Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (54 page)

Even in judging something as subjective as personality, psychologists have found that we see what we are looking for in a person. In a series of studies subjects were asked to assess the personality of someone they were about to meet, some given a profile of an introvert (shy, timid, quiet), others given a profile of an extrovert (sociable, talkative, outgoing). When asked to make a personality assessment, those told that the person would be an extrovert asked questions that would lead to that conclusion; the group given the introvert profile did the same. They both found in the person the personality they were seeking to find (Snyder 1981). Of course, the confirmation bias works both ways in this experiment. It turns out that the subjects whose personalities were being evaluated tended to give answers that would confirm whatever hypothesis the interrogator was holding.

The confirmation bias is not only pervasive, but its effects can be powerfully influential on people's lives. In a 1983 study, John Darley and Paul Gross showed subjects a video of a child taking a test. One group was told that the child was from a high socioeconomic class while the other group was told that the child was from a low socioeconomic class. The subjects were then asked to evaluate the academic abilities of the child based on the results of the test. Not surprisingly, the group told of the high socioeconomic class rated the child's abilities as above grade level, while the group that was told the child was from a low socioeconomic class rated the child's abilities as below grade level. In other words, the same data were seen by one group of evaluators differently than the other group, depending on what their expectations were. The data then confirmed those expectations.

The confirmation bias can also overwhelm one's emotional states and prejudices. Hypochondriacs interpret every little ache and pain as indications of the next great health calamity, whereas normal people simply ignore such random bodily signals (Pennebaker and Skelton 1978). Paranoia is another form of confirmation bias, where if you strongly believe that "they" are out to get you, then you will interpret the wide diversity of anomalies and coincidences in life to be evidence in support of that paranoid hypothesis. Likewise, prejudice depends on a type of confirmation bias, where the prejudged expectations of a group's characteristics leads one to evaluate an individual who is a member of that group in terms of those expectations (Hamilton et al. 1985). Even in depression, people tend to focus on those events and information that further reinforce the depression, and suppress evidence that things are, in fact, getting better (Beck 1976). As Nickerson noted in summary: "the presumption of a relationship predisposes one to find evidence of that relationship, even when there is none to be found or, if there is evidence to be found, to overweight it and arrive at a conclusion that goes beyond what the evidence justifies."

Even scientists are subject to the confirmation bias. Often in search of a particular phenomenon, scientists interpreting data may see (or select) those data most in support of the hypothesis under question and ignore (or toss out) those data not in support of the hypothesis. Historians of science have determined, for example, that in one of the most famous experiments in the history of science, the confirmation bias was hard at work. In 1919, the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington tested Einstein's prediction for how much the sun would deflect light coming from a background star during an eclipse (the only time you can see stars behind the sun). It turns out that Eddington's measurement error was as great as the effect he was measuring. As Stephen Hawking (1988) described it, "The British team's measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science." In going through Eddington's original data, historians S. Collins and J. Pinch (1993) found that "Eddington could only claim to have confirmed Einstein because he used Einstein's derivations in deciding what his observations really were, while Einstein's derivations only became accepted because Eddington's observation seemed to confirm them. Observation and prediction were linked in a circle of mutual confirmation rather than being independent of each other as we would expect according to the conventional idea of an experiment test." In other words, Eddington found what he was looking for. Of course, science contains a special self-correcting mechanism to get around the confirmation bias: other people will check your results or rerun the experiment. If your results were entirely the product of the confirmation bias, someone will sooner or later catch you on it. That is what sets science apart from all other ways of knowing.

Finally, and most importantly for our purposes here, the confirmation bias operates to confirm and justify weird beliefs. Psychics, fortune tellers, palm readers, and astrologers, for example, all depend on the power of the confirmation bias by telling their clients (some would call them "marks") what to expect in their future. By offering them one-sided events (instead of two-sided events in which more than one outcome is possible), the occurrence of the event is noticed while the nonoccurrence of the event is not. Consider numerology. The search for meaningful relationships in various measurements and numbers available in almost any structure in the world (including the world itself, as well as the cosmos) has led numerous observers to find deep meaning in the relationship between these numbers. The process is simple. You can start off with the number you seek and try to find some relationship that ends in that number, or one close to it. Or, more commonly, you crunch through the numbers and see what pops out of the data that looks familiar. In the Great Pyramid, for example (as discussed in chapter 16), the ratio of the pyramid's base to the width of a casing stone is 365, the number of days in the year. Such number crunching with the confirmation bias in place has led people to "discover" in the pyramid the earth's mean density, the period of precession of the earth's axis, and the mean temperature of the earth's surface. As Martin Gardner (1957) wryly noted, this is a classic example of "the ease with which an intelligent man, passionately convinced of a theory, can manipulate his subject matter in such a way as to make it conform to precisely held opinions." And the more intelligent the better.

So, in sum, being either high or low in intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of the normalness or weirdness of beliefs one holds. But these variables are not without some interaction effects. High intelligence, as noted in my Easy Answer, makes one skilled at defending beliefs arrived at for non-smart reasons. In chapter 3 I discuss a study conducted by psychologist David Perkins (1981), in which he found a positive relationship between intelligence and the ability to justify beliefs, and a negative relationship between intelligence and the ability to consider other beliefs as viable. That is to say, smart people are better at rationalizing their beliefs with reasoned arguments, but as a consequence they are less open to considering other positions. So, although intelligence does not affect what you believe, it does influence how beliefs are justified, rationalized, and defended after the beliefs are acquired for non-smart reasons.

Enough theory. As the architect Mies van der Rohe noted, God dwells in the details. The following examples of the difference between intelligence and belief are carefully chosen not from the lunatic fringe or culturally marginalized, but from the socially mainstream and especially from the academy. That is what makes the Hard Question so hard. It is one thing to evaluate the claims of a government coverup from a raving conspiratorialist publishing a newsletter out of his garage in Fringeville, Idaho; it is quite another when it comes from a Columbia University political science professor, or from a Temple University history professor, or from an Emory University social scientist, or from a multimillionaire business genius from Silicon Valley, or from a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.

UFOs and Alien Abductions: A Weird Belief with Smart Supporters

UFOs and alien abductions meet my criteria for a weird thing because the claim that such sightings and experiences represent actual encounters with extraterrestrial intelligences is (1) unaccepted by most people in astronomy, exobiology, and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (despite the near universal desire by practitioners to find life of any grade somewhere other than earth), (2) extremely unlikely (although not logically impossible), and (3) is largely based on anecdotal and uncorroborated evidence. Are UFO and alien abduction claims supported by smart people? While the community of believers used to be populated largely by those in the nooks and crannies of society's fringes, they have successfully migrated into the cultural mainstream. In the 1950s and 1960s, those who told stories of alien encounters were, at best, snickered at behind closed doors (and sometimes when the doors were wide open) or, at worst, sent to psychiatrists for mental health evaluations. And they were always the butt of jokes among scientists. But in the 1970s and 1980s a gradual shift occurred in the credentials of the believers, and in the 1990s they received a boost from the academy that has helped metastasize their beliefs into society's main body.

Consider Jodi Dean's widely reviewed 1998 book
Aliens in America.
Dean is a Columbia University Ph.D., a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and a noted feminist scholar. Her book is published by Cornell University Press and begins as if it is going to be a thoughtful sociology of UFOlogy with a thesis that abductees feel "alienated" from modern American society because of economic insecurities, threats of environmental destruction, worldwide militarism, colonialism, racism, misogyny, and other cultural bogeymen: "My argument is that the aliens infiltrating American popular cultures provide icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium." Since Dean rejects science and rationality as methods of discriminating between sense and nonsense, we "have no criteria for choosing among policies and verdicts, treatments and claims. Even further, we have no recourse to procedures, be they scientific or juridical, that might provide some 'supposition of reasonableness.' " For Dean, not only is science not a solution, it is part of the problem: " 'Scientists' are the ones who have problems with the 'rationality' of those in the UFO community. 'Scientists' are the ones who feel a need to explain why some people believe in flying saucers, or who dismiss those who do so as 'distorted' or 'prejudiced' or 'ignorant.' " Indeed, Dean concludes, since postmodernism has shown all truth to be relative and consensual, then the UFOlogists' claims are as true as anyone's claims: "The early ufologists fought against essentialist understandings of truth that would inscribe truth in objects (and relations between objects) in the world. Rejecting this idea, they relied on an understanding of truth as consensual. If our living in the world is an outcome of a consensus on reality, then stop and notice that not everyone is consenting to the view of reality espoused by science and government."

With this relativist view of truth Dean never tells us whether she believes the UFO/abduction narratives told by her subjects. So I asked her just that in a radio interview, to which she replied: "I believe that they believe their stories." I acknowledged the clarification but pressed the point: "But what do you believe?" Dean refused to answer the question. Fair enough, I suppose, since she is trying to take a nonjudgmental perspective (although I could not get her to offer an opinion even off the air and off the record). But my point here is that by so doing this smart person is lending credence to a weird belief, adding to its credibility as an acceptable tenet of truth that should be part of acceptable social dialogue when, in fact, there is no more evidence for the existence of aliens on earth than there is for fairies (which, in the 1920s, enjoyed their own cultural heyday and the backing of smart people like the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle; see Randi 1982).

Where Dean equivocates on the veracity question, Temple University history professor David Jacobs does not. Jacobs, who earned his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin and subsequently published his dissertation in 1975 as
The UFO Controversy in America
through Indiana University Press, in 1992 wrote
Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions
(even landing a mainstream trade publisher in Simon & Schuster, one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses in the world). In 1998 he ratcheted up the stakes with
The Threat: The Secret Agenda—What the Aliens Really Want... and How They Plan to Get It.
He admits in this latest book that "when I talk about the subject to my colleagues in the academic community, I know they think that my intellectual abilities are seriously impaired." Shortly after
The Threat
was released, I interviewed Jacobs on my weekly NPR radio show in Los Angeles. His intellectual abilities are not impaired in the least. I found him to be bright, articulate, and completely committed to his belief. He spoke like an academic, explained his theory and evidence with the cool dispatch of a seasoned scholar, and acted as if this claim were no different than discussing some other aspect of twentieth-century American history, which he teaches.

Yet Jacobs' books resound with the anthem "I know this sounds weird, but I'm a smart guy." His first book includes a foreword by Harvard's John Mack (more on Mack below), who praises Jacobs as "scholarly and dispassionate," the product of "rigorous scholarship," "careful observation," and "meticulous documentation." In his second book his Ph.D. graces not only the cover, but appears as a header on every page, again punching home the message to the reader that no matter how weird it all seems, a Doctor of Philosophy is endorsing it. Jacobs' narrative style is designed to sound scholarly and scientific. He speaks of his "research," the "methodologies" used, his fellow "investigators," their "huge database," the "documentation" in support of the database, the numerous "theories," "hypotheses," and "evidence" that confirm not only the fact that the aliens are here, but enlighten us about their agenda. Even though this field of study has not one iota of physical evidence—all claims depend entirely on blurry photographs, grainy videos, recovered memories through hypnosis, and endless anecdotes about things that go bump in the night—Jacobs admits these limitations of his "data," but argues that if you combine them you can make the leap from skepticism to belief: "Our encounters with the abduction phenomenon have often come through the haze of confabulation, channeling, and unreliable memories reported by inexperienced or incompetent researchers. It smacks so much of cultural fantasy and psychogenesis that the barriers to acceptance of its reality seem unsurmount-able." Indeed, but never underestimate the power of belief. "Yet, I am persuaded that the abduction phenomenon is real. And as a result, the intellectual safety net with which I operated for so many years is now gone. I am as vulnerable as the abductees themselves. I should 'know better,' but I embrace as real a scenario that is both embarrassing and difficult to defend." If the evidence is so weak for this phenomenon, then how can a smart guy like Jacobs believe in it? His answer, coming in the final pages of the book, closes the belief off to counter evidence: "The aliens have fooled us. They lulled us into an attitude of disbelief, and hence complacency, at the very beginning of our awareness of their presence." It is the perfect circular (and impenetrable) argument. The aliens have either caused your belief or your skepticism. Either way, aliens exist.