Midnight, the Proud Boys, and the lure of the mob

In the brilliant but devastating Doctor Who episode "Midnight," the Doctor is on a sightseeing expedition that turns deadly when an alien attacks the "space train," and takes over the body of one of the passengers.

The increasing sophistication of the alien -- whose real form we never see -- as it gradually learns to operate the body of the passenger it has hijacked is one of the most chilling progressions the series ever conceived.  The character of Sky Silvestri is played to the absolute hilt by actress Lesley Sharp, and her riveting portrayal of an intelligence that is intrinsically hostile to other life forms is the stuff of nightmares.

By far the scariest thing about the episode, however, is how the other passengers react.  Doctor Who doesn't often flinch from showing us the ugly side of humanity, and here is mob psychology at its absolute worst -- looking for someone to blame for what has happened, and unfortunately landing on the wrong person.  The result is near catastrophe, and the resolution of the story one of the most poignant and disturbing scenes I've ever watched.  (Ask any Whovian about the line "The Hostess -- what was her name?" and you'll be sure to get a reaction, as well as possibly depressing them for the rest of the day.)

The force of mob psychology has been much on my mind since the riots in Washington, D.C. this past weekend resulted in twenty-three arrests and four people hospitalized with stab wounds.  The #StopTheSteal rallying cry, based upon zero-evidence, entirely bogus claims by Donald Trump and his cronies, spurred far-right groups like the "Proud Boys" to stage demonstrations in downtown D.C., and of course -- undoubtedly what Trump wanted -- the demonstrators clashed with counter-protestors.  (If you doubt my labeling the claims of election fraud as "bogus," explain how those same claims have resulted in almost sixty lawsuits, all but one of which was shot down, including two unanimous 9-0 votes by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.  Apparently no judge is willing to jeopardize her/his career and reputation supporting a lawsuit with zero evidence to support it, even judges appointed by Donald Trump himself.)

It seems like all you have to do is get a sufficient number of people together, and the psychology of the crowd takes over and accomplishes the rest.  As Terry Pratchett put it, "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."  In the case of the Proud Boys, this would be a vanishingly small quantity.  More scientifically, a paper back in 2017 by French psychologists Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni tried to quantify this effect, and found something as fascinating as it is horrifying.  It took 140 secondary school students, and asked them beforehand to give an assessment of two things -- their opinion of the French president, and their attitudes toward Americans.  They then had the test subjects join a group, discuss the two topics, and then reassessed their opinions afterward.

A lot of us have the impression that group discussion moderates extreme viewpoints -- something we might characterize as the "democratic principle," that if you give everyone a voice, the fringes on either end are argued out of their extremism, or at least so vastly outnumbered that their rants don't count for much.  What Moscovici and Zavalloni found was exactly the opposite.  Exposing people with moderate views to ones with extreme beliefs makes the moderate people more extreme.

In other words: being in a group increases the polarization of the members, even the ones who started out in the middle of the pack.

As psychologist Robert Cialdini put it, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, "Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer."

So much of what we do comes from the fact that, all civilization and culture and intelligence aside, at our core we're still just social primates.  It doesn't take much for the veneer of civility to fall away, and once that happens, we tend to base our behavior on the behavior of those around us.

For better or worse.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but to return to where I started -- "Midnight" -- it's important to acknowledge the fact that sometimes all it takes is one person resisting the pull of the mob to turn things around.  This requires courage, determination, and (often) not an inconsiderable amount of risk.  But ultimately, it's the only way we can avoid the worst outcomes of our built-in tribal mentality -- intolerance, polarization, discrimination, and violence.  Let's hope that there are people today who have the guts to do this.

And maybe this time, we'll even remember their names.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Disbelieving your own eyes

In May of 2015, the brilliant and acerbic Andy Borowitz wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans."  Borowitz wrote:

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. 

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said.  “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.” 

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

I wonder if Borowitz realizes how literally accurate his satirical piece is.   Because Brian Schaffner, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, has just published research showing something that even given humanity's fact-resistance, is kind of mind-blowing.

In the first, and less surprising part of the research, Schaffner showed the now-famous aerial photographs from Obama's and Trump's inaugurations to 1,388 people, and asked them which was which.  Unsurprisingly, given the claims by Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, and others, a significant percentage of Trump voters thought the Obama photograph (clearly showing more people) was Trump's, and vice versa.

Obama's inauguration [image courtesy of photographer Senior Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin, U. S. Air Force, and the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, all that shows is that people believed what Spicer said, and/or that the photograph itself had been misrepresented in the press.  So far, nothing too shocking.  But the amazing -- and alarming -- piece of Schaffner's research is best described in his own words:

For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?”  Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration. 

Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims? 

Yes.

In fact, about 15% of the Trump voters responded, with no apparent hesitation, that the photograph containing fewer people actually had more.  (I'm not sure if I find it heartening that 85% of Trump voters correctly identified the photo with the bigger audience, however, given that 41% still thought it was from Trump's inauguration.)

As Alan Levinovitz of Slate wrote:

The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it.  Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs.  (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”)  To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken.  And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea.  It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths...  It’s also much easier to convince yourself that a crowd is larger than it appears, particularly when the man you’ve put your faith in is arguing the same thing.  And in the case of the photographs, it didn’t take much to come up with an explanation for the apparent discrepancy.  Trump himself supplied it: Mainstream media manipulated both images to make it appear as if Obama’s had more.

Okay, I know I have biases just like everyone, and (like everyone) am probably wrong about some of my beliefs.  But what I completely do not get -- to the point of complete and utter bafflement -- is how people could be so wedded to their own biases that they would take incontrovertible hard evidence that they were wrong, and instead of changing their beliefs, disbelieve the evidence.

"No," they seem to be saying.  "I can't possibly be wrong.  It must be what I'm seeing right in front of me that is a lie."

Bill Nye compares this sort of thing to a belief in astrology, which persists despite huge amounts of evidence against it.  "For example, if somebody believes in astrology, it takes them about two years to get over it," Nye said.  "You have to show them over and over there’s no such thing as astrology, it doesn’t really work, and then they let go.  But everybody’s expectation that you’ll let go in a week is not going to met...  So we have to work, I think, diligently in the science community to fight back.  Of course there are the facts, we start with those.  But there’s this human nature thing on both sides to fight back.  We have our bubble over here, they have their bubble over there."

All of which means that rationalists have their work cut out for them.  I've seen over and over the extent to which humans react to new information primarily from an emotional, not a logical, standpoint; but over and over I'm astonished at how deep this tendency runs.  Andy Borowitz's quips about "fact-resistant humans" made me laugh, but I'm afraid in the last week or so my laugh has rung rather hollow.  Because the people currently in charge of the United States seem hell-bent on using this avoidance of the facts to their benefit, in terms of consolidating power and silencing the opposition.

And if it works, I'm afraid we're in for a really, really rough few years.