These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Referring to the brain, the influential physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean of Yale Medical School said, “True representations of the world can no more exist in this jellylike mass than it can on the evening news.”[1]
If you look around, you don’t have to go far to find someone who believes something that is totally ridiculous. Look a little farther and you’ll find many more. Does it make you wonder why people believe things that are obviously wrong and even silly?
We’re all confident in our beliefs and are convinced we’re right. Unfortunately we do have biases that we’re not aware of. There are also decision and thought processes that can lead us astray. Very few of us have been trained in logic and how to spot misleading statistics. It can even be difficult to spot false claims in advertising and propaganda. Many people fail to check into the reliability of their information sources, or even consider their sources’ motivations—why they want you to believe something and how they’ll profit from it.
We’ve seen some ways our senses can deceive us. Now I’d like to take a closer look at a few of our thought processes and how these can create an illusory world that’s contrary to reality.
Under the Influence
As mentioned earlier, many things can influence our perceptions and alter our senses. In fact, it surprisingly easy and simple to do. It actually only takes one word to change something’s flavor, as we saw earlier with the Parmesan cheese and vomit scent test. Or when Coke drinkers thought Pepsi was Coke when placed in Coke cans, and vice versa. These are examples of how our biases can influence us.
Vodka is another example. Vodka is a neutral spirit to which flavors are added to make a wide variety of mixed drinks. The U.S. government defines vodka as being “without distinctive character, aroma, taste or color.” You can find craft vodkas that begin with different ingredients, but they are all distilled down to ethanol, then charcoal filtered. Many liquor companies don’t even do that. Almost all American vodkas begin with ethanol distilled by the huge agricultural-industrial corporations Archer Daniels Midland, Grain Processing Corporation, and Midwest Grain Products. This is sold wholesale to the makers of the various brands. Water is added to adjust it to the desired proof. The distillation process removes nearly all taste, odor, and color. Still, the brands go to great lengths to convince customers that theirs is better and they might add something to give it a bit of flavor. There are even very expensive “premium” vodkas.
It’s easy to think, “A fool and his money...”, but we are all susceptible, especially when we have little evidence on which to base our opinions. Even taste tests can fool us unless they’re rigorous double-blind tests, where neither taster nor anyone else in the room knows the identity of the samples.
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| Manuel Velazquez, CC by 3.0 Attribution 3.0 Unported (adjusted) |
No one is free from biases. In fact there are at least a hundred common biases, according to researchers who study these characteristics. And they’re not common just to us. For example, capuchin monkeys also suffer from a number of our biases. Laurie Santos of Yale University explains, “We know that capuchin monkeys share a number of our own economic biases. Our previous work has shown that monkeys are loss-averse, irrational when it comes to dealing with risk, and even prone to rationalizing their own decisions, just like humans.”[2]
I’m not sure it’s comforting to know we’re not alone in our self-deceptions, but some seem to be of ancient origin and are deeply embedded.
Here are a few: Optimism—having a sunny outlook or rose-colored glasses—is related to the idea of cosmic justice and karma. The opposite of this is, of course, is pessimism, which is related to the idea of bad luck and that the world is out to get you. The fading effect bias causes bad memories to fade faster than positive ones, so our memories become more positive over time, contributing to nostalgia. On the other hand, our attention and emotions emphasize negative experiences, while depression enhances and creates bad memories.
There’s hindsight bias, where the past seems predictable when it actually wasn’t. People will say, “I knew it all along” when they actually didn’t know it and may have thought the opposite at the time. There’s the attribution bias—if I win, it’s skill, and if I lose, it was out of my control or someone else’s fault.
Anchoring bias is relying on one source or piece of evidence to make decisions. Authority bias is when we place a higher value in the opinion of an authority-figure or celebrity. In-group bias is conforming to the beliefs of a group and looking down on those who think differently.
Confirmation bias is particularly harmful. It’s when we try to prove our beliefs instead of trying to disprove them. It’s seeking out evidence or opinions that confirm our beliefs and discarding or disparaging whatever doesn’t. This leads us to ignore contrary evidence, in effect deluding ourselves that our beliefs and opinions are true.
That is very evident in people’s social media accounts and in the news sources they choose. They seek out and trust only those news sources that agree with their view of the world, thus avoiding facts that would expose the erroneous elements of their belief system. This enables them to feel confident that they are right without having to question and examine the basis of their beliefs. Confirmation bias contributes to much of the strife in the world as people surround themselves with echo chambers, unaware they’re reinforcing their false views.
This is as true of scientific hypotheses, as of political dogma and religious teachings. Some of the greatest scientists have been led astray by disregarding facts that don’t fit their ideas. Einstein spent much of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics and failing. Much worse, I’ve seen disagreements between scientists descend into vicious personal attacks. Scientists are human after all.
Another bias that affects scientists is expectation bias, where the outcome you expect to get can actually alter your results. This is one of the reasons they conduct double-blind experiments. But this bias also affects others. A group of students that tested at the same level were divided into two groups and their teachers were told one group was smart and the other dim. The grades the students received matched the teacher’s expectations—not the student’s abilities.[3] If you rely on first impressions, they may become self-fulfilling prophecies.
All of these biases subtly color our view of the world. We are constantly susceptible to them, but we’re almost never aware of them. This is our blind-spot bias. We know they exist. We see them in other people, but think we don’t have them. We’re not blind to biases, we just fail to see them in ourselves. This is unrelated to intelligence or your decision-making abilities, although those with the largest bias blind spots tend to ignore advice from experts or their peers.
It’s not all bad. Optimism helps keep us motivated, while pessimism can keep us grounded, but it depends on the situation. In most cases realism is preferable. If you want to correct your biases, you first have to become aware of them. That’s not so easy.
Click here for the next article in this series:
[2] Bill Hathaway, “Unlike people, monkeys aren’t fooled by expensive brands”, YaleNews, December 2, 2014, https://news.yale.edu/2014/12/02/unlike-people-monkeys-aren-t-fooled-expensive-brands.
[3] Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain, New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.
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