Mind Hacks

One of the Reuteurs blogs has a somewhat rambly post about being wrong in journalism which does, however, contain this absolute gem:

I try hard to believe the opposite: that many if not most of my opinions are wrong (although of course I have no idea which they are), and that many of the most interesting and useful things I write come out of my being wrong rather than being right. This is not, as Wilkinson noted to Cowen, an easy intellectual stance to hold: he calls it “a weird violation of the actual computational constraints of the human mind”.

Link to Reuters on being wrong (via The Hardest Science; thanks Peter!).

Bad Science has an excellent piece on the psychology of how we deal with evidence that challenges our cherished beliefs. Needless to say, our most common reaction is to try and undermine the evidence rather than adjust our beliefs.

The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it. Murder rates went up, or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state, or comparing neighbouring states, and the results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.

The article goes on to discuss a recent study that found that scientific information that contradicts a cherished belief not only leads people to doubt the study in question, but also science itself.

In psychology, the motivation to resolve conflicting ideas is called cognitive dissonance and it leads us to try and resolve the contradiction in whichever is the most personally satisfying way, rather than whichever it the most in tune with reality.

The theory has an interesting beginning and first originated when psychologist Leon Festinger decided to study a flyer saucer cult, an episode he documented in his amazing book When Prophecy Fails.

Festinger was curious as to what would happen when an inconsistency to a cherished belief was so absolute it would seem to be logically overwhelming. So he was intrigued when he saw a story in the paper about a religious cult who had prophesised that the world would end in a great flood on December 21, 1954, while the true believers would be rescued in a flying saucer.

The members sold all their possessions, several divorced because their spouses were non-believers, and they prepared for the big event. Festinger’s colleague Stanley Schachter infiltrated the cult and documented what happened on the night when the ‘end of the world’ came – and went.

In the hours following midnight the group were distraught, but at 4am a ‘message’ arrived from the aliens, channelled through the group’s leader. It said: “This little group, sitting all night long, has spread so much goodness and light that the God of the Universe spared the Earth from destruction.”

You would think that a failed prophecy backed up by a lame excuse would lead the members to give it up as a lost cause, but instead, they became more fervent in their beliefs and publicly announced they’d saved the world.

Although the group Festinger studied eventually disbanded, the group’s leader ‘Sister Thedra’ went on to found various alien-inspired New Age movements and is still widely revered in those circles. There’s some information about her on this UFO group page and on various similar places online, none of which mentions the failed prophecy.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most established theories in psychology and one of our most powerful motivators that drives us to fit the world into what we already believe. Science, religion or reality are simply no match.

Link to Bad Science on discounting evidence.

The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the psychology of conspiracy theories, looking at what characteristics are associated with believing in sinister far-reaching explanations and what role these beliefs play in society.

I was particularly interested in one part where they note that we are influenced by such ideas even when we’re not aware of it:

Other relevant work has examined the psychological impact of exposure to conspiracy theories, particularly in relation to mass media sources (e.g. Butler et al., 1995 [who studied the psychological impact of the film JFK]), but also in relation to the third-person effect (the tendency for people to believe that persuasive media has a larger influence on others than themselves). In one study, Douglas and Sutton (2008) had participants read material containing conspiracy theories about Princess Diana’s death before rating their own and others’ agreement with the statements, as well as their perceived retrospective attitudes. They found that participants significantly underestimated how much the conspiracy theories influenced their own attitudes.

The piece also covers why conspiracy theories can seem so attractive and discusses compatibility with prior beliefs, the fact they might fill an emotional need, and how they might reflect a general distrust of authority.

However, it doesn’t touch on the fact that truth can often be stranger than fiction, giving even the most unlikely theories a wide margin of error:

The CIA setting-up fake brothels to spike punters with LSD to test its effectiveness as a new generation of mind control drug – been done; secret international network to listen in on telephone calls, faxes and e-mails – old hat; foreign journalists in the pay of intelligence services to spin the media – yesterday’s news.

It is interesting that both conspiracy theorists and conspiracy hiders use this grey area to equal effect.

Link to Psychologist article ‘The truth is out there’.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. This site is entirely independent of the Knights Templar.

I’ve just picked up on this thought-provoking 2008 article from the Boston Globe on a psychological theory of poverty that suggests that traditional economic models just don’t apply to the poor.

The article riffs on an apparently under-recognised book by philosopher Charles Karelis called The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-off Can’t Help the Poor.

Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

I also a found a short piece on NPR where Karelis discusses the idea further and I was thinking that as an essentially psychological theory, the general idea must have been tested before.

However, I’m having trouble finding anything directly relevant, although I’m certainly not an expert in the area so maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The sting of poverty’.