Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (26 page)

It’s a time-honored gimmick to use in Introductory Psychology classes. Before your students—most of them new to university—get the message that you’re going to be critical of pseudoscience, you announce that you’re going to offer a demonstration of handwriting analysis. You tell them there’s a visiting expert in the department who has offered to help.

You ask each student to write a meaningless sentence like “The purple cow jumped over the moon,” and then you instruct them to place the papers carefully in unsealed envelopes, write their names and ID numbers on the outside of the envelopes and pass them forward. Inform them that this will take some time but you will return the results of the handwriting analysis in about a week. The delay is not necessary, although it builds suspense. The only time you’ll have to spend is inserting a formally typed piece of paper into each envelope.

On the big day, you return the now-sealed envelopes, which contain their handwritten sentences along with an analysis of their personality based on their handwriting. On your signal, everyone opens his or her envelope and reads the analysis, which consists of a single sentence. There is usually quiet in the room, punctuated by a few nervous giggles. After a moment, you ask them whether their analysis seems accurate. Many will shake their heads up and down quietly, trying not to draw attention to themselves. You can rephrase the question, such as “Does it seem like he knows what he’s doing?” and you’ll get an even more enthusiastic response.

Finally, ask them if anyone would be willing to read his or her analysis to the class. At first there will be no volunteers. Finally, someone will raise her hand and barely audibly will read out loud what is written on her paper. That sentence might be, “Although you are outgoing, happy, and extroverted sometimes, you are quiet, reserved, and introverted at other times.” Or it might say, “You have found it unwise to reveal yourself too quickly in social situations.” Or perhaps, “At times your sexual experiences have involved difficult adjustments for you.” At this point there is stunned silence as people look to the left and right of themselves in growing recognition of the obvious. They’ve been had—they’ve all received the same analysis. There is usually an interesting mix of emotions. Some are rolling their eyes or groaning. They wondered from the first whether it was phony. Others look genuinely disappointed; they were really into this and they wanted it to be real. Now they’re starting to wonder why you did it to them.

You can turn this into your next question. Why does it work? What have we learned? Why is it part of an Introductory Psychology course? This might be the most important moment in the course so far, because they realize that many of their preconceptions about themselves and the field of psychology might be wrong. If they’re willing to pay attention, this course might shake up their world more than they anticipated.

So why
does
it work? Apart from the obvious stuff about trusting authority figures, there are some insights here into how their minds work. The important message isn’t about handwriting analysis and whether or not it works. What matters is that they were prepared to accept some pretty flimsy evidence as proof that it did. Why were they so gullible? What was it about the analysis they all received from the “expert”? To begin with, they have gotten what sounds like a highly specific message and yet, as they now see, it is quite general. Those embarrassing personal insights turn out to be glib generalities that fit just about everyone in the room. Just how far could we have pushed their credibility before it broke?

Were they predisposed to believe in things like handwriting analysis because they have heard about them all their lives without ever hearing a criticism or disproof? If I told them I had an ancient and blind Hindu prophet in my office who would run his hands over their aura and produce an analysis of their character, would that have worked as well? What about a German shepherd who could sniff them and press one of a dozen pedals with his paw, thereby printing out the analysis they received? If the dog still sounds credible to them, how about a trained rat with various levers in his cage that could trigger the printouts? There are plainly limits to our gullibility, but they are rarely absolute. To most undergraduate students, a handwriting analysis by an “expert psychologist” is well on the positive side of credible.

Not for a second would I dispute the occasional accuracy of this section’s title. How
general
the indictment may be is another matter. What’s relevant to our discussion is how evidence of this delicate issue was collected and analyzed. In 1976, an author with few professional credentials named Shere Hite put together a book called
The Hite Report
.
⁵
Subtitled
A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality
, the book was a runaway hit, ultimately selling more than 35 million copies worldwide. Not surprisingly, this initial book spawned a franchise resulting in four
Hite Reports
and two later works as well. In her initial
Report
, which Hite often claimed to be “scientific,” the author presented a relentlessly negative and depressing view of heterosexual relationships that failed, almost uniformly, because of the attitudes and behavior of men. Report after report came from angry and sexually unsatisfied women detailing the abuse they had suffered at the hands of the men in their lives. Hite made some attempt to classify these reports by category, added two covers and a title page, and then watched her work climb the best seller lists.

Part of the book’s appeal lay in the undeniable sense of validation it provided to unhappy and abused women. Given the extent of some of the cases, the book probably also offered a perverse comfort in knowing that someone out there was even worse off than the reader. In this regard, no one can blame the readers, the author, or her informants. The problem lies in assuming that there is anything
scientific
about any of this. Yet, that is just what many journalists believed (the book was listed by the
London Times
as one of the Hundred Key Books of the Twentieth Century). The case is worth examining quite apart from the personal pain or feminist politics at its core.

First, large sample sizes do not render findings “scientific.” The case is analogous to asking all those who have been abducted by aliens to send me a one-thousand-word summary of their experience, then stapling them together and publishing them as scientific proof of alien abductions. The problem isn’t with the number of stories or even their accuracy, which are both issues raised by reviewers who argued for the legitimacy of the
Hite Report
. In fact, I am willing to concede as truth every word of those harrowing tales of abuse. I am equally impressed by the sheer number of women who wrote to Ms. Hite. And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with science.

To make important statements about what jerks men are, we need to know how general the indictment is. Otherwise, your tale is nothing more than your litany of woe, even if your neighbor agrees with it. To explore generality, we cannot simply ask wounded women to tell their stories. The issue isn’t whether there are some men who are sexually insensitive, abusive jerks who have mistreated their partners. That much is undeniable. The issue is, again, generality. To that end, we need a random sample of women talking about their relationships with men. Only then can we begin to understand how widespread the problem is. To her credit, Ms. Hite attempted to achieve this. She sent out questionnaires to hundreds of organizations, potentially sampling over 100,000 women. The problem stems from the fact that very few of them (fewer than 3,000) replied and, of those, most were very hurt and very angry. Those are the reports that were cobbled together, so to speak, and sold to the public. Presumably, women who were reasonably satisfied in relationships with their partners did not feel the need to tell Ms. Hite about it. Indeed, a collection of such reports would probably not have made very interesting reading or garnered much in the way of financial reward for Ms. Hite and her publisher.

The bottom line, once again, is that it is not sufficient to form an interesting hypothesis and test it by gathering as much confirming evidence as you can. Yet, as we are learning through the efforts of cognitive science, that is precisely how our minds work when faced with the mass of information in our lives. Form a belief and then look for evidence to confirm it. That’s many things—including Caveman Logic—but it isn’t science. And, even as nonscientists, it is not a good way to run our personal lives. Important hypotheses or belief systems should be
tested
before we invest our egos or lives in them. Once again, this requires stating the belief in a way that allows for either confirmation or disproof. Then gather as much evidence as you can from as large and unbiased a sample as you can find. And then see what kind of conclusion the evidence supports. Perhaps men
are
sexually unfulfilling jerks, but we’ll never really know it from reading
The Hite Report
.

S
ometimes it’s helpful to put a face on the resistance you’re going to encounter. It can be a bit sobering to get a sense of what keeps people from embracing your ideas. What do they oppose or fear about what you’re offering?

My partner and I found ourselves sitting next to four high school teachers at dinner during a recent vacation in Florida. Our neighbors were bright, friendly, and outgoing, so we began to chat as we made our way through several bottles of wine. The woman sitting closest to me was a biology teacher named Joanne (not her real name). The others taught chemistry and social studies. After the usual small talk about escaping the northern cold, I asked Joanne whether she faced any problems teaching Darwin in her biology class.

“Not really,” she replied.

“So you’re able to teach evolution without having to apologize for it?” I asked.

“Well, I like to be fair so I teach them both sides of the issue.”

“So you teach creationism in your biology class?” I inquired.

“Yes,” she replied, aware that our conversation was beginning to move beyond casual vacation chatter. “I want to be respectful of the Christian kids too. The Bible
does
have something to say about all of this, you know.”

“And you think science class is the place to teach it?” I inquired.

“Sure. Why not?” she asked. “Where else would you teach it?”

“How about your friend’s social studies class?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” she conceded, “but I just like to give a balanced picture of the issue. It seems fair.”

It struck me that a lot of important questions had already been raised:

I have little doubt that Joanne does a fine job teaching her students about photosynthesis or the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates. But arguably she is not doing as good a job when it comes time to explain one of the most fundamental principles about life on Earth (the subject matter of biology). These students are likely to go away thinking that Darwin is “just another theory” and the Bible presents an equivalent alternative hypothesis about life on Earth.

When I inquired whether she would also teach her students that Earth was five thousand years old, she replied, “Of course not.”

“Why?” I wondered. “If this is about respecting Christian kids, aren’t there many who also believe that age thing?”

Her reply was essentially a “Yes, but . . .” I was left with the impression that
fundamentalist
Christian beliefs exceeded her own and were thus beyond her threshold for fair treatment. Because Joanne didn’t believe Earth was five thousand years old, she was not prepared to include it in her syllabus. Nor was she prepared to offer equal time to the Flat Earth Society or other such “foolishness” (her word). Darwin, however, was another matter. On this issue, Joanne stood shoulder to shoulder with former president George W. Bush in believing that “the verdict is still out.”

After another glass of wine, Joanne confronted me. “Let me ask you something. Can you look at us and see a random process?” Without waiting for an answer, she added, “Every time I see a flower or a beautiful bird I find myself siding with the intelligent design kids. Do you really believe there is no thought, no purpose behind such beauty? If this were a random world, would anything be so beautiful?”

This final point was presented with a “Take that!” demeanor, which led me to believe the conversation was over. It wasn’t. But what I had just heard reminded me that there is a widespread assumption out there that beauty can only happen by design. “Randomness” or “chance” are seen as alternatives to “design.” They are both godless and can only result in chaos or ugliness. Beauty, the idea goes, doesn’t just
happen
. It must result from conscious, purposeful design. Of course, once you admit “design” into your system, it’s a fairly short step to a “designer.” There is only one candidate for that job.