Instant Genius - Irrational thinking and beliefs, with Steven Pinker

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

Are we innately rational or irrational beings? What’s the common psychology that leads people to be sucked into conspiracy theories? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shares his theories about rational thought and how we can overcome psychological biases. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, bind handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth.

So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. I'm Jason Googer, commissioning editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. In this episode, I speak to Stephen Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, an author of the book Rationality. We discuss claims that humans are not simply in the rational species,

investigate the common biases and fallacies that can cloud our judgment, and explore some of the critical thinking tools that we can apply in our own lives to aid our reasoning and decision-making. Today we're going to be talking about rational and irrational thoughts and beliefs. So I think probably the subject this will bring up in most people's minds when they think about, let's say, irrational beliefs, is the idea of conspiracy theories. And these are very far ranging, you know, from the relatively harmless, such as certain fast food chains sell chicken nuggets made out of pink slime.

But they range all the way up to things that are potentially harmful, like billionaires are using vaccines to implant tracking microchips into us, etc. But they all seem quite different, but they must have a common theme. So what kind of qualities does such an irrational belief have? One of it is a property of the belief itself that makes it perversely immune to refutation. Namely, the fact that there's no evidence for this conspiracy is proof of what a diabolical conspiracy it is. There's certain ideas that by their very nature are immune to refutation, like if you disagree

with the idea that such and such is racist, that proves that you are a racist, or God works in mysterious ways, and if we were to understand why he did the things that we did, then that would deflate the cosmic mystery that God wants to impress us. So these are our memes in Richard Dawkins' original sense, not a picture of a cat with a funny caption, but a meme in the sense that an idea that possesses traits that aids in its own propagation and a conspiracy theory is adapted to be resistant to refutation. That's one. Another is that when it comes to questions about major events, major processes, historical dynamics, the origins of the universe, the causes of fortune and misfortune, the course of history, things that people have no direct

access to. I'd like, say, the mechanics of their own lives, whether you've got a clean shirt to wear this morning, whether the kids have done their homework or not. People are pretty rational. They don't have any choice. Reality would punish them if they weren't. But when it comes to things that don't impinge on our lives, such as the causes of historical events, our natural mindset is is that whether there is evidence for them or against them is irrelevant. There can't be. You can't find out. And so people instead subscribe to myths, to narratives, to hero tales that make their own side look good

and make what they see as their enemies look bad, make them look evil. So a lot of conspiracy theories are appealing because they have the right villains, they have the right heroes. And to those of us who say, well, wait a second, you can't just believe something because it makes your enemies look bad, you should only believe true things. And that's a very reasonable thing to say, but it is a luxury of living in a time in which we have science, we have journalism, we have objective record keeping, we have data sets, we have archival materials. We didn't evolve with any of those things.

And so for beliefs that are, in a sense, cosmic or mythological, people's natural inclination is just to believe what makes them feel good, what makes them feel superior. And just to be concrete, take a crazy conspiracy theory like Pizza Gate, the idea that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a basement of a Washington area pizzeria. That just sounds barking mad to most of us, and there is no evidence for it. But people who believe it, it's not clear whether they are literally committed to the factual truth of that or whether they're really saying, I think Hillary Clinton is so depraved that she's capable of such a heinous act, and who's to know that she didn't do it? And to those of us

to say, well, wait a second, you know, why don't have anyone call the police? Why don't we see any records of that? The investigative journalists have uncovered. We're betraying a mindset that you can, in principle, get the factual answer to any question. And that is not. That is not a way. not particularly intuitive. So you mentioned there something interesting about myths. So a lot of people might think that this sort of thinking is a new, a modern phenomenon, but that's not the case, is it? Oh, quite the contrary.

And when you mentioned conspiracy theories that might be dangerous, I can give an example from my own family. My grandmother's earliest memory was the Kishinev pogrom in 1905, in which many Jews in the town of Kishinaw, and what's now Moldova, were massacred or raped because of a viral rumor that Jews had sacrificed Christian children to use their blood to make matzah, the ceremonial unleavened bread. Now, this was clearly a conspiracy theory. There were other conspiracy theories circulating at the time that Jews controlled the world economy, if they believed that they conspired to bring about Germany's defeat in World War I.

anti-Semitic conspiracies continue to proliferate, and to say that they can be dangerous is to put it mildly as an understatement, so on with other ethnic groups. Many pogroms and ethnic riots began with a rumor that they had conspired to poison the wells or to cheat people out of their savings and so on. So they are venerable. So I've mentioned some quite varied and quite extreme examples there, but there are still. lots of, let's say, lesser irrational beliefs that persist in society. And one that, you know, our listeners are probably particularly interested in is the sort of pervasiveness and maybe even persuasiveness of pseudoscience. Indeed. Not necessarily a conspiracy theory, but another example of the kind of florid irrationality that people that I have discovered, people are

interested in when you bring up the topic of rationality. I wrote the book and I taught a course on rationality with the goal of explaining some of the major tools of critical thinking and reasoning. What is probability? What is logic? What is scheme theory? What is the theory of rational choice? How do you distinguish correlation from causation? And people nod. They say, oh, yeah, I guess I should know these things. But what I really want you to tell me is, why do people believe in astrology or in crystal healing power or past lives? all these examples of pseudoscience. The answer is complex, but I think at the heart of it,

it's that we all have certain intuitive ways of understanding the world, that we may even have inherited as part of our evolutionary legacy, things that serve us well in the absence of real science, a kind of essentialist folk biology, a general intuition that people have, sorry, living things, have some kind of essence suffusing them, some kind of invisible magic substance that gives them their life, their structure, their organization, that disease is caused by the pollution or adulteration of your pure essence by

some foreign contaminant. Health consists of purging it. And so you get belief in culture after culture, not just our culture a couple of hundred years ago, in bloodletting as a cure, in purging, in enemas, in sweating, in cupping, and the general idea of the young, you've got to get rid of toxins, whatever they are. Conversely, that kind of essentialist folk belief also leads to vaccine resistance, which is as old as vaccines, and is kind of understandable when you remind yourself, but what is a vaccine, that it is a weakened form of the actual germ that gives you the disease injected into your bloodstream or into your muscle?

it's not surprising that that is a, gives rise to a feeling of kind of ick or a yuck reaction. Now, those of us who do get vaccinated, a highly rational thing to do. But we do it not because we ourselves can reconstruct the science behind it. You ask me how do vaccines protect you and I'll say, oh, I have something to do with antibodies, doesn't it? I consider, I'm a scientist, but there's only so much immunology I know. Basically, what I do, and what most people do who get back to do, is they trust the scientists. They say, well, they have their methods. If they say it's safe, that's, and effective, that's good enough for me.

For people who are alienated from mainstream institutions, who think of scientists, not as those who are the best access to the truth, but just another tribe, you can blow off science and just say, I'm just not going to do it. It's my body, and it just seemsicky to me. And there are other intuitions like that that give rise to forms of pseudoscience, such as the intuition that we all have, that everyone has a body and they have a mind. And the mind is somehow attached to the body. The mind is what we deal with when we deal with other people as humans rather than as hunks of flesh. We assume that other people see things and know things and hear things and want things just like we do, even though we can't see their minds.

but we assume they have them. Well, from there, it's a pretty short step to imagine that there can be minds that just happen not to be attached to bodies. And so you get belief in ghosts and spirits and saints and souls and reincarnation and powers of telepathy. It's a natural intuition. Again, if you have a scientific mindset, if you know that the only way that we perceive things is via physical energy, if the mental activity comes from the physiological activity

of the brain, then you discount these intuitions of free-floating souls. But if you haven't signed onto the scientific worldview and to basic scientific facts like neural activity sort of gives their eyes to consciousness, then these folk beliefs can seem pretty compelling. So you mentioned there the potential idea of this being part of evolution. So if you could say, like I suppose if you accept the law of evolution by natural selection, in any case in the first place. Why aren't these irrational beliefs or this style of irrational thinking? Why haven't those people been weeded out by evolution? Well, there is.

I don't know if it's as popular in Britain as in the United States, the so-called Darwin Awards. This is the humorous pseudo-prices for people who weed their genes out of the gene pool by acts of mind-boggling stupidity. It's kind of a joke because evolution doesn't work to improve the species, but to improve the individual or even the replicator. But these are the guy who strapped a military surplus rocket onto the back of his pickup truck to go really fast and flattened himself against a cliff face and other acts of recklessness. So you're right that in the fullness of time, people who say reject effective medicine in favor of quack cures and new age woo-woo are less likely to survive an illness than those who take

antibiotics and chemotherapy. But that takes a long time. It's a evolution as a speed limit measured in generations. Also, any selective pressure has to be uniform over the entire pool of humans all over the world. We interbreed with one another pretty readily. So it's something that we've only enjoyed for a few centuries is unlikely to have shaped the gene pool. Yeah, so sort of following on from the idea of evolution then, as our sort of capacity as a society, you know, to become, to make greater use of technology and science and that sort of thing, has that had any effect on our ability to think rationally? It has. As irrational as we are, there are some superstitious ways of thinking that are been kind of pushed to the fringes that used to be mainstream.

So take many people's example of an irrational world leader, Donald Trump. He, for all the, the bullheaded things that he did, or the boneheaded things that he did, he didn't consult astrologers, he didn't feed omens into lunar eclipses, he didn't hold seances, He didn't bring in spiritual leaders to commune with the souls of dead ancestors to give him impart their wisdom. These are things that mainstream leaders did not so long ago. Abraham Lincoln brought spiritual elders and psychics into the White House. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created a character that's just the epitome of rationality, He believed in ferries, and he was hoodwinked by some fake photos that he literally

sincerely believed had berries. So we can't, that would seem to be risable today. And so there are ways in which we do tend to improve. And perhaps an even more obvious one is the so-called Flynn effect, the fact that IQ scores, contrary to your impression of pervasive stupidity, have actually increased the first century. But that increase does not reflect increases in raw brain power and say how many digits you can repeat back backwards. It does seem to reflect a kind of scientific intelligence that we often take for granted. We don't even think of it as scientific until it's pointed out to us.

But I'll ask you a question. This might be a typical question on an IQ test. What do a fish and a crow have in common? Well, traditionally, you ask a peasant or a farmer, and this has been done, the answer would be absolutely nothing. What are you talking about? A fish lives in the water. A crow lives in the air.

Fish swims, a crow flies. The crow is black. A fish has scales. Crow can eat a fish, a fish can't eat a crow. Now, today, even a child might say they're both animals or they're both living things. That's a scientific answer. It's categorizing things out of the realm of everyday impressions of what things look like, but in terms of an abstract scientific category, maybe even a vertebrate if they've taken some high school biology. So that kind of question has shown an increase in it and suggests that a kind of scientific thinking has penetrated the bulk of the population.

So one of the things that a lot of people say about these, let's say, slightly wild ideas, that they're being spread by the internet and by social media. Is that an oversimplification? It's certainly part of the dancer, that media have become democratized. But we've always had media that have spread the pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. The supermarket tabloids that are a fixture of America. in the supermarkets, and I assume British ones too, sightings of Elvis Presley, baby-born talking, all kinds of nonsense and pseudoscience have been avidly consumed for many, many decades.

And before that, even we think about the miracles of mainstream religion, what are they, but paranormal phenomena spread as fake news? So fake news and paranormal phenomena and weird stuff is kind of been the default. I mean, that's just what public knowledge consisted of until science made inroads. But those inroads are not the entirety of the human species, and many people just haven't got the word that science is a better way of ascertaining reality than entertaining stories. So, of course, it's easy to laugh at this sort of thing, like, somebody. saying that they've seen Elvis and somebody else believing it, etc. But one point that you make is that lots of people do succumb to irrational thinking.

And you mentioned several different ways in which they do that by certain biases or fallacies. So what are the most sort of common ones of those fallacies or biases? I think the most consequential is the availability fallacy or the availability bias. This was a term coined by Amosterski and Daniel Kahneman, who are pioneers in the study of human judgment and decision making. This is the tendency to judge risk and probability in danger by how easily you can recall examples that are available in memory. So if there is a shark attack in the news that morning, then you don't go into the water. If there's a school shooting or a terrorist attack, then you feel unsafe because of terrorists. not appreciating that you're in much greater danger from car crashes falling down the stairs,

drownings, to say nothing of air pollution and obesity and other contributors to mortality. But there aren't headlines about people who die in car crashes typically or who fall down the stairs and hit their head. There are headlines on plane crashes and terrorist attacks. And so journalism is a kind of availability machine. It makes a... certain photogenic events salient in our, it burns them into our brains, and so we think that they are prevalent. That's one. Another one is also I'll give credit to Tversky and Conneman representativeness. We reasoned by stereotype instead of by taking into account base rates. So if you get a positive test result for a rare disease, you might start putting your affairs in order and writing your will.

But as long as the test has false positives and the base rate of the disease in the population is low, that is a rare disease. Chances are that most of the positives are false positives. And even doctors don't really appreciate it and they overdiagnose. rare diseases just because someone presents with the symptoms. In what's called Bayesian reasoning that is appealing to the Reverend Bays' famous theorem for how you calibrate degree of credence in a hypothesis, according to the strength of the evidence, you should take into account not just how likely are the symptoms

or the test results that the person has the disease, but how likely are they to have disease in the first place, given how rare or prevalent it is in the population. And medical students are sometimes warned against this base rate neglect, and their teachers try to shake some basing reasoning into them with a, it's now become a cliche. If you hear hoofbeats outside the window, don't look for a zebra. That is, even though it is true that zebras make hoofbeats, but given the base rate, chances are it's a horse rather than a zebra. That's a second example. maybe another one is to fail to cost out the probability times the payoff in making a decision.

People will say buy an extended warranty for appliances, often at a quarter or a third of the appliance itself. If they stop to think, how much would it cost to replace the appliance, how likely is it for modern appliances to fail? Maybe they think twice about taking out a life insurance policy on their toaster. And conversely, another failure to take into account probability and cost is people who take ridiculous risks like texting while driving. For the tiny benefit of getting your social media post a few minutes early, you are taking

some chance at losing your life, which presumably is a cost that is much greater than the benefit of reading your email a bit sooner. One bias that you talk about that I thought was particularly, um, interesting and perhaps powerful is the my side bias? Indeed. The my side bias may be the most powerful of the 200 or so biases that psychologists have racked up. And this is just the bias to engage in motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning just means you start off with a conclusion that you want to be true and you arrange your line of reasoning so it takes you there, put in the service of the glory, the correctness, the nobility of your group, your religion, your political ideology,

your sports club, and to express the opinions that make you a hero to your own social circle that prevent you from getting ostracized or canceled, again, in your own social circle, often by ratifying some sacred myth that makes your side look good, demonizing the other side. a perverse sense in which that's rational for every individual who does it. There's nothing rational about becoming a social pariah or outcast because your beliefs contradict the prevailing wisdom of your social clique. There is something irrational when everyone does it. And so instead of people assessing whether vaccines work, whether climate changes has human causes, he will just champion the belief that is a sacred value of their own coalition.

So is rational thinking a learned skill? And if so, you know, how do we go about learning it? How do we go about developing these methods of critical thinking? It's not entirely learned that it's a birthright of the human species. We're all rational when it comes to our physical surroundings, our day-to-day challenges. And that's not just true of the modern West, but it's true of every human society. In fact, I start out rationality with a pretty extended discussion of the San, Hunter, gatherers of the Calahari Desert. There's so many people have the stereotype that hunter gatherers who are probably represent the lifestyle of our ancestors just react to danger with reflexive knee-jerk thinking. That's very unfair to hunter-gatherers who are highly cerebral and try to figure out what kind of animal left tracks by a circuitous chains of evidence. So we do have rationality as our birthright.

However, it is rationality tied to our lived experience, our day-to-day challenges, it's commingled with our factual knowledge of the world. What doesn't come naturally are the tools of rationality that are much more abstract, that we even summarize in terms of abstract symbols, like if p implies Q, then not Q implies not P. Or the probability of the hypothesis given the data is the probability of the data multiplied by the probability of the data given the hypothesis, etc. Now, these are a little more alien to us.

There are all these P's and Q's and X's and Ys. Those you really do have to learn in school. But they're very powerful because they allow us to transcend our experience. You can plug in any P or Q and come to new conclusions. That's why these tools are so powerful, but they are gifts of civilization, of past logicians, and mathematicians and scientists, and you really do have to learn them in school, although school is not enough. School is not enough? Well, it isn't in the sense that, so one easy, what seems like

a quick fix for irrationality is courses in critical thinking. You teach students, you know, what probability is, you teach them to avoid traps like arguing from panickedote or setting up a straw man and knocking him down, it's supposed to considering the strongest possible version of an argument you oppose. And they're good as far as they go, but they're kind of like all courses, namely as soon as students write the exam and leave for the summer, they forget everything they learn in the course. And the thing is that rationality can't be just treated as another subject like Renaissance painting or invertebrate biology. It's kind of how you should think about everything. In the arts, in the sciences, in the social sciences, and the humanities,

is just how you come to sound conclusions. And so in addition to being explicitly taught, which I think it should be. I don't think it should be ignored. I think you should have a prominent place in the curriculum. But it's also got to be something that we have to make second major in our debates, in our editorials, in our op-eds. You just should not be able to get away with arguing from an anecdote.

And we're very far from having that as one of the norms on war, of civilized discussion. So it's the responsibility not only of the individual to apply these rational thought patterns, but also of large institutions like governments and media outlets. Indeed. So it should be part of our just everyday etiquette of how you argue for any position, but also it has to be entrenched in certain institutions that are dedicated to pursuing objective truth, rational choices, despite all of the self-serving biases that we humans are

burdened with. So these are the kind of communities that we join that have rules that are designed to push back or to work around our biases. Tools like in science, peer review, no matter how much you want your ideas to be true, no matter how fancy schmancy a scientist you are, how many Nobel prizes you won, how prestigious your professorship, you still can't publish anything you want, it's got to be vetted by others. And you've got to make empirical predictions that could be falsified. You've got to take questions and accept criticism from someone, no matter how low their rank, it's fair game.

These are kind of the rules of the game. Likewise, in journalism, you've got to source your claims, you've got to get interview, people affected by the story. we might have insider knowledge. You still have editors. You have fact checkers. If a paper, respectable paper, prints something that they then discover to be wrong. They print a retraction.

In governance, you have freedom of speech. You have parliamentary debate. We've got checks and balances, separation of powers. Now, all of these can be seen as workarounds for the fact that we're not angels. None of us can implement our truth, because it's probably not the truth. To get at the truth, you need an arena of debate and criticism and fact-checking. And so these institutions, like a respectable journalistic outlet, like a scientific society, like a university, like a government record-keeping agency, like an international organization, like the various UN agencies. They all work because they're committed to truth ascertained by rules that everyone signs on to.

So sort of by way of closing, then, taking into account all that we've said, do you think, you know, the human race is on a trajectory towards rationality? How optimistic are you? There's no simple answer because the human race is an awful lot of people, and some of them are becoming more and more rational. We have data being brought to bear on questions that used to be handled just by conventional wisdom and hunches. We've got evidence-based medicine. We've got data-driven sports and policing and feedback-informed therapy. We have more and more areas in which we have become more rational. As we can see in accomplishments like smartphones, like vaccines, like space probes,

On the other hand, we still have all of the ways that human reasoning can fall back on superstition and myth and good narratives as opposed to true hypotheses. It's always going to be a battle to push back against them just because that's our instinctive way of thinking. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker. If you want to know more about his thoughts on reason and critical thinking, check out his book, Rationality. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at namea audio.com.

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