Batman's watching you

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.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons William Tung, San Diego Comic-Con 2024 Masquerade - Cosplay of Batman 3, CC BY-SA 2.0]

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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Tribal tactics

Given the right context, people tend to be cooperative.

That's the gist of a study out of the University of Texas - Austin this week, called, "Prosocial Modeling: A Meta-analytic Review and Synthesis," by Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone Henderson, and Erika Patall.  If behavior is characterized as helpful to others -- such as wearing a mask during a pandemic -- it triggers similar prosocial behavior in those who witness it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wereskowa, Wearing FFP mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Khmelnytskyi, April 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Just like the deadly virus, cooperative behavior can also be transmitted across people,” said Haesung Jung, lead author of the study, in a press release.  "These findings remind the public that their behavior can impact what others around do; and the more individuals cooperate to stop the spread of the disease, the more likely others nearby will do the same...  We found that people can readily improvise new forms of prosocial actions.  They engaged in behaviors that were different from what they witnessed and extended help to different targets in need than those helped by the prosocial model."

It's unsurprising, given that we're social primates, that we're influenced by the behavior of those around us.  Not only do we learn by imitation, there's the tendency -- often nicknamed "peer pressure" -- to pick up behaviors, good or bad, from our friends and acquaintances, usually for reasons of group acceptance and fitting in.  I vividly remember being a graduate student at the University of Washington, where my classmates were some of the most foul-mouthed, snarky, hard-drinking folks I've ever been around.  They weren't bad people, mind you; but it definitely was the intellectual version of a "rough crowd."  It took very little time for me to adopt those behaviors myself.  We tend to conform to the norm for the group we belong to.

(Yes, I know, I still swear a lot.  I swore even more then, hard though that may be to imagine.  Like I said -- rough crowd.)

So the results of the Jung et al. study make sense.  Get the ball rolling, she suggests, and the influence we have over the people we associate with can cause an increase in the overall prosocial behavior of the group.

But.

The example the paper focuses on -- the wearing of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic -- isn't as simple as that.  This isn't simply a case of enlightened people who understand risks wearing masks and waking up the uninformed, or at least encouraging them to behave in a socially responsible manner.  Simultaneously we have a group of people who are consciously and deliberately using the same tribal tendencies to stop people from wearing masks.  From the very beginning of the pandemic, we have had Fox News bombarding their listeners with the following messages:

• COVID is a hoax.
• Even if it's not a hoax, it's China's fault.
• It's really just seasonal flu, so it's nothing to worry about.
• Okay, it's worse than the flu, but the numbers being reported, especially from blue states, are wild exaggerations made to disparage the Trump administration.
• Which, by the way, has been doing an absolutely stellar job of managing the pandemic.
• Wearing masks is giving in to the Democrats' alarmist propaganda.
• All this is just the "deep state" trying to get you to give up your liberties, so it's nobler and braver to defy them and not wear a mask.

Just this morning I saw a post on social media of the "Meh, why worry?" variety, to the effect that Woodstock happened right in the middle of the Hong Kong flu epidemic, and that didn't stop people from partying.

Which may well be true, but doesn't make it smart.

So we've got a "news" outlet deliberately downplaying the danger, and worse, making it look like a conspiracy to bring down Dear Leader.  The result is that wearing masks isn't seen as prosocial, at least amongst Fox viewers; it's seen as falling for the lies of the Democrats, and thus betraying Donald Trump and everything the GOP stands for.

This kind of thinking is remarkably hard to counteract, because the Fox mouthpieces -- people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham -- started out by training their listeners to disbelieve the facts.  The administration quickly picked up on this strategy, starting with Kellyanne Conway's infamous "alternative facts" comment, and it has proven wildly successful, if you can characterize getting a significant slice of the American public to trust nothing but the party line as "success."

As I've pointed out before, once you get people to mistrust the hard evidence itself, you can convince them of anything.

So the problem with mask-wearing in the United States is that it isn't universally being seen as a compassionate protective measure, it's seen as being a dupe.  Besides the "how others are seeing our actions" factor that Jung et al. focused on, there's "how we see ourselves" -- and if we've been trained that a behavior is going to make us look like a gullible sucker, that's going to counteract the positive forces of prosocial modeling.  (Especially if the training has included a message that the risk the behavior is supposed to protect us from doesn't exist in the first place.)

Yes, we're motivated to be compassionate and protect the people around us.  But the ugly side of tribalism is equally powerful, and we now have a group of people in charge who are callously choosing their tactics to exploit those tendencies, with the end of gaining power and money.

Until we can stop the disinformation and propaganda, the kind of prosocial modeling Jung et al. describe is unlikely to have much effect.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

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

Selflessness, sociality, and bullshit

About two and a half years ago, a team of researchers released a landmark paper entitled "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."  The gist of the paper, which I wrote about in Skeptophilia, is that people with lower cognitive ability and vocabulary are more prone to getting taken in by meaningless intellecto-babble -- statements that sound profound but actually don't mean anything.

This is the sort of thing that Deepak Chopra has become famous for, which led to the creation of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator.  (My latest visit to it produced "The unexplainable embraces new life, and our consciousness constructs an expression of balance."  I've read some real Chopra, and I can say with certainty that it's damned hard to tell the difference.)

Now, a followup paper, authored by Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, Gustav Tinghög, and Daniel Västfjäll of the University of Linköping (Sweden) -- interestingly, none of whom were involved in the earlier study -- has shown that not only does poor bullshit detection correlate with low cognition (which is hardly surprising), it correlates with high selfishness and low capacity for compassion.

In "Bullshit-Sensitivity Predicts Prosocial Behavior," which came out in the online journal PLoS One two weeks ago, the authors write:

Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior.  We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity)...  [L]ogistic regression analyses showed that... bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior.  These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity.  The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

"To our knowledge, we are the first study that links reactions to bullshit to an actual behavior rather than to self-reported measures. We also measure prosociality in two different ways, which makes the findings more robust and generalizable," said Arvid Erlandsson, who co-authored the study, in an interview in PsyPost.  "We see this finding as a small but interesting contribution to a fun and quickly emerging field of research rather than something groundbreaking or conclusive.  We are open with the fact that the results were found in exploratory analyses, and we cannot currently say much about the underlying mechanisms...  Future studies could potentially test causality (e.g. see whether courses in critical thinking could make people better at distinguishing the actually profound from the pseudo-profound and whether this also influences their prosociality compared to a control group)."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons -- This vector image was created with Inkscape by Anynobody, composing work: Mabdul., Bullshit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As you might expect, I find all of this fascinating.  I'm not sure it's all that encouraging, however; what this implies is that bullshit will tend to sucker stupid mean people (sorry, I'm not a researcher in psychology, and I just can't keep writing "low-cognition, low-prosocial individuals" without rolling my eyes).  And if you add that to the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the well-studied tendency of people with low ability to overestimate how good they are at something -- you've got a perfect storm of unpleasant behavior.

Stupid mean people who think they're better than the rest of us, and who will not only fall for nonsense, but will be unwilling to budge thereafter regardless of the facts.

Sound like some people in red hats we keep seeing on the news?

So my chortles of delight over the Erlandsson et al. paper were tempered by my knowledge that we here in the United States are currently watching the results play out for real, and it's scaring the hell out of a good many of us.

I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this.  Promote critical thinking in schools is a good place to start, but education budgets are being slashed pretty much everywhere, which certainly isn't conducive to adding new and innovative programs.  Other than that, we just have to keep coming back to facts, evidence, and logic, and hoping that someone -- anyone -- will listen.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]