Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (51 page)

"Smart people" suffers from a similar problem in operational definition, but at least here our task is aided by achievement criteria that most would agree, and the research shows, require a minimum level of intelligence. Graduate degrees (especially the Ph.D.), university positions (especially at recognized and reputable institutions), peer-reviewed publications, and the like, allow us to concur that, while we might quibble over how smart some of these people are, the problem of smart people believing weird things is a genuine one that is quantifiable through measurable data. Additionally, there is a subjective evaluation that comes from the experiences I have had in dealing directly with so many people whose claims I have evaluated. While I have not had the opportunity to administer intelligence tests to my various subjects, through numerous television and radio appearances and personal interviews I have conducted with such claimants, and especially through the lecture series that I organize and host at Caltech, I have had the good fortune to meet a lot of really smart people, some out-and-out brilliant scholars and scientists, and even a handful of geniuses so far off the scale that they strike me as wholly Other. All of these factors combined affords me a reasonable assessment of my subjects' intelligence.

An Easy Answer to a Hard Question

"The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime."

"What's that, O'Brien?" replied I . . .

"Why, Peter," rejoined he, "it's the stuff they feed fools on."

—P. Simple,
Marryat,
1833

It is a given assumption in the skeptical movement—elevated to a maxim really—that intelligence and education serve as an impenetrable prophylactic against the flimflam that we assume the unintelligent and uneducated masses swallow with credulity. Indeed, at the Skeptics Society we invest considerable resources in educational materials distributed to schools and the media under the assumption that this will make a difference in our struggle against pseudoscience and superstition. These efforts do make a difference, particularly for those who are aware of the phenomena we study but have not heard a scientific explanation for them, but are the cognitive elite protected against the nonsense that passes for sense in our culture? Is flapdoodle the fodder only for fools? The answer is no. The question is why?

For those of us in the business of debunking bunk and explaining the unexplained, this is what I call the Hard Question: Why do
smart
people believe weird things? My Easy Answer will seem somewhat paradoxical at first:
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

That is to say, most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing). Rather, such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices. Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and con, and choose the most logical and rational belief, regardless of what we previously believed. Instead, the facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories, hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming. All of us do this, of course, but smart people are better at it through both talent and training. Some beliefs really are more logical, rational, and supported by the evidence than others, of course, but it is not my purpose here to judge the validity of beliefs; rather, I am interested in the question of how we came to them in the first place, and how we hold on to them in the face of either no evidence or contradictory evidence.

The Psychology of Belief

There are a number of principles of the psychology of belief that go to the heart of fleshing out my Easy Answer to the Hard Question.

1. Intelligence and Belief

Although there is some evidence that intelligent people are slightly less likely to believe in some superstitions and paranormal beliefs, overall conclusions are equivocal and limited. A study conducted in 1974 with Georgia high school seniors, for example, found that those who scored higher on an IQ test were significantly less superstitious than students with lower IQ scores (Killeen et al. 1974). A 1980 study by psychologists James Alcock and L. R Otis found that belief in various paranormal phenomena was correlated with lower critical thinking skills. In 1989, W. S. Messer and R. A. Griggs found that belief in such psychic (psi) phenomena as out-of-body experiences, ESR and precognition was negatively correlated with classroom performance as measured by grades (as belief goes up, grades go down).

But it should be noted that these three studies are using three different measures: IQ, critical thinking skills, and educational performance. These may not always be indicative of someone being "smart." And what we mean by "weird things" here is not strictly limited to superstition and the paranormal. For example, cold fusion, creationism, and Holocaust revisionism could not reasonably be classified as superstitions or paranormal phenomena. In his review of the literature in one of the best books on this subject
(Believing in Magic),
psychologist Stuart Vyse (1997) concludes that while the relationship between intelligence and belief holds for some populations, it can be just the opposite in others. He notes that the New Age movement in particular "has led to the increased popularity of these ideas among groups previously thought to be immune to superstition: those with higher intelligence, higher socioeconomic status, and higher educational levels. As a result, the time-honored view of believers as less intelligent than non-believers may only hold for certain ideas or particular social groups."

For the most part intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of belief. In geometry, orthogonal means "at right angles to something else"; in psychology orthogonal means "statistically independent. Of an experimental design: such that the variates under investigation can be treated as statistically independent," for example, "the concept that creativity and intelligence are relatively orthogonal (i.e., unrelated statistically) at high levels of intelligence" (OED). Intuitively it seems like the more intelligent people are the more creative they will be. In fact, in almost any profession significantly affected by intelligence (e.g., science, medicine, the creative arts), once you are at a certain level among the population of practitioners (and that level appears to be an IQ score of about 125), there is no difference in intelligence between the most successful and the average in that profession. At that point other variables, independent of intelligence, take over, such as creativity, or achievement motivation and the drive to succeed (see Hudson 1966; Getzels and Jackson 1962).

Cognitive psychologist Dean Keith Simonton's research on genius, creativity, and leadership (1999), for example, has revealed that the raw intelligence of creative geniuses and leaders is not as important as their ability to generate a lot of ideas and select from them those that are most likely to succeed. Simonton argues that creative genius is best understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. Creative geniuses generate a massive variety of ideas from which they select only those most likely to survive and reproduce. As the two-time Nobel laureate and scientific genius Linus Pauling observed, one must "have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. . . . You aren't going to have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas and some sort of principle of selection." Like Forest Gump, genius is as genius does, says Simonton: "these are individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity. In other words, the creative genius attains eminence by leaving for posterity an impressive body of contributions that are both original and adaptive. In fact, empirical studies have repeatedly shown that the single most powerful predictor of eminence within any creative domain is the sheer number of influential products an individual has given the world." In science, for example, the number one predictor of receiving the Nobel Prize is the rate of journal citation, a measure, in part, of one's productivity. As well, Simonton notes, Shakespeare is a literary genius not just because he was good, but because "probably only the Bible is more likely to be found in English-speaking homes than is a volume containing the complete works of Shakespeare." In music, Simonton notes that "Mozart is considered a greater musical genius than Tartini in part because the former accounts for 30 times as much music in the classical repertoire as does the latter. Indeed, almost a fifth of all classical music performed in modern times was written by just three composers: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven." In other words, it is not so much that these creative geniuses were smart, but that they were productive and selective. (See also Sulloway, 1996.)

So intelligence is also orthogonal to the variables that go into shaping someone's beliefs. Think of this relationship visually as follows:

Magic is a useful analogue for this relationship. Folk wisdom has it that smart people are harder for magicians to fool because they are cleverer at figuring out how the tricks are done. But ask any magician (I have asked lots) and they will tell you that there is no better audience than a room full of scientists, academics, or, best of all, members of the high IQ club Mensa. Members of such cohorts, by virtue of their intelligence and education, think they will be better at discerning the secrets of the magician, but since they aren't they are easier to fool because in watching the tricks so intensely they more easily fall for the misdirection cues. The magician James "the Amazing" Randi, one of the smartest people I know, gleefully deceives Nobel laureates with the simplest of magic, knowing that intelligence is unrelated (or perhaps in this case slightly inversely correlated) to the ability to discern the real magic behind the tricks. Tellingly, over the years I have given a number of lectures to Mensa groups around the country and have been struck by the number of weird beliefs such exceptionally smart people hold, including and especially ESP. At one conference there was much discussion about whether Mensa members also had higher Psi-Qs (Psychic Quotient) than regular people!

Another problem is that smart people might be smart in only one field. We say that their intelligence is domain specific. In the field of intelligence studies there is a long-standing debate about whether the brain is "domain general" or "domain specific." Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Steve Pinker, for example, reject the idea of a domain-general processor, focusing on brain modules that evolved to solve specific problems in our evolutionary history. On the other hand, many psychologists accept the notion of a global intelligence that could be considered domain general (Barkow et al. 1992). Archaeologist Steven Mithen (1996) goes so far as to say that it was a domain-general processor that made us human: "The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover, the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity." (See also, Jensen 1998; Pinker 1997; Sternberg 1996; and Gardner 1983.) It seems reasonable to argue that the brain consists of both domain specific and domain-general modules. David Noelle, of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, informs me that "modern neuroscience has made it clear that the adult brain does contain functionally distinct circuits. As our understanding of the brain advances, however, we find that these circuits rarely map directly onto complex domains of human experience, such as 'religion' or 'belief.' Instead, we find circuits for more basic things, such as recognizing our location in space, predicting when something good is going to happen (e.g., when we will be rewarded), remembering events from our own lives, and keeping focused on our current goal. Complex aspects of behavior, like religious practices, arise from the interaction of these systems—not from any one module" (personal correspondence; see also Karmiloff-Smith 1995).

What happens when smart people may be smart in one field (domain specificity) but are not smart in an entirely different field, out of which may arise weird beliefs. When Harvard marine biologist Barry Fell jumped fields into archaeology and wrote a best-selling book,
America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World
(1976), about all the people who discovered America before Columbus, he was woefully unprepared and obviously unaware that archaeologists had already considered his different hypotheses of who first discovered America (Egyptians, Greeks, Roman, Phoenicians, etc.) but rejected them for lack of credible evidence. This is a splendid example of the social aspects of science, and why being smart in one field does not make one smart in another. Science is a social process, where one is trained in a certain paradigm and works with others in the field. A community of scientists reads the same journals, goes to the same conferences, reviews one anothers' papers and books, and generally exchanges ideas about the facts, hypotheses, and theories in that field. Through vast experience they know, fairly quickly, which new ideas stand a chance of succeeding and which are obviously wrong. Newcomers from other fields, who typically dive in with both feet without the requisite training and experience, proceed to generate new ideas that they think—because of their success in their own field—will be revolutionary. Instead, they are usually greeted with disdain (or, more typically, simply ignored) by the professionals in the field. This is not because (as they usually think is the reason) insiders don't like outsiders (or that all great revolutionaries are persecuted or ignored), but because in most cases those ideas were considered years or decades before and rejected for perfectly legitimate reasons.