Going to the source

One of the hardest things for skeptics to fight is the tendency by some people to swallow any damnfool thing they happen to see online.

I had credited this tendency to gullibility.  If you see a catchy meme implying that if you drink a liter of vinegar a day, your arthritis will be cured ("Doctors hate this!  Get well with this ONE WEIRD TRICK!"), and think it sounds plausible, it's just because you don't have the background in science (or logic) to sift fact from fiction.

It turns out, the truth is apparently more complex than this.

According to a trio of psychologists working at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the problem isn't that silly ideas sound plausible to some people; it's that their mindset causes them to weight all information sources equally -- that one guy's blog is just as reliable as a scientific paper written by experts in the field.

(And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of One Guy writing that in his blog.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Karen Thibaut, Belmans in labo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The paper, "Using Power as a Negative Cue: How Conspiracy Mentality Affects Epistemic Trust in Sources of Historical Knowledge," was written by Roland Imhoff, Pia Lamberty, and Olivier Klein, and appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin a couple of months ago.  The authors write:

Classical theories of attitude change point to the positive effect of source expertise on perceived source credibility persuasion, but there is an ongoing societal debate on the increase in anti-elitist sentiments and conspiracy theories regarding the allegedly untrustworthy power elite.  In one correlational and three experimental studies, we tested the novel idea that people who endorse a conspiratorial mind-set (conspiracy mentality) indeed exhibit markedly different reactions to cues of epistemic authoritativeness than those who do not: Whereas the perceived credibility of powerful sources decreased with the recipients’ conspiracy mentality, that of powerless sources increased independent of and incremental to other biases, such as the need to see the ingroup in particularly positive light.  The discussion raises the question whether a certain extent of source-based bias is necessary for the social fabric of a highly complex society.

So people with a "conspiracy mentality" fall for conspiracies not because they're ignorant or gullible, but because their innate distrust of authority figures causes them to trust everyone equally -- they often frame it as being "open-minded" or "unbiased" -- regardless of what the credentials, background, expertise, or (even) sanity of the source.

In an interview in PsyPost, study co-author Roland Imhoff explained the angle they took on this perplexing social issue:

The very idea for the study was born in a joint discussion with my co-author Olivier Klein at a conference of social psychological representations of history.  We were listening to talks about all kinds of construals, biases and narratives about what happened in the ancient or not so ancient past.   Having the public debate about ‘alternative facts’ from after Trump’s inauguration still in the back of our minds, we wondered: how do we even know what we know, how do we know who to trust when it comes to events we all have not experienced in first person? 

While previous research had insisted that this is predominantly a question of trusting ingroup sources (i.e., my government, my national education institutions), we had a lingering suspicion that people who endorse conspiracy theories might have a different system of epistemic trust: not trusting those who are in power (and allegedly corrupt).

Which points out a problem I'd always found baffling -- why, to many people, is "being an intellectual elite" a bad thing?  It was one of the (many) epithets I heard hurled at Barack Obama -- that being Harvard-educated, he couldn't possibly care about, or even be aware, of the problems of ordinary middle-class America.  Conversely, this card was played the other way by George W. Bush.  He was a "regular guy," the type of fellow you could enjoy having a beer with on Saturday night and discussing the latest sports statistics.

And my thought was: don't you want our leaders to be smarter than you are?  I mean, seriously.  I know that I and the guys I have a beer with on Saturday night aren't qualified to run the country.  (And to my bar buddies, no disrespect intended.)  There's no way in hell I'm smart enough to be president.  One of the things I want in the people we elect to office is that they are smart -- smart enough to make good decisions based on actual factual knowledge.

That, apparently, is not the norm, which the election of Donald Trump -- clearly one of the least-qualified people ever to hold the highest office in the land -- illustrated with painful clarity.  But it wasn't only a flip of the middle finger at the Coastal Elites that got him there.  The study by Imhoff et al. suggests that it was because of a pervasive tendency to treat all sources of information as if they were equal.

"[T]he data consistently suggests [people with a conspiracy mentality] just ignore source characteristics," Imhoff said.  "To them a web blog is as trustworthy as an Oxford scholar.  As we have formulated, they have terminated the social contract of epistemic trust, that we should believe official sources more than unofficial ones."

I blame part of this on people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and (of course) Alex Jones, who have gone out of their way for years to convince everyone that the powers-that-be are lying to you about everything.  Now, the powers-that-be do lie sometimes.  Also, being an Oxford scholar is no guarantee against being wrong.  But if you cherry-pick your examples, and then act as if those instances of error or dishonesty are not only universal, but are deliberate attempts to hoodwink the public for nefarious purposes -- you've set up a vicious cycle where the more facts and evidence you throw at people, the less they trust you.

As I've pointed out before: if you can teach people to disbelieve the hard data, it's Game Over.  After that, you can convince them of anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

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

Cock-and-bull

The skeptic community (if such a thing actually exists) is all abuzz because of the recent publication in the journal Cogent Social Studies of an article by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay called "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct."  If you read the article, you'll see immediately that it's a hoax.  It contains such passages as one in which they say the "concept of the penis" is responsible for climate change, and defend that claim thusly:

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset.  This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology.  When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

Boghossian and Lindsay, both of whom write for Skeptic magazine, do a good bit of har-de-har-harring at the fact that their spoof article allegedly passed peer review, as does Skeptic's founder, Michael Shermer.  Shermer writes:

Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today.  Its ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help rein in extremism in this and related areas.

In fact, Boghossian and Lindsay hint that their hoax shows a fundamental problem with all of gender studies:

The most potent among the human susceptibilities to corruption by fashionable nonsense is the temptation to uncritically endorse morally fashionable nonsense.  That is, we assumed we could publish outright nonsense provided it looked the part and portrayed a moralizing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral convictions.  Like any impostor, ours had to dress the part, though we made our disguise as ridiculous and caricatured as possible—not so much affixing an obviously fake mustache to mask its true identity as donning two of them as false eyebrows.

Denigrating all of gender studies based upon a sample size of One Paper seems like lousy skepticism to me.  They didn't do a thorough analysis of papers published in the dozens of journals that address the subject; they found one journal that accepted one hoax paper uncritically.  Sure, it says something about Cogent Social Studies -- which, it turns out, is a pay-to-publish journal anyhow, ranking it a long way down on the reliability ladder -- but that no more discredits gender studies as a whole than the Hwang Woo-Suk hoax discredited all stem cell research.

To me, this is more of an indication that Boghossian and Lindsay, and by extension Michael Shermer, have an ax to grind.  The hoax itself appears very much like a cheap stunt that Boghossian and Lindsay dreamed up to take a pot shot at a subject that for some reason they hold in disdain.  When the hoax succeeded, they crowed that the field of gender studies is "crippled academically."

Kind of looks like confirmation bias to me.  Sad, given that these three are often held up as the intellectual leaders of the skeptic community.

[image courtesy of artist Ju Gatsu Mikka and the Wikimedia Commons]

I do think there's one important lesson that can be drawn from this situation, however, and it's not the one Boghossian and Lindsay intended.  It's that the old adage of "if it's in an academic journal, it's reliable" simply isn't true.  I recall, in my college days, being told that the "only acceptable sources for papers are academic journals."  This wrongly gives college students the impression that all journals have identical standards -- that Nature and Science are on par with Cogent Social Studies and The American Journal of Homeopathy.

This makes a true skeptic's job harder (not to mention the job of college students simply trying to find good sources for their own research).  It is incumbent upon anyone reading an academic paper to see what the track record of the journal is -- if its papers have been cited by reputable researchers, if the research they describe is valid, if its authors have reasonable credentials.  Boghossian and Lindsay did show that we are right to be suspicious of papers that appear in pay-to-publish journals.  Beyond that, what they did strikes me as a lot of mean-spirited dicking around.

Alien mass burials and the speed of nonsense

I know scientists say that nothing moves faster than light, but I bet that bullshit comes close.

The difficulty with getting a straight story these days is that with the click of a mouse, a story can make its way halfway around the world.  And since real news is generally more prosaic and boring than outrageous, wild tales, the bullshit always spreads faster and further.

I fight this constantly in my Critical Thinking class.  That curriculum is designed to give students some tools for detecting baloney, and one of those tools is "look at what other sources say."  I hammer it in constantly: before you believe something, look for corroboration.

So, one day a story pops up about, say, Bigfoot.  My student dutifully looks for other sources, and finds them!  And they all say substantially the same thing!  We have corroboration!  Bigfoot exists!

Well, not really, of course.  Take the story that came up a couple of days ago about a mass alien burial near Kigali, Rwanda.  Here is an excerpt:

The remains belong to gigantic creatures that bear little resemblance to humans. Head of research group believes that they could be visitors from another planet who died as a result of a catastrophe.

According to the scientists, they were buried at least 500 years ago. At first, researchers thought that they came across the remains of ancient settlements, but no signs of human life have been found nearby.

The 40 communal graves had approximately 200 bodies in them, all perfectly preserved. The creatures were tall - approximately 7 feet. Their heads were disproportionately large and they had no mouth, nose or eyes.

The anthropologists believe that the creatures were members of an alien landing, possibly destroyed by some terrestrial virus to which they had no immunity. However, no traces of the landing of the spacecraft or its fragments were discovered.

Of course, I'm immediately suspicious any time I see unnamed anthropologists (or any other scientists) "believing" in an alien landing.  So, following my own advice, I started looking for what other sources had to say about the whole incident.  I figured I'd either find nothing (i.e., this was the product of a lone wingnut) or a bunch of sites debunking it.

Instead, I found hundreds of sites reporting the story as fact.  Besides sites such as Latest-UFO-Sightings.net (where I found the original story), I found the same story reported on the Archaeology Daily News, the EU Times, TruthFrequency News, and Pravda!  So, I clicked on a couple of the links -- and not only was it the same story, it was reported in almost exactly the same words.  Basically, it had just been lifted in toto and republished, again and again.

Then, I noticed something odd about the dates -- while the story I saw was dated June 26, 2011, and was written as if it had just happened, a couple of the sites, such as the amazingly wacky David Icke Forum, had the same story dated to November of 2009.  Again, the wording was nearly identical to the recent publications, so it had to be the same original writer.  So I started trying to find the earliest reporting of the story, to see if perhaps I could figure out where the story started.  And the whole alien-mass-burial story seems to have begun with...

... wait for it...

The Weekly World News.

Yes, The Weekly World News, that stalwart bastion of brave news reporting on topics such as how Britney Spears is having Elvis's baby.   (Real headline from The Weekly World News:  "SANTA'S ELVES REALLY SLAVES FROM THE PLANET MARS.")  They apparently published the whole Rwanda alien story back in 2009, and even came up with an anthropologist to lead the team ("Dr. Hugo Childs"), whose name got dropped in later iterations of the story.  No need to worry about his feelings, though; Dr. Hugo Childs seems to exist about as much as Santa's elves do, judging by the fact that he doesn't show up in any searches in peer-reviewed anthropological or archeological journals.  So, suffices to say that their level of reporting has definitely not changed any.

What's funny (and by "funny" I mean "scary") is how somehow, this story made its way into the news stream, rather in the same fashion as a pipe dumping sewage into a river.  And the whole thing got passed along, gradually working its way up the "credibility" scale, until it finally reached the EU Times and Pravda.  This is scary for a couple of reasons.  First, apparently copy editors have not been sufficiently taught in critical thinking skills, and don't realize that "look for multiple sources" only works if the sources don't all come from the same original story.  Second, it seems that bullshit, unlike other substances, doesn't dilute away, but seems to become more concentrated with time, as more and more sites publish the same nonsense over and over.

And third, it travels fast.  Within two days of the publication of the first of the recent versions of this story (June 24) it had been picked up by dozens of other sites, from the dubiously credible to the completely reputable.  Which just goes to show, as I said initially; nothing travels faster than light, but bullshit has to be a close second place finisher.