Category: Reasoning

I have a guest post for the Research Digest, snappily titled ‘People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more‘. The paper I review is about the so-called “belief superiority” effect, which is defined by thinking that your views are better than other people’s (i.e. not just that you are right, but that other people are wrong). The finding that people who have belief superiority are more likely to overestimate their knowledge is a twist on the famous Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, but showing that it isn’t just ignorance that predicts overconfidence, but also the specific belief that everyone else has mistaken beliefs.

Here’s the first lines of the Research Digest piece:

We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed than others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actually better informed on the topics for which they are convinced their opinion is superior? This is what Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi set out to check in a series of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Read more here: ‘People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more‘

 

Nicky Case (of Explorable Explanations and Parable of the Polygons internet fame) has a fantastic essay which picks up on the theme of my last Cyberselves post – technology as companion, not competitor.

In How To Become A Centaur Case gives blitz history of AI, and of its lesser known cousin IA – Intelligence Augmentation. The insight that digital technology could be a a ‘bicycle for the mind’ (Steve Jobs’ quote) gave us the modern computer, as shown in the 1968 Mother of All Demos which introduced the world to the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and collaborative working. (1968 people! 1968! As Case notes, 44 years before google docs, 35 years before skype).

We’re living in the world made possible by Englebart’s demo. Digital tools, from mere phones to the remote presence they enable, or the remote action that robots are surely going to make more common, and as Case says:

a tool doesn’t “just” make something easier — it allows for new, previously-impossible ways of thinking, of living, of being.

And the vital insight is that the future will rely on identifying the strengths and weakness of natural and artificial cognition, and figuring out how to harness them together. Case again:

When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”.

It’s the “+”.

The article is too good to try to summarise. Read the full text here

Cross-posted at the Cyberselves blog.

Previously: Tools, substitutes or companions: three metaphors for thinking about technology, Cyberselves: How Immersive Technologies Will Impact Our Future Selves

The backfire effect is when correcting misinformation hardens, rather than corrects, someone’s mistaken belief. It’s a relative of so called ‘attitude polarisation’ whereby people’s views on politically controversial topics can get more, not less, extreme when they are exposed to counter-arguments.

The finding that misperception are hard to correct is not new – it fits with research on the tenacity of beliefs and the difficulty of debunking.

The backfire effect appears to give an extra spin on this. If backfire effects hold, then correcting fake news can be worse than useless – the correction could reinforce the misinformation in people’s minds. This is what Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler warned about in a 2010 paper ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’.

Now, work by Tom Wood and Ethan Porter suggests that backfire effects may not be common or reliable. Reporting in their ‘The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence’ they exposed over 10,000 mechanical turk participants, over 5 experiments and 52 different topics, to misleading statements from American politicians from both of the two main parties. Across all statements, and all experiments, they found that showing people corrections moved their beliefs away from the false information. There was an effect of the match between the ideology of the participant and of the politician, but it wasn’t large:

Among liberals, 85% of issues saw a significant factual response to correction, among moderates, 96% of issues, and among conservatives, 83% of issues. No backfire was observed for any issue, among any ideological cohort

All in all, this suggests, in their words, that ‘The backfire effect is far less prevalent than existing research would indicate’. Far from being counter-productive, corrections work. Part of the power of this new study is that it uses the same materials and participants as the 2010 paper reporting backfire effects – statements about US politics and US citizens. Although the numbers mean the new study in convincing, it doesn’t show the backfire effect will never occur, especially for different attitudes in different contexts or nations.

So, don’t give up on fact checking just yet – people are more more reasonable about their beliefs than the backfire suggests.

Original paper: Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330.

New studies: Wood, T., & Porter, E. (in press). The elusive backfire effect: Mass attitudes’ steadfast factual adherence. Political Behaviour.

The news is also good in a related experiment on fake news by the same team: Sex Trafficking, Russian Infiltration, Birth Certificates, and Pedophilia: A Survey Experiment Correcting Fake News. Regardless of ideology or content of fake news, people were responsive to corrections.

Read more about the psychology of responsiveness to argument in my ‘For argument’s sake: evidence that reason can change minds’.

A review called ‘The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories‘ sets out a theory of why individuals end up believing Elvis is alive, NASA faked the moon landings or 9/11 was an inside job. Karen Douglas and colleagues suggest:

Belief in conspiracy theories appears to be driven by motives that can be characterized as epistemic (understanding one’s environment), existential (being safe and in control of one’s environment), and social (maintaining a positive image of the self and the social group).

In their review they cover evidence showing that factors like uncertainty about the world, lack of control or social exclusion (factors affecting epistemic, existential and social motives respectively) are all associated with increased susceptibility to conspiracy theory beliefs.

But also they show, paradoxically, that exposure to conspiracy theories doesn’t salve these needs. People presented with pro-conspiracy theory information about vaccines or climate change felt a reduced sense of control and increased disillusion with politics and distrust of government. Douglas’ argument is that although individuals might find conspiracy theories attractive because they promise to make sense of the world, they actually increase uncertainty and decrease the chance people will take effective collective action.

My take would be that, viewed like this, conspiracy theories are a form of maladaptive coping. The account makes sense of why we are all vulnerable to conspiracy theories – and we are all vulnerable; many individual conspiracy theories have very widespread subscription – for example half of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in the assassination of JFK. Of course polling about individual beliefs must underestimate the proportion of individuals who subscribe to at least one conspiracy theory. The account also makes sense of why some people are more susceptible than others – people who have less education, are more excluded or powerless and have a heightened need to see patterns which aren’t necessarily there.

There are a few areas where this account isn’t fully satisfying.
– it doesn’t really offer a psychologically grounded definition of conspiracy theories. Douglas’s working definition is ‘explanations for important events that involve secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups’, which seems to include some cases of conspiracy beliefs which aren’t ‘conspiracy theories’ (sometimes it is reasonable to believe in secret plots by the powerful; sometimes the powerful are involved in secret plots), and it seems to miss some cases of conspiracy-theory type reasoning (for example paranoid beliefs about other people in your immediate social world).
– one aspects of conspiracy theories is that they are hard to disprove, with, for example, people presenting contrary evidence seem as confirming the existence of the conspiracy. But the common psychological tendency to resist persuasion is well known. Are conspiracy theories especially hard to shift, any more than other beliefs (or the beliefs of non-conspiracy theorists)? Would it be easier to persuade you that the earth is flat than it would be to persuade a flat-earther that the earth is round? If not, then the identifying mark of conspiracy theories may be the factors that lead you to get into them, rather that their dynamics when you’ve got them.
– and how you get into them seems crucially unaddressed by the experimental psychology methods Douglas and colleagues deploy. We have correlational data on the kinds of people who subscribe to conspiracy theories, and experimental data on presenting people with conspiracy theories, but no rich ethnographic account of how individuals find themselves pulled into the world of a conspiracy theory (or how they eventually get out of it).

Further research is, as they say, needed.

Reference: Douglas, K., Sutton, R. M., & Cichocka, A. (2017). The psychology of conspiracy theories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26 (6), 538-542.

Karen Douglas’ homepage

Previously on mindhacks.com: Conspiracy theory as character flaw, That’s what they want you to believe. Conspiracy theory page on mindhacks wiki.

I saw Karen Douglas present this work at a talk to Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub. Thanks to them for organising.

How do you persuade somebody of the facts? Asking them to be fair, impartial and unbiased is not enough. To explain why, psychologist Tom Stafford analyses a classic scientific study.

One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe. If we hear gossip about a rival we tend to think “I knew he was a nasty piece of work”; if we hear the same about our best friend we’re more likely to say “that’s just a rumour”. If you don’t trust the government then a change of policy is evidence of their weakness; if you do trust them the same change of policy can be evidence of their inherent reasonableness.

Once you learn about this mental habit – called confirmation bias – you start seeing it everywhere.

This matters when we want to make better decisions. Confirmation bias is OK as long as we’re right, but all too often we’re wrong, and we only pay attention to the deciding evidence when it’s too late.

How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens. There are, broadly, two possible accounts and a classic experiment from researchers at Princeton University pits the two against each other, revealing in the process a method for overcoming bias.

The first theory of confirmation bias is the most common. It’s the one you can detect in expressions like “You just believe what you want to believe”, or “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” or when the someone is accused of seeing things a particular way because of who they are, what their job is or which friends they have. Let’s call this the motivational theory of confirmation bias. It has a clear prescription for correcting the bias: change people’s motivations and they’ll stop being biased.

The alternative theory of confirmation bias is more subtle. The bias doesn’t exist because we only believe what we want to believe, but instead because we fail to ask the correct questions about new information and our own beliefs. This is a less neat theory, because there could be one hundred reasons why we reason incorrectly – everything from limitations of memory to inherent faults of logic. One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways the world could be different from how we first assume it is. Under this account the way to correct confirmation bias is to give people a strategy to adjust their thinking. We assume people are already motivated to find out the truth, they just need a better method. Let’s call this the cognition theory of confirmation bias.

Thirty years ago, Charles Lord and colleagues published a classic experiment which pitted these two methods against each other. Their study used a persuasion experiment which previously had shown a kind of confirmation bias they called ‘biased assimilation’. Here, participants were recruited who had strong pro- or anti-death penalty views and were presented with evidence that seemed to support the continuation or abolition of the death penalty. Obviously, depending on what you already believe, this evidence is either confirmatory or disconfirmatory. Their original finding showed that the nature of the evidence didn’t matter as much as what people started out believing. Confirmatory evidence strengthened people’s views, as you’d expect, but so did disconfirmatory evidence. That’s right, anti-death penalty people became more anti-death penalty when shown pro-death penalty evidence (and vice versa). A clear example of biased reasoning.

For their follow-up study, Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational instructions told participants to be “as objective and unbiased as possible”, to consider themselves “as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair and impartial manner”. The alternative, cognition-focused, instructions were silent on the desired outcome of the participants’ consideration, instead focusing only on the strategy to employ: “Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.” So, for example, if presented with a piece of research that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were asked to analyse the study’s methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way.

They called this the “consider the opposite” strategy, and the results were striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment. Pro-death penalty participants thought the evidence supported the death penalty. Anti-death penalty participants thought it supported abolition. Wanting to make unbiased decisions wasn’t enough. The “consider the opposite” participants, on the other hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation effect – they weren’t driven to rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones that disagreed, and didn’t become more extreme in their views regardless of which evidence they read.

The finding is good news for our faith in human nature. It isn’t that we don’t want to discover the truth, at least in the microcosm of reasoning tested in the experiment. All people needed was a strategy which helped them overcome the natural human short-sightedness to alternatives.

The moral for making better decisions is clear: wanting to be fair and objective alone isn’t enough. What’s needed are practical methods for correcting our limited reasoning – and a major limitation is our imagination for how else things might be. If we’re lucky, someone else will point out these alternatives, but if we’re on our own we can still take advantage of crutches for the mind like the “consider the opposite” strategy.

This is my BBC Future column from last week. You can read the original here. My ebook For argument’s sake: Evidence that reason can change minds is out now.

Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the “illusion of truth” effect. Here’s how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like “A prune is a dried plum”. Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn’t true (something like “A date is a dried plum”).

After a break – of minutes or even weeks – the participants do the procedure again, but this time some of the items they rate are new, and some they saw before in the first phase. The key finding is that people tend to rate items they’ve seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.

So, here, captured in the lab, seems to be the source for the saying that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. And if you look around yourself, you may start to think that everyone from advertisers to politicians are taking advantage of this foible of human psychology.

But a reliable effect in the lab isn’t necessarily an important effect on people’s real-world beliefs. If you really could make a lie sound true by repetition, there’d be no need for all the other techniques of persuasion.

One obstacle is what you already know. Even if a lie sounds plausible, why would you set what you know aside just because you heard the lie repeatedly?

Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge? They used paired true and un-true statements, but also split their items according to how likely participants were to know the truth (so “The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an example of a “known” items, which also happens to be true, and “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” is an un-true item, for which people are likely to know the actual truth).

Their results show that the illusion of truth effect worked just as strongly for known as for unknown items, suggesting that prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgements of plausibility.

To cover all bases, the researchers performed one study in which the participants were asked to rate how true each statement seemed on a six-point scale, and one where they just categorised each fact as “true” or “false”. Repetition pushed the average item up the six-point scale, and increased the odds that a statement would be categorised as true. For statements that were actually fact or fiction, known or unknown, repetition made them all seem more believable.

At first this looks like bad news for human rationality, but – and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough – when interpreting psychological science, you have to look at the actual numbers.

What Fazio and colleagues actually found, is that the biggest influence on whether a statement was judged to be true was… whether it actually was true. The repetition effect couldn’t mask the truth. With or without repetition, people were still more likely to believe the actual facts as opposed to the lies.

This shows something fundamental about how we update our beliefs – repetition has a power to make things sound more true, even when we know differently, but it doesn’t over-ride that knowledge

The next question has to be, why might that be? The answer is to do with the effort it takes to being rigidly logical about every piece of information you hear. If every time you heard something you assessed it against everything you already knew, you’d still be thinking about breakfast at supper-time. Because we need to make quick judgements, we adopt shortcuts – heuristics which are right more often than wrong. Relying on how often you’ve heard something to judge how truthful something feels is just one strategy. Any universe where truth gets repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% vs 49% will be one where this is a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.

If repetition was the only thing that influenced what we believed we’d be in trouble, but it isn’t. We can all bring to bear more extensive powers of reasoning, but we need to recognise they are a limited resource. Our minds are prey to the illusion of truth effect because our instinct is to use short-cuts in judging how plausible something is. Often this works. Sometimes it is misleading.

Once we know about the effect we can guard against it. Part of this is double-checking why we believe what we do – if something sounds plausible is it because it really is true, or have we just been told that repeatedly? This is why scholars are so mad about providing references – so we can track the origin on any claim, rather than having to take it on faith.

But part of guarding against the illusion is the obligation it puts on us to stop repeating falsehoods. We live in a world where the facts matter, and should matter. If you repeat things without bothering to check if they are true, you are helping to make a world where lies and truth are easier to confuse. So, please, think before you repeat.

This is my BBC Future column from the other week, the original is here. For more on this topic, see my ebook : For argument’s sake: evidence that reason can change minds (smashwords link here)

Neither intelligence nor education can stop you from forming prejudiced opinions – but an inquisitive attitude may help you make wiser judgements.

Ask a left-wing Brit what they believe about the safety of nuclear power, and you can guess their answer. Ask a right-wing American about the risks posed by climate change, and you can also make a better guess than if you didn’t know their political affiliation. Issues like these feel like they should be informed by science, not our political tribes, but sadly, that’s not what happens.

Psychology has long shown that education and intelligence won’t stop your politics from shaping your broader worldview, even if those beliefs do not match the hard evidence. Instead, your ability to weigh up the facts may depend on a less well-recognised trait – curiosity.

The political lens

There is now a mountain of evidence to show that politics doesn’t just help predict people’s views on some scientific issues; it also affects how they interpret new information. This is why it is a mistake to think that you can somehow ‘correct’ people’s views on an issue by giving them more facts, since study after study has shown that people have a tendency to selectively reject facts that don’t fit with their existing views.

This leads to the odd situation that people who are most extreme in their anti-science views – for example skeptics of the risks of climate change – are more scientifically informed than those who hold anti-science views but less strongly.

But smarter people shouldn’t be susceptible to prejudice swaying their opinions, right? Wrong. Other research shows that people with the most education, highest mathematical abilities, and the strongest tendencies to be reflective about their beliefs are the most likely to resist information which should contradict their prejudices. This undermines the simplistic assumption that prejudices are the result of too much gut instinct and not enough deep thought. Rather, people who have the facility for deeper thought about an issue can use those cognitive powers to justify what they already believe and find reasons to dismiss apparently contrary evidence.

It’s a messy picture, and at first looks like a depressing one for those who care about science and reason. A glimmer of hope can be found in new research from a collaborative team of philosophers, film-makers and psychologists led by Dan Kahan of Yale University.

Kahan and his team were interested in politically biased information processing, but also in studying the audience for scientific documentaries and using this research to help film-makers. They developed two scales. The first measured a person’s scientific background, a fairly standard set of questions asking about knowledge of basic scientific facts and methods, as well as quantitative judgement and reasoning. The second scale was more innovative. The idea of this scale was to measure something related but independent – a person’s curiosity about scientific issues, not how much they already knew. This second scale was also innovative in how they measured scientific curiosity. As well as asking some questions, they also gave people choices about what material to read as part of a survey about reactions to news. If an individual chooses to read about science stories rather than sports or politics, their corresponding science curiosity score was marked up.

Armed with their scales, the team then set out to see how they predicted people’s opinions on public issues which should be informed by science. With the scientific knowledge scale the results were depressingly predictable. The left-wing participants – liberal Democrats – tended to judge issues such as global warming or fracking as significant risks to human health, safety or prosperity. The right-wing participants – conservative Republicans – were less likely to judge the issues as significant risks. What’s more, the liberals with more scientific background were most concerned about the risks, while the conservatives with more scientific background were least concerned. That’s right – higher levels of scientific education results in a greater polarisation between the groups, not less.

So much for scientific background, but scientific curiosity showed a different pattern. Differences between liberals and conservatives still remained – on average there was still a noticeable gap in their estimates of the risks – but their opinions were at least heading in the same direction. For fracking for example, more scientific curiosity was associated with more concern, for both liberals and conservatives.

The team confirmed this using an experiment which gave participants a choice of science stories, either in line with their existing beliefs, or surprising to them. Those participants who were high in scientific curiosity defied the predictions and selected stories which contradicted their existing beliefs – this held true whether they were liberal or conservative.

And, in case you are wondering, the results hold for issues in which political liberalism is associated with the anti-science beliefs, such as attitudes to GMO or vaccinations.

So, curiosity might just save us from using science to confirm our identity as members of a political tribe. It also shows that to promote a greater understanding of public issues, it is as important for educators to try and convey their excitement about science and the pleasures of finding out stuff, as it is to teach people some basic curriculum of facts.

This is my BBC Future column from last week. The original is here. My ebook ‘For argument’s sake: evidence that reason can change minds’ is out now

Playing two classic schoolyard games can help us understand everything from sexism to the power of advertising.

There’s a word game we used to play at my school, or a sort of trick, and it works like this. You tell someone they have to answer some questions as quickly as possible, and then you rush at them the following:

“What’s one plus four?!”
“What’s five plus two?!”
“What’s seven take away three?!”
“Name a vegetable?!”

Nine times out of 10 people answer the last question with “Carrot”.

Now I don’t think the magic is in the maths questions. Probably they just warm your respondent up to answering questions rapidly. What is happening is that, for most people, most of the time, in all sorts of circumstances, carrot is simply the first vegetable that comes to mind.

This seemingly banal fact reveals something about how our minds organise information. There are dozens of vegetables, and depending on your love of fresh food you might recognise a good proportion. If you had to list them you’d probably forget a few you know, easily reaching a dozen and then slowing down. And when you’re pressured to name just one as quickly as possible, you forget even more and just reach for the most obvious vegetable you can think of – and often that’s a carrot.

In cognitive science, we say the carrot is “prototypical” – for our idea of a vegetable, it occupies the centre of the web of associations which defines the concept. You can test prototypicality directly by timing how long it takes someone to answer whether the object in question belongs to a particular category. We take longer to answer “yes” if asked “is a penguin a bird?” than if asked “is a robin a bird?”, for instance. Even when we know penguins are birds, the idea of penguins takes longer to connect to the category “bird” than more typical species.

So, something about our experience of school dinners, being told they’ll help us see in the dark, the 37 million tons of carrots the world consumes each year, and cartoon characters from Bugs Bunny to Olaf the Snowman, has helped carrots work their way into our minds as the prime example of a vegetable.

The benefit to this system of mental organisation is that the ideas which are most likely to be associated are also the ones which spring to mind when you need them. If I ask you to imagine a costumed superhero, you know they have a cape, can probably fly and there’s definitely a star-shaped bubble when they punch someone. Prototypes organise our experience of the world, telling us what to expect, whether it is a superhero or a job interview. Life would be impossible without them.

The drawback is that the things which connect together because of familiarity aren’t always the ones which should connect together because of logic. Another game we used to play proves this point. You ask someone to play along again and this time you ask them to say “Milk” 20 times as fast as they can. Then you challenge them to snap-respond to the question “What do cows drink?”. The fun is in seeing how many people answer “milk”. A surprising number do, allowing you to crow “Cows drink water, stupid!”. We drink milk, and the concept is closely connected to the idea of cows, so it is natural to accidentally pull out the answer “milk” when we’re fishing for the first thing that comes to mind in response to the ideas “drink” and “cow”.

Having a mind which supplies ready answers based on association is better than a mind which never supplies ready answers, but it can also produce blunders that are much more damaging than claiming cows drink milk. Every time we assume the doctor is a man and the nurse is woman, we’re falling victim to the ready answers of our mental prototypes of those professions. Such prototypes, however mistaken, may also underlie our readiness to assume a man will be a better CEO, or a philosophy professor won’t be a woman. If you let them guide how the world should be, rather than what it might be, you get into trouble pretty quickly.

Advertisers know the power of prototypes too, of course, which is why so much advertising appears to be style over substance. Their job isn’t to deliver a persuasive message, as such. They don’t want you to actively believe anything about their product being provably fun, tasty or healthy. Instead, they just want fun, taste or health to spring to mind when you think of their product (and the reverse). Worming their way into our mental associations is worth billions of dollars to the advertising industry, and it is based on a principle no more complicated than a childhood game which tries to trick you into saying “carrots”.

This is my BBC Future column from last week. The original is here. And, yes, I know that baby cows actually do drink milk.

The Devil looks you in the eyes and offers you a bet. Pick a number and if you successfully guess the total he’ll roll on two dice you get to keep your soul. If any other number comes up, you go to burn in eternal hellfire.

You call “7” and the Devil rolls the dice.

A two and a four, so the total is 6 — that’s bad news.

But let’s not dwell on the incandescent pain of your infinite and inescapable future, let’s think about your choice immediately before the dice were rolled.

Did you make a mistake? Was choosing “7” an error?

In one sense, obviously yes. You should have chosen 6.

But in another important sense you made the right choice. There are more combinations of dice outcomes that add to 7 than to any other number. The chances of winning if you bet 7 are higher than for any other single number.

The distinction is between a particular choice which happens to be wrong, and a choice strategy which is actually as good as you can do in the circumstances. If we replace the Devil’s Wager with the situations the world presents you, and your choice of number with your actions in response, then we have a handle on what psychologists mean when they talk about “cognitive error” or “bias”.

In psychology, the interesting errors are not decisions that just happen to turn out wrong. The interesting errors are decisions which people systematically get wrong, and get wrong in a particular way. As well as being predictable, these errors are interesting because they must be happening for a reason.

If you met a group of people who always bet “6” when gambling with the Devil, you’d be an incurious person if you assumed they were simply idiots. That judgement doesn’t lead anywhere. Instead, you’d want to find out what they believe that makes them think that’s the right choice strategy. Similarly, when psychologists find that people will pay more to keep something than they’d pay to obtain it or are influenced by irrelevant information in the judgements of risk, there’s no profit to labelling this “irrationality” and leaving it at that. The interesting question is why these choices seem common to so many people. What is it about our minds that disposes us to make these same errors, to have in common the same choice strategies?

You can get traction on the shape of possible answers from the Devil’s Wager example. In this scenario, why would you bet “6” rather than “7”? Here are three possible general reasons, and their explanations in the terms of the Devil’s Wager, and also a real example.

 

1. Strategy is optimised for a different environment

If you expected the Devil to role a single loaded die, rather than a fair pair of dice, then calling “6” would be the best strategy, rather than a sub-optimal one.
Analogously, you can understand a psychological bias by understanding which environment is it intended to match. If I love sugary foods so much it makes me fat, part of the explanation may be that my sugar cravings evolved at a point in human history when starvation was a bigger risk than obesity.

 

2. Strategy is designed for a bundle of choices

If you know you’ll only get to pick one number to cover multiple bets, your best strategy is to pick a number which works best over all bets. So if the Devil is going to give you best of ten, and most of the time he’ll roll a single loaded die, and only some times roll two fair dice, then “6” will give you the best total score, even though it is less likely to win for the two-fair-dice wager.

In general, what looks like a poor choice may be the result of strategy which treats a class of decisions as the same, and produces a good answer for that whole set. It is premature to call our decision making irrational if we look at a single choice, which is the focus of the psychologist’s experiment, and not the related set of choice of which it is part.

An example from the literature may be the Mere Exposure Effect, where we favour something we’ve seen before merely because we’ve seen it before. In experiments, this preference looks truly arbitrary, because the experiment decided which stimuli to expose us to and which to withhold, but in everyday life our familiarity with things tracks important variables such as how common, safe or sought out things are. The Mere Exposure Effect may result from a feature of our minds that assumes, all other things being equal, that familiar things are preferable, and that’s probably a good general strategy.

 

3. Strategy uses a different cost/benefit analysis

Obviously, we’re assuming everyone wants to save their soul and avoid damnation. If you felt like you didn’t deserve heaven, harps and angel wings, or that hellfire sounds comfortably warm, then you might avoid making the bet-winning optimal choice.

By extension, we should only call a choice irrational or suboptimal if we know what people are trying to optimise. For example, it looks like people systematically under-explore new ways of doing things when learning skills. Is this reliance on habit, similar to confirmation bias when exploring competing hypotheses, irrational? Well, in the sense that it slows your learning down, it isn’t optimal, but if it exists because exploration carries a risk (you might get the action catastrophically wrong, you might hurt yourself), or that the important thing is to minimise the cost of acting (and habitual movements require less energy), then it may in fact be better than reckless exploration.

 

So if we see a perplexing behaviour, we might reach for one of these explanations to explain it: The behaviour is right for a different environment, a wider set of choices, or a different cost/benefit analysis. Only when we are confident that we understand the environment (either evolutionary, or of training) which drives the behaviour, and the general class of choices of which it is part, and that we know which cost-benefit function the people making the choices are using, should we confidently say a choice is an error. Even then it is pretty unprofitable to call such behaviour irrational – we’d want to know why people make the error. Are they unable to calculate the right response? Mis-perceiving the situation?

A seemingly irrational behaviour is a good place to start investigating the psychology of decision making, but labelling behaviour irrational is a terrible place to stop. The topic really starts to get interesting when we start to ask why particular behaviours exist, and try to understand their rationality.

 

Previously/elsewhere:

Irrational? Decisions and decision making in context
My ebook: For argument’s sake: evidence that reason can change minds, which explores our over-enthusiasm for evidence that we’re irrational.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness:

Finally put my finger on what is wrong with the common belief in psychological findings that people “irrationally” overestimate tail probabilities, calling it a “bias”. Simply, these experimenters assume that people make a single decision in their lifetime! The entire field of psychology of decisions missed the point.

His argument seems to be that risks seem different if you view them from a lifetime perspective, where you might make choices about the same risk again and again, rather than consider as one-offs. What might be a mistake for a one-off risk could be a sensible strategy for the same risk repeated in a larger set.

He goes on to take a swipe at ‘Nudges’, the idea that you can base policies around various phenomena from the psychology of decision making. “Clearly”, he adds, “psychologists do not know how to use ‘probability'”.

This is maddeningly ignorant, but does have a grain of truth to it. The major part of the psychology of decision making is understanding why things that look like bias or error exist. If a phenomenon, such as overestimating low probability events, is pervasive, it must be for a reason. A choice that looks irrational when considered on its own might be the result of a sensible strategy when considered over a lifetime, or even over evolutionary time.

Some great research in decision making tries to go beyond simple bias phenomenon and ask what underlying choice is being optimised by our cognitive architecture. This approach gives us the Simple Heuristics Which Make Us Smart of Gerd Gigerenzer (which Taleb definitely knows about since he was a visiting fellow in Gigerenzer’s lab), as well as work which shows that people estimate risks differently if they experience the outcomes rather than being told about them, work which shows that our perceptual-motor system (which is often characterised as an optimal decision maker) has the same amount of bias as our more cognitive decisions; and work which shows that other animals, with less cognitive/representational capacity, make analogues of many classic decision making errors. This is where the interesting work in decision making is happening, and it all very much takes account of the wider context of individual decisions. So saying that the entire field missed the point seems…odd.

But the grain of truth the accusation is that the psychology of decision making has been popularised in a way that focusses on one-off decisions. The nudges of behavioural economics tend to be drammatic examples of small interventions which have large effects in one-off measures, such as giving people smaller plates makes them eat less. The problem with these interventions is that even if they work in the lab, they tend not to work long-term outside the lab. People are often doing what they do for a reason – and if you don’t affect the reasons you get the old behaviour reasserting itself as people simply adapt to any nudge you’ve introduced Although the British government is noted for introducing a ‘Nudge Unit‘ to apply behavioural science in government policies, less well known is a House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report ‘Behavioural Change’, which highlights the limitations of this approach (and is well worth reading to get an idea of the the importance of ideas beyond ‘nudging’ in behavioural change).

Taleb is right that we need to drop the idea that biases in decision making automatically attest to our irrationality. As often as not they reflect a deeper rationality in how our minds deal with risk, choice and reward. What’s sad is that he doesn’t recognise how much work on how to better understand bias already exists.

We could spend all year living healthier, more productive lives, so why do we only decide to make the change at the start of the year? BBC Future’s psychologist Tom Stafford explains.

Many of us will start 2016 with resolutions – to get fit, learn a new skill, eat differently. If we really want to do these things, why did we wait until an arbitrary date which marks nothing more important than a timekeeping convention? The answer tells us something important about the psychology of motivation, and about what popular theories of self-control miss out.

What we want isn’t straightforward. At bedtime you might want to get up early and go for a run, but when your alarm goes off you find you actually want a lie-in. When exam day comes around you might want to be the kind of person who spent the afternoons studying, but on each of those afternoons you instead wanted to hang out with your friends.

You could see these contradictions as failures of our self-control: impulses for temporary pleasures manage to somehow override our longer-term interests. One fashionable theory of self-control, proposed by Roy Baumeister at Florida State University, is the ‘ego-depletion’ account. This theory states that self-control is like a muscle. This means you can exhaust it in the short-term – meaning that every temptation you resist makes it more likely that you’ll yield to the next temptation, even if it is a temptation to do something entirely different.

Some lab experiments appear to support this limited resource model of willpower. People who had to resist the temptation to eat chocolates were subsequently less successful at solving difficult puzzles which required the willpower to muster up enough concentration to complete them, for instance. Studies of court records, meanwhile, found that the more decisions a parole board judge makes without a meal break, the less lenient they become. Perhaps at the end of a long morning, the self-control necessary for a more deliberated judgement has sapped away, causing them to rely on a harsher “keep them locked up” policy.

A corollary of the ‘like a muscle’ theory is that in the long term, you can strengthen your willpower with practice. So, for example, Baumeister found that people who were assigned two weeks of trying to keep their back straight whenever possible showed improved willpower when asked back into the lab.

Yet the ‘ego-depletion’ theory has critics. My issue with it is that it reduces our willpower to something akin to oil in a tank. Not only does this seem too simplistic, but it sidesteps the core problem of self-control: who or what is controlling who or what? Why is it even the case that we can want both to yield to a temptation, and want to resist it at the same time?

Also, and more importantly, that theory also doesn’t give an explanation why we wait for New Year’s Day to begin exerting our self-control. If your willpower is a muscle, you should start building it up as soon as possible, rather than wait for an arbitrary date.

A battle of wills

Another explanation may answer these questions, although it isn’t as fashionable as ego-depletion. George Ainslie’s book ‘Breakdown of Will‘ puts forward a theory of the self and self-control which uses game theory to explain why we have trouble with our impulses, and why our attempts to control them take the form they do.

Ainslie’s account begins with the idea that we have, within us, a myriad of competing impulses, which exist on different time-scales: the you that wants to stay in bed five more minutes, the you that wants to start the day with a run, the you that wants to be fit for the half-marathon in April. Importantly, the relative power of these impulses changes as they get nearer in time: the early start wins against the lie-in the day before, but it is a different matter at 5am. Ainslie has a detailed account of why this is, and it has some important implications for our self-control.

According to this theory, our preferences are unstable and inconsistent, the product of a war between our competing impulses, good and bad, short and long-term. A New Year’s resolution could therefore be seen as an alliance between these competing motivations, and like any alliance, it can easily fall apart. Addictions are a good example, because the long-term goal (“not to be an alcoholic”) requires the coordination of many small goals (“not to have a drink at 4pm;” “not at 5pm;” “not at 6pm,” and so on), none of which is essential. You can have a drink at 4pm and still be a moderate drinker. You can even have a drink also at 5pm, but somewhere along the line all these small choices add up to a failure to keep to the wider goal. Similarly, if you want to get fit in 2016, you don’t have to go for a jog on 1 January, or even on 2 January, but if you don’t start doing exercise on one particular day then you will never meet your larger goal.

From Ainslie’s perspective willpower is a bargaining game played by the forces within ourselves, and like any conflict of interest, if the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable isn’t clearly defined then small infractions can quickly escalate. For this reason, Ainslie says, resolutions cluster around ‘clean lines’, sharp distinctions around which no quibble is brooked. The line between moderate and problem drinking isn’t clear (and liable to be even less clear around your fourth glass), but the line between teetotal and drinker is crystal.

This is why advice on good habits is often of the form “Do X every day”, and why diets tend to absolutes: “No gluten;” “No dessert;” “Fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays”. We know that if we leave the interpretation open to doubt, although our intentions are good, we’ll undermine our resolutions when we’re under the influence of our more immediate impulses.

And, so, Ainslie gives us an answer to why our resolutions start on 1 January. The date is completely arbitrary, but it provides a clean line between our old and new selves.

The practical upshot of the theory is that if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our competing interests hold.

Good luck for your 2016 resolutions!

The internet can give us the illusion of knowledge, making us think we are smarter than we really are. Fortunately, there may be a cure for our arrogance, writes psychologist Tom Stafford.

The internet has a reputation for harbouring know-it-alls. Commenters on articles, bloggers, even your old school friends on Facebook all seem to swell with confidence in their understanding of exactly how the world works (and they are eager to share that understanding with everyone and anyone who will listen). Now, new research reveals that just having access to the world’s information can induce an illusion of overconfidence in our own wisdom. Fortunately the research also shares clues as to how that overconfidence can be corrected.

Specifically, we are looking at how the internet affects our thinking about what we know, a topic psychologists call metacognition. When you know you are boasting, you are being dishonest, but you haven’t made any actual error in estimating your ability. If you sincerely believe you know more than you do then you have made an error. The research suggests that an illusion of understanding may actually be incredibly common, and that this metacognitive error emerges in new ways in the age of the internet.

In a new paper, Matt Fisher of Yale University, considers a particular type of thinking known as transactive memory, which is the idea that we rely on other people and other parts of the world – books, objects – to remember things for us. If you’ve ever left something you needed for work by the door the night before, then you’ve been using transactive memory.

Part of this phenomenon is the tendency to then confuse what we really know in our personal memories, with what we have easy access to, the knowledge that is readily available in the world, or with which we are merely familiar without actually understanding in depth. It can feel like we understand how a car works, the argument goes, when in fact we are merely familiar with making it work. I press the accelerator and it goes forward, neglecting to realise that I don’t really know how it goes forward.

Fisher and colleagues were interested in how this tendency interacts with the internet age. They asked people to provide answers to factual questions, such as “Why are there time zones?”. Half of the participants were instructed to look up the answers on the internet before answering, half were told not to look up the answers on the internet. Next, all participants were asked how confidently they could explain the answers to a second series of questions (seperate, but also factual, questions such as “Why are cloudy nights warmer?” or “How is vinegar made?”).

Sure enough, people who had just been searching the internet for information were significantly more confident about their understanding of the second set of questions. Follow up studies confirmed that these people really did think the knowledge was theirs: they were still more confident if asked to indicate their response on a scale representing different levels of understanding with pictures of brain-scan activity (a ploy that was meant to emphasise that the information was there, in their heads). The confidence effect even persisted when the control group were provided answer material and the internet-search group were instructed to search for a site containing the exact same answer material. Something about actively searching for information on the internet specifically generated an illusion that the  knowledge was in the participants’ own heads.

If the feeling of controlling information generates overconfidence in our own wisdom, it might seem that the internet is an engine for turning us all into bores. Fortunately another study, also published this year, suggests a partial cure.

Amanda Ferguson of the University of Toronto and colleagues ran a similar study, except the set-up was in reverse: they asked participants to provide answers first and, if they didn’t know them, search the internet afterwards for the correct information (in the control condition participants who said “I don’t know” were let off the hook and just moved on to the next question). In this set up, people with access to the internet were actually less willing to give answers in the first place than people in the no internet condition. For these guys, access to the internet shut them up, rather than encouraging them to claim that they knew it all. Looking more closely at their judgements, it seems the effect wasn’t simply that the fact-checking had undermined their confidence. Those that knew they could fall back on the web to check the correct answer didn’t report feeling less confident within themselves, yet they were still less likely to share the information and show off their knowledge.

So, putting people in a position where they could be fact-checked made them more cautious in their initial claims. The implication I draw from this is that one way of fighting a know-it-all, if you have the energy, is to let them know that they are going to be thoroughly checked on whether they are right or wrong. It might not stop them researching a long answer with the internet, but it should slow them down, and diminish the feeling that just because the internet knows some information, they do to.

It is frequently asked if the internet is changing how we think. The answer, this research shows, is that the internet is giving new fuel to the way we’ve always thought. It can be both a cause of overconfidence,  when we mistake the boundary between what we know and what is available to us over the web, and it can be a cause of uncertainty, when we anticipate that we’ll be fact-checked using the web on the claims we make. Our tendencies to overestimate what we know, to use information that is readily available as a substitute for our own knowledge, and to worry about being caught out are all constants on how we think. The internet slots into this tangled cognitive ecosystem, from which endless new forms evolve.

This is my BBC Future column from earlier this week. The original is here

Philosophy professor Quassim Cassam has a piece in Aeon arguing that conspiracy theorists should be understood in terms of the intellectual vices. It is a dead-end, he says, to try to understand the reasons someone gives for believing a conspiracy theory. Consider someone called Oliver who believes that 9/11 was an inside job:

Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person’s reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver’s belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a ‘rationalising explanation’ of his belief.

The problem with this is that rationalising explanations take you only so far. If you ask Oliver why he believes 9/11 was an inside job he will, of course, be only too pleased to give you his reasons: it had to be an inside job, he insists, because aircraft impacts couldn’t have brought down the towers. He is wrong about that, but at any rate that’s his story and he is sticking to it. What he has done, in effect, is to explain one of his questionable beliefs by reference to another no less questionable belief.

So the problem is not their beliefs as such, but why the person came to have the whole set of (misguided) beliefs in the first place. The way to understand conspiracists is in terms of their intellectual character, Cassam argues, the vices and virtues that guide as us as thinking beings.

A problem with this account is that – looking at the current evidence – character flaws don’t seem that strong a predictor of conspiracist beliefs. The contrast is with the factors that have demonstrable influence on people’s unusual beliefs. For example, we know that social influence and common cognitive biases have a large, and measurable, effect on what we believe. The evidence isn’t so good on how intellectual character traits such as closed/open-mindedness, skepticism/gullibility are constituted and might affect conspiracist beliefs. That could be because the personality/character trait approach is inherently limited, or just that there is more work to do. One thing is certain, whatever the intellectual vices are that lead to conspiracy theory beliefs, they are not uncommon. One study suggested that 50% of the public endorse at least one conspiracy theory.

Link : Bad Thinkers by Quassim Cassam

Paper on personality and conspiracy theories: Unanswered questions: A preliminary investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs

Paper on widespread endorsement of conspiracy theories: Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion

Previously on Mindhacks.com That’s what they want you to believe

And a side note, this view that the problem with conspiracy theorists isn’t the beliefs helps explain why throwing facts at them doesn’t help, better to highlight the fallacies in how they are thinking.

People who take shortcuts can trick themselves into believing they are smarter than they are, says Tom Stafford, and it comes back to bite them.

Honesty may be the best policy, but lying has its merits – even when we are deceiving ourselves. Numerous studies have shown that those who are practised in the art of self-deception might be more successful in the spheres of sport and business. They might even be happier than people who are always true to themselves. But is there ever a downside to believing our own lies?

An ingenious study by Zoe Chance of Yale University tested the idea, by watching what happens when people cheat on tests.

Chance and colleagues ran experiments which involved asking students to answer IQ and general knowledge questions. Half the participants were given a copy of the test paper which had – apparently in error – been printed with the answers listed at the bottom. This meant they had to resist the temptation to check or improve their answers against the real answers as they went along.

Irresistible shortcut

As you’d expect, some of these participants couldn’t help but cheat. Collectively, the group that had access to the answers performed better on the tests than participants who didn’t – even though both groups of participants were selected at random from students at the same university, so were, on average, of similar ability.  (We can’t know for sure who was cheating – probably some of the people who had answers would have got high scores even without the answers – but it means that the average performance in the group was partly down to individual smarts, and partly down to having the answers at hand.)

The crucial question for Chance’s research was this: did people in the “cheater” group know that they’d been relying on the answers? Or did they attribute their success in the tests solely to their own intelligence?

The way the researchers tested this was to ask the students to predict how well they’d do on a follow-up test. They were allowed to quickly glance over the second test sheet so that they could see that it involved the same kind of questions – and, importantly, that no answers had been mistakenly been printed at the bottom this time. The researchers reasoned that if the students who had cheated realised that cheating wasn’t an option the second time around, they should predict they wouldn’t do as well on this second test.

Not so. Self-deception won the day. The people who’d had access to the answers predicted, on average, that they’d get higher scores on the follow-up – equivalent to giving them something like a 10-point IQ boost. When tested, of course, they scored far lower.

The researchers ran another experiment to check that the effect was really due to the cheaters’ inflated belief in their own abilities. In this experiment, students were offered a cash reward for accurately predicting their scores on the second test. Sure enough, those who had been given the opportunity to cheat overestimated their ability and lost out – earning 20% less than the other students.

The implication is that people in Chance’s experiment – people very much like you and me – had tricked themselves into believing they were smarter than they were. There may be benefits from doing this – confidence, satisfaction, or more easily gaining the trust of others – but there are also certainly disadvantages. Whenever circumstances change and you need to accurately predict how well you’ll do, it can cost to believe you’re better than you are.

That self-deception has its costs has some interesting implications. Morally, most of us would say that self-deception is wrong. But aside from whether self-deception is undesirable, we should expect it to be present in all of us to some degree (because of the benefits), but to be limited as well (because of the costs).

Self-deception isn’t something that is always better in larger doses – there must be an amount of it for which the benefits outweigh the costs, most of the time. We’re probably all self-deceiving to some degree. The irony being, because it is self-deception, we can’t know how often.

This is my BBC Future article from last week. The original is here