The view from the fringe

We've dealt with a lot of conspiracy theories here at Skeptophilia.  Amongst the more notable:

• COVID-19 was a bioterrorism agent sent into the West by China.
• The Denver Airport is a portal to hell.
• The CIA has allied itself with evil aliens to infiltrate political leadership all over the Earth and ultimately institute a tyrannical one-world government.  These same people apparently think The X Files was a scientific documentary.
• The US has targeted weather weapons, and the government uses them to steer hurricanes and tornadoes toward people they don't like.
• Something something something Nibiru Planet X we're all gonna die and NASA doesn't care something something.
• Not only did the Democrats cover up the fact that Barack Obama born in Kenya, Republicans covered up the fact that Donald Trump was born in Finland.

It's easy to assume that all of these are born of a lack of factual knowledge and understanding of the principles of logical induction.  I mean, if you have even the most rudimentary grasp of how weather works, you'd see that HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, located in Alaska) couldn't possibly affect the path of hurricanes in the south Atlantic.

Especially since it was shut down in 2014.

But however ridiculously illogical some conspiracy theories are -- the Earth is flat, the Moon landings were faked, the Sun is a giant mirror reflecting laser light from an alien spaceship -- there are people who fervently believe them, and will hang onto those beliefs like grim death.  Anyone who disagrees must either be a "sheeple" or else in on the conspiracy themselves for their own nefarious reasons.

If I had to rank the people I least like to argue with, conspiracy theorists would beat out even young-Earth creationists.  They take "I believe this even though there's no evidence" and amplify it to "I believe this because there's no evidence."  After all, super-powerful conspirators wouldn't just go around leaving a bunch of evidence around, would they?  Of course not.

So q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It turns out, though, that it's more complicated than a simple lack of scientific knowledge.  A paper that came out this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin describes a study led by psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University, which found that -- even controlling for other factors, like intelligence, analytical thinking skills, and emotional stability -- conspiracy theorists were united by two main characteristics: overconfidence and a mistaken assumption that the majority of people agree with them.

The correlation was striking.  Asked whether their conspiratorial beliefs were shared by a majority of Americans, True Believers said "yes" 93% of the time (the actual average value for the conspiracies studied is estimated at 12%).  And the overconfidence extended even to tasks unrelated to their particular set of fringe beliefs.  Given an ordinary assessment of logic, knowledge of current events, or mathematical ability, the people who believe conspiracy theories consistently (and drastically) overestimated how well they'd scored.

"The tendency to be overconfident in general may increase the chances that someone falls down the rabbit hole (so to speak) and believes conspiracies," Pennycook said.  "In fact, our results counteract a prevailing narrative about conspiracy theorists: that they know that they hold fringe beliefs and revel in that fact...  Even people who believed very fringe conspiracies, such as that scientists are conspiring to hide the truth about the Earth being flat, thought that their views were in the majority.  Conspiracy believers – particularly overconfident ones – really seem to be miscalibrated in a major way.  Not only are their beliefs on the fringe, but they are very much unaware of how far on the fringe they are."

Which brings up the troubling question of how you counteract this.  My dad used to say, "There's nothing more dangerous than confident ignorance," and there's a lot of truth in that.

So how do you change a belief when it's woven together with the certainty that you're (1) in the right, and (2) in the majority?

It would require a shift not only in seeing the facts more clearly and seeing other people more clearly, but seeing yourself more clearly.  And that, unfortunately, is a tall order.

It reminds me of the pithy words of Robert Burns, which seems like a good place to end:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

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Reunion recap

Robert Burns famously said:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us.
It would frae many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

I got a lesson in that general principle this past weekend, when I went to my 40th high school reunion.  Which was a little surreal from another aspect, which is that I can't really believe that much time has passed.  I don't feel like I'm a week or so shy of 58 years old, but I had confirmed for me several times at the party that yes, actually we are that old.

Maybe the reason I don't feel old is because my personality, and especially my sense of humor, kind of plateaued some time around tenth grade.  I mean, I still laugh at fart jokes.  I suppose that's why I ended up teaching adolescents, I'm right on their emotional level.

But there was another eye-opening thing about the reunion, which was how many people remembered me with apparent fondness.  I didn't think I was disliked in school so much as I felt invisible, kind of a nonentity.  Because of my shyness and anxiety my social life was zilch, and I figured most of my classmates had their attention focused on the popular kids -- the confident ones, the star athletes, the party animals, the class clowns.

Me, I read a lot, ran a lot, listened to music, and tried to figure out how to do the bare minimum homework it took to get by in classes I didn't like.  Other than that, I pretty much just tried to keep my head down and fly under the radar.  I did have a bit of a reputation for being a smartass (something that got me in trouble more than once), but overall, I felt like someone no one much would have a reason to notice.

I was bowled over by the warmth with which I was greeted on Saturday night.  I received dozens of hugs and handshakes, and was told over and over how well people remembered me.  I thought that some of it might be Facebook -- since I post links to my novels and to Skeptophilia there, I knew that the dozen or so of my former classmates who are Facebook friends would know a bit about me.

But it's more than that, because I received the same kind of welcome from people who aren't connected to me on social media, and most of whom I literally have not seen since we graduated in June of 1978.  I left that evening feeling a mixture of elation and sadness -- elation because I was evidently much better liked than I ever dreamed, and sadness because I hadn't realized it at the time, and had spent the intervening years thinking of myself as having been the amiable, bookish nobody, the kid who everyone looked past, who never got into the yearbook, whom no one really knew.

What this all points up is how completely inaccurate our own self-assessments are.  I wish I'd known sooner.  I might have been less afraid, less worried about what others thought, less concerned that everyone else seemed more popular than me.  I might have had the courage to join clubs, go to dances, ask out the cute girl I had a life-threatening crush on.  To put it succinctly, I might have had a hell of a lot more fun.

Me having fun, of all things

But as my grandma always said, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.  You can't change the past; all you can do is recognize it for what it is, realize you were doing the best you could with what you knew then.  Forgive yourself for what you didn't know, what you misunderstood, for your missteps and fumbles and awkward moments.  We've all had them, and they apparently matter far, far less than we usually think at the time.

So the party was great, and being that this is southern Louisiana, there was enough food to feed the French army, a well-stocked bar, and music and dancing and socializing until the wee hours.  I arrived home Monday night, exhausted and still feeling a little disembodied.  And the oddest thing of all is that I -- as neurotic and anxious as I am -- fell asleep with the thought, "Hey, they said there'll be a 45th reunion in five years.  I'm already looking forward to it."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

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

Color me blue

There's been a recent surge in popularity of questionnaire-based tests that supposedly tell you which of four "personality colors" you belong to.  (Here's a typical example.)  You're given questions like:

When facing a big project, you are...

• deadline-driven

• worrying

• researching

• making it a group effort

And after twenty or so questions of this sort, you're sorted into one of four "color groups," a little like what the Sorting Hat does at Hogwarts, only less reliable.

I throw in the "less reliable" part not only because we are being given a schema that puts every human on the Earth into one of four categories (hell, even the astrologers admit there are twelve), but because the whole thing relies on self-assessment.  When you take these tests, you're not finding out what you're really like, you're finding out what you think you're like.

Which is clearly not the same thing.  We're notoriously bad judges of our own personalities.  In their 2008 paper "Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One’s Own Competence Is an Intrinsically Difficult Task," Cornell University psychologists Travis J. Carter and David Dunning had the following to say:

(A)lthough the exhortation to ‘know oneself’ has a long and venerable history, recent investigations in behavioral science paint a vexing and troubling portrait about people’s success at self-insight. Such research increasingly shows that people are not very good at assessing their competence and character accurately.  They often hold self-perceptions that wander a good deal away from the reality of themselves...  (T)he extant psychological literature suggests that people have some, albeit only a meager, amount of self-insight.

And they quote Ann Landers's trenchant quip, "Know yourself.  Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful."

So trying to reach self-discovery from a series of restricted-choice questions you answer about yourself has about as much likelihood of revealing some hitherto unguessed truth as those Facebook quizzes that claim to tell you what character from Game of Thrones you are.

What is more vexing is that despite the fact that these tests are only telling you what you think about yourself, the whole "color group" thing is gaining a lot of ground in the business world as a way of improving relational dynamics in the workplace.  Don't believe me?  Check out this article over at Knoji by M. J. Grueso, who tells us the following:

Most companies use a color personality test in order to better understand these personality differences and how to make it work for everyone.  Understanding the different personalities is important not just for big companies but for us as individuals as this will make it easier for us to learn how to better deal with colleagues and clients...  Experts have determined that there are four basic personality types. Yellow, Red, Blue and Green.  And it doesn't have anything to do with a person's favorite color.  As an individual, learning our color personality is also important.  First, because it helps us to better understand ourselves and why we react to certain situations a certain way.  Second, when we understand who we are, it allows us to open ourselves to at least try to understand others as well.

Which all sounds pretty nifty.  But then I started wondering, "Who are these experts?"  And I found out that the whole color-personality thing was the brainchild of one Carol Ritberger, who is the "renowned psychologist" mentioned in the link in the first paragraph of this post...

... but who actually isn't a psychologist at all.  She describes herself as an "innovative leader in the fields of personality behavioral psychology and behavioral medicine," but later goes on to say that her credentials are "a doctorate in Theology and a doctorate in Esoteric Philosophy and Hermetic Science."

Which are about as related to the science of behavioral psychology as alchemy is to chemistry.

But despite having no apparent training in medical science, she claims to have the ability to do what she calls "intuitive healing:"

Our mission is to provide programs that train participants in the science and art of intuitive diagnostics, qualified to work in concert with medical practitioners in the process of healing. 

We stand at the threshold of a time of compelling change-a positive major shift is taking place, and that shift is having a dramatic impact on our lives.  We are compelled to talk about it and to seek to understand it.  It is awakening a new energy force within each of us that is causing dynamic change to occur within the physical body and the human energy system.  We are changing to forms of light that are not as we have previously known them, and are becoming more vibrant, more radiant, and more empowered.  This new energy force is changing our way of thinking and is illuminating a whole new dimension of our persona.  It is creating the need for intense self-exploration and we are being nudged, pushed, and driven to learn more about who we really are.  It is fueling the desire to better understand ourselves-its energy is assisting us in seeking to get in touch with our very souls.  We are being guided to look beyond the obvious and that which our five senses understand.  This new energy force is sensitizing us to the need to develop our thinking while our mental processing remains the same, and the way we perceive our lives is going through a radical change.  Consciousness, as we have known it, is expanding... 

Medical intuition is both an art and a science.  It is a learnable diagnostic skill that provides insight into how the body, mind, and spirit connection interrelates with one's health and well being.

I don't know about you, but if I've got some sort of medical condition, psychological or otherwise, I'd prefer to be treated by an individual with the proper training and credentials, rather than by someone who diagnoses me through "intuition" and babbles about undefined "energy forces" that are "changing our physical bodies" and "expanding our consciousness."

So the whole what-color-are-you thing (1) doesn't tell you anything you didn't already believe, (2) is only as accurate as your own ability to self-assess, and (3) was developed by someone whose grasp of science sounds tenuous at best.

Be that as it may, you'll probably want to know that I'm a "Blue."  "Blues" are tightly-wound, orderly people with good attention to detail, but who tend to be fretful, quiet, pessimistic, and sensitive to criticism. We need to be "more open about our feelings" and "more willing to try new things."

All of which would be immediately apparent to anyone who's known me more than five minutes.  So as a step toward Socrates's ideal of "Know thyself," it doesn't really get me very far, not that I expected it to.