Lately, the political scene in the United States has been dominated by not just the single-cause fallacy (the tendency to attribute complex phenomena to one root cause), but the simple-cause fallacy. This is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) writ large; make everything the result of one, easy-to-understand origin, and you'll have a convenient scapegoat when things go to hell.
How many times have you heard our current government officials saying stuff like "(Some bad thing) is because of (pick one: illegal immigrants, Democrats, brown people doing bad stuff, socialism, LGBTQ+ people)." And unfortunately, this kind of thing has its appeal. Complexity is challenging. We often don't like to be confronted with difficult-to-solve problems, especially when solving those problems involves (1) working with people we disagree with, and (2) facing situations where the solution involves painful compromises.
It's why there was very little pushback a couple of days ago when J. D. Vance, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, said that high housing prices were due to illegal immigrants. Lest you think I'm making this up, here's his exact quote:
A lot of young people are saying, housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with thirty million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens. And at the same time we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with even for the population that we had.
This is in spite of the fact that as of the latest data, the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States is less than half that, and the awkward question of how illegal immigrants (all thirty million of them, apparently) would get bank loans to purchase homes without steady, good-paying jobs -- and Social Security Numbers. Despite this, the person interviewing him -- unsurprisingly, it was Sean Hannity -- nodded as if what Vance just said made complete sense.
I saw a fascinating example of this tendency just yesterday, which I saw more than once appended to commentary to the effect of "Wow, people sure are stupid." It's a study in Nature by a team led by Francesco Pagnini, of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, and is entitled, "Unexpected Events and Prosocial Behavior: The Batman Effect."
What the researchers did was send a volunteer who was visibly pregnant onto a train, and counted the number of people who offered her a seat. Then they did the same thing, but right after she boarded, a man dressed up as Batman boarded as well. The number of people who gave up their seat for her almost doubled -- from 38% to 67%. And the vast majority of the posters and commenters I've seen mention this study were snickering about how gullible people are. Did the passengers really think that was Batman, and he was going to go all Justice League on their asses if they didn't give up their seat for the pregnant lady? One even went into a long diatribe about how our current online culture has made it hard for people (especially young people, he says) to tell the difference between fiction and reality.
Well, okay, maybe that's one possibility; that being reminded of a character who stands for fair play makes people think they should Do The Right Thing, too. But I can easily think of two other reasons this might have happened -- one of which the authors go into, right in the damn paper. (Highlighting another unfortunate tendency, which is that people often comment on social media posts just from the tagline, and without even clicking the link. I can't even tell you the number of times I've had someone post a comment on a Skeptophilia link that left me thinking, "Bro, did you even read the fucking post?")
The explanation that the authors went into is that having something unusual happen -- like a guy showing up in costume -- makes people take notice. I don't know about you, but when I've ridden trains, I'm seldom giving a lot of attention to the other passengers. (I've usually got my nose in a book.) Unless, that is, one of them is doing something peculiar. It wouldn't have to be Batman, or anyone associated with Smiting Evildoers; all it would have to be is something odd. Then I'd look up -- and be more likely to notice other things, such as a pregnant lady standing there hanging onto the grab bar.
The other possible explanation, though, is one that definitely would have occurred to me; if there's a guy standing there nonchalantly, dressed like Batman, is this part of a stunt? If so, there'd certainly be others watching and waiting to see what the other passengers do -- and possibly filming it. That would cause me to look around. It might induce me toward more prosocial behavior, too; if I know I'm being filmed, I wouldn't want to end up enshrined forever on YouTube as the lazy bum who sat there while a pregnant woman was hanging on for dear life trying not to fall down when the train lurches.
The point here is that an interesting finding (people are more prosocial when somebody nearby is dressed as Batman) is not proof that the passengers think that Batman is real, and (by extension) that they don't know the difference between fact and fiction. That might be true, at least for a few of them. But in this case, the simple (and wryly amusing) explanation is a vast overconclusion.
The fact that it has shown up over and over, though, is yet another example of confirmation bias; the people who are claiming this interpretation of the experiment obviously already think that humanity is irredeemably stupid, and this was just another nail in the coffin. So instead of doing what we all should do -- thinking, "what are other possible explanations for this?" -- they stop there, sitting back with smug expressions, because after all if they see how dumb everyone else is, it must mean they're smart themselves.
Or maybe I'm just falling for the single-cause fallacy myself. It's why I wouldn't want to be a psychologist; people are way too complicated.
But one conclusion I will stand by is that this phenomenon only gets worse with people like J. D. Vance, who not only falls back on simple one-liner explanations, he makes up the data as he goes to support them.
So anyway. Despite what you may have heard, most people don't think Batman is real, and therefore act nicer when he's around. My guess is people would have had exactly the same reaction if someone had showed up dressed as the Joker. It's always best to stop and question your assumptions and biases before jumping to a conclusion -- or commenting on a link just based on the tagline.
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