath. I won’t repeat my arguments here, but I don’t think Kaminer’s position is defensible. Even if AK has some sort of placebo effect, that is not good enough reason to recommend it. It is possible, I suppose, that the AK lady was so charming and sweet that she completely disarmed Mike and relieved him of all stress, thereby relaxing him to such an extent that his own body was able to produce natural substances that brought him relief or shut down the production of the harmful chemicals that were causing his symptoms. However, even if Mike’s recovery was due to a placebo effect, we have no way of knowing this without doing systematic formal testing of AK. With the amount of evidence we have here, the placebo effect is on par with voodoo or divine vengeance in terms of its supportive evidence.

It might seem that the evidence in Mike’s anecdote that AK is an effective diagnostic and therapeutic procedure is on par with the evidence that the prescription a physician gives you for a diagnosed bladder infection was effective. It might appear that the only evidence you have is that the infection went away after you took the medicine. However, presumably the physician chose the drug to prescribe based on the evidence from scientific studies. The AK lady has no scientific studies to back up her method of diagnosis. What she probably has is some experience using AK where the method seems to work. She has probably seen demonstrations of AK, has received some positive feedback from her customers, and so “knows from experience” that it works.

The evidence from satisfied customers is anecdotal and consists of nothing more than some customers claiming that after the treatment they felt better. Again, these customers have no way of knowing that it was the AK that brought about the desired outcome. All they know is that one thing happened after another. The demonstrations of AK that the practitioner has probably witnessed or produced herself were most likely not controlled demonstrations. The method of testing AK used by practitioners would probably involve knowing what substance is being tested and then behaving in an expected manner. If the substance is believed to be bad for you, then they press hard or produce little resistance (depending on what role they are playing). If the substance is believed to be good for you, then they don’t press hard or don’t offer much resistance. This may all take place at the unconscious level, however. So, we need not accuse the AK folks of fraud. Ideomotor action combined with a strong desire to succeed in providing support for their belief system is sufficient to explain how this kind of self-deception works. These factors also illustrate the importance of doing randomized, double-blind, controlled studies rather than relying on personal experience and anecdotes to establish causal connections.

While there haven’t been any well designed controlled studies indicating the effectiveness of AK, there have been numerous studies that seem to provide support for the effectiveness of acupuncture. Evaluating treatment by an acupuncturist is a bit trickier than evaluating AK treatment. I will try to illustrate some of the issues involved in evaluating personal experiences with acupuncture by using an e-mail sent to me from “Fabio.” (English is not Fabio’s first language but I have kept my editing to a minimum. I believe that Fabio expresses himself clearly enough to be understood and that is all that is required for our purposes here. The reader should understand that it is the ideas that we are interested in here, not the grammar.)

Regarding your article on acupuncture: I agree with you that there are many people who claim to do acupuncture and what they do is just junk. And I agree that there might be several studies that prove acupuncture is not working, at least not in the way it should, or that it is even harmful.

On the other hand, take this personal experience, which I witnessed with my own eyes, from a person I know: A little girl of six years has had big problems due to the fact that her left leg was 6 cm [2.4 inches] shorter than the right one since birth. After taking her to hospital, the doctors advised the parents [that they wanted] to operate [on] their daughter and remove 6 cm from the longer leg. Accidentally, they met an acupuncturist, who I know personally, and he offered ... to try to treat the girl before the operation [and] to try [to] avoid it [the operation]. And funny thing, it worked, since it wasn’t the leg that was 6 cm shorter, but the hip, which was tilted relative to the backbone. No difficult operation, almost no pain, almost no cost, and no more problems in the years since the treatment up to now.

I don’t say this to claim that acupuncture is THE great thing and can replace conventional medical treatment. I am aware that there are a lot of people around who are just frauds or even harm people. But this little first-hand experience and some others I had myself on my own body, convinced me that acupuncture definitely can work and can do something to your body. Of course it will not work if not applied correctly. And it’s no wonder-healing. Just like conventional medicine is dependent on being applied correctly and cannot perform wonders.

Of course you don’t need to believe my story and can say that I am just telling nonsense out of wishful thinking or whatever. My only advice, if you want to be a “real” skeptic: go out, try a lot of people [and] a lot of treatments and see what it can do... if it does not work, you just waste money, if it helps you with something it is fine and if it harms you, at least you know that it works, just not in the way you liked it to have... no, sorry I was just kidding.

Anyhow, from my opinion it is very very important to try out as much as one can do, and not only read studies and books. In my opinion, this is what a skeptic in the sense of being a scientist should do. What can happen? If it does not work, it simply does not work, and if something works, it’s just a starting point for thinking, more investigations and maybe findings. And it can definitely be exciting.

Fabio advised me and other skeptics to personally experience acupuncture if we are to understand it. Experience can provide us with lessons that books and scientific studies cannot. Furthermore, Fabio and many others are satisfied customers in the sense that they have experienced the effectiveness of acupuncture.

First, I must remind Fabio and the reader that in my article on acupuncture in The Skeptic’s Dictionary I make a point to distinguish the claim that sticking needles into various parts of a human body induces physiological changes in that body and the claim that acupuncture works by unblocking chi in meridians. The concepts of chi and meridians are metaphysical concepts that evolved long before physiology and long before the discovery of nerve endings, endorphins, etc. The fact that millions of people have sworn by acupuncture or lucky charms or prayers or faith healers, and the like is irrelevant to whether these practices are causal agents in the way their adherents think they are. As I make clear in my article, appealing to unblocking chi in meridians is superfluous metaphysical gibberish but the claim that sticking needles in people has measurable physiological effects is an empirical claim that has been tested and is correct.

We can test the claim, for example, that sticking needles in a person’s ear lobes effectively treats addiction. But we are deceiving ourselves if we think we have good evidence for such a claim by experiencing auricular acupuncture before we quit drinking, smoking, or using heroin. I understand why a person who went to an acupuncturist to help with some addictive behavior would think that the acupuncture was the most significant causal factor in her treatment if she did actually overcome the addiction. But this subjective certainty of a causal connection is of little relevance to the accuracy of the general claim: acupuncture is an effective causal agent in the treatment of addiction. To provide compelling evidence for such a claim we should require controlled studies, not anecdotes. In our individual experience we are unable to control for dozens of other factors that might be significant and we are likely to give too much credit to the one thing that actually had little or no effect.

Fabio might reply by asking: What difference does it make? You quit smoking! That’s what you wanted. So what if the acupuncture actually had nothing to do with it? The treatment worked!

In fact, you don’t know that the treatment worked, i.e., that the acupuncture was effective. You can’t reasonably advise others to try it simply on the grounds that after you did the treatment you quit smoking. On the other hand, if dozens of your smoking friends and colleagues all tried it and all quit smoking for several years, we would have to admit that the odds of some X-factor being involved have diminished. Though the placebo effect might account for these successes, such a mass of anecdotal evidence would warrant a nice grant from your government or an acupuncture needle-making company to do a proper scientific study of the issue. Any lingering doubts we might have about the causal efficacy of acupuncture for treating nicotine addiction could be erased by a few well designed and executed controlled studies.

I was intrigued by the story about the little girl because I was told by my parents that when I was very young one of my legs was shorter than the other. I received neither surgery nor acupuncture, but a shoe with a lift. Eventually, I didn’t need the shoe. As far as I can tell, my legs are the same length now. Maybe my hip was out of whack and the shoe with the lift slowly adjusted it in relation to my leg. I’ve never heard of acupuncture making legs grow or hips relocate, so that is a new one on me. I asked Fabio if she received any other treatment besides acupuncture and he wrote:

Only acupuncture was used to treat her. In the weeks directly after the treatment, she had some trouble getting used to the “changes” in her body, but after this period, everything was fine and just normal, no limp, no brace. I followed her case for roughly two years after the treatment, where no negative change to her constitution happened.

What effect, if any, did the acupuncture have on this little girl? There is no way for us to know. We don’t have anything to compare this treatment to. We have no way of knowing what would have happened had she received no treatment at all. There are studies that indicate acupuncture can relieve some of the pain associated with joint problems, but what relevance such studies have for this case is uncertain. Also, apparently it is not uncommon to have one leg shorter than the other, a fact that has been exploited by some chiropractors who offer bogus treatments to “cure” the patient.

I’ll conclude with a quote from Barry Beyerstein (1947-2007) who was a model of critical thinking:

The pioneers of the scientific revolution were aware of the large potential for error when informal reasoning joins forces with our penchant for jumping to congenial conclusions. By systematizing observations, studying large groups rather than a few isolated individuals, instituting control groups, and trying to eliminate confounding variables, these innovative thinkers hoped to reduce the impact of the frailties of reasoning that lead to false beliefs about how the world works. None of these safeguards exists when we base our decisions merely on a few satisfied customers’ personal anecdotes—unfortunately, these stories are the “alternative” practitioner’s stock in trade. Psychologists interested in judgmental biases have repeatedly demonstrated that human inference is especially vulnerable in complex situations, such as that of evaluating therapeutic outcomes, which contain a mix of interacting variables and a number of strong social pressures. Add a pecuniary interest in a particular outcome, and the scope for self-delusion is immense. (Social and Judgmental Biases That Make Inert Treatments Seem to Work. 1999. Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 3 (2):20-33.)

Index

Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions Not Listed in the Table of Contents

actor-observer bias

affirming the consequent

appeal to popularity

appeal to the mob

arbitrary coherence

bandwagon fallacy

better-than-average bias

black or white fallacy

citation bias

conjunction fallacy

correspondence bias

democratic fallacy

dispositional attribution bias

either-or fallacy

emotional attribution bias

equivocation

evading the issue

evaluator bias

false charge of ad hominem

false dilemma (false dichotomy)

file-drawer effect

fundamental attribution error

gambler’s fallacy

hasty conclusion

hostile media effect

hostile referee effect

illusion of objectivity

intellectual attribution bias

irrelevant appeal to emotions

irrelevant comparison

law of contagion

law of similarity

law of small numbers

loss aversion

memory misattribution

motivated perception

non sequitur

planning fallacy

poisoning the well

positivity bias

pragmatic fallacy

principle of parsimony

principle of simplicity

proportionality bias

psi assumption

red herring

selective looking

self-priming

self-serving bias

situational attribution bias

slippery slope fallacy

Table of Contents

Also by Robert Todd Carroll

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

ad hoc hypothesis

ad hominem

ad populum fallacy

affect bias

anchoring effect

anecdotal evidence (testimonials)

apophenia and pareidolia

appeal to authority

appeal to tradition

argument to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam)

attribution biases

availability bias

backfire effect

begging the question

bias blind spot

causal fallacies

change blindness

classical conditioning and placebo effects

clustering illusion

communal reinforcement

confabulation

confirmation bias

continued influence effect

control group study

critical thinking/critical thinker

debiasing

experimenter effect

fallacies

false implication

false memories

Forer effect (aka Barnum effect)

groupthink

halo effect

hindsight bias

ideomotor effect

illusion of control

illusion of justice

illusion of skill

illusion of understanding

inattentional blindness

intentionality bias

law of truly large numbers

magical thinking

motivated reasoning

negativity bias

Occam’s razor

optimistic bias

positive-outcome bias

post hoc fallacy

priming effect

recency bias

regressive fallacy

representativeness bias

selection bias

self-deception

shoehorning

straw man fallacy

subjective validation

suppressed evidence

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

wishful thinking

Appendix I: The Wisdom Of Not Thinking Too Much

Appendix II: Evaluating Personal Experience

Index