You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (12 page)

It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.

To combat post-decisional dissonance, the feeling you have committed to one option when the other option may have been better, you make yourself feel justified in what you selected to lower the anxiety brought on by questioning yourself.

All of this forms a giant neurological cluster of associations, emotions, details of self-image, and biases around the things you own.

So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind—you’re trying to prop up your own.

It would be hard not to feel somewhat intimidated while sitting across from a professor with all his or her degrees and certificates staring back at you. Behind that huge desk, surrounded by books and ancient statues, inside an aging, hallowed building, the professor seems to channel the might and weight of all of academia.

When he or she opines on the history of civilization, you might be inclined to see the professor’s point of view as more correct, more thoroughly meditated upon than that of your cousin who collects ketchup packets. You would be right. Indeed, it is more likely that a professor of history will know why the Roman Empire fell and what can be learned from it than your condiment-obsessed relative will know these things. Those who devote their lives to the study or practice of a given idea are worth listening to when it comes to the areas of their expertise, but this doesn’t mean all their opinions are golden.

If the professor tells you how much he or she wishes the Spice Girls would reunite and play on campus, you would be committing logical fallacy if you decided you should maybe rethink your musical taste. When you see the opinions of some people as better than others on the merit of their status or training alone, you are arguing from authority.

Should you listen to a highly trained scuba diver’s advice before plunging into the depths of the ocean? Yes. Should you believe that person when the diver talks about seeing a mermaid making love to a dolphin? No.

This book often brings up the consensus of scientists on certain behaviors as a way to prove how deluded you are. It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies. Science focuses on the facts, not the people who unearth them, but that doesn’t mean large groups of people can’t agree on something that is totally wrong.

Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would. It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself. Freeman was criticized by many in his heyday, but for two decades his work continued, and it earned him the highest accolade possible. Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized. Today, the ice-pick lobotomy is condemned by medicine as a barbaric and naive approach to dealing with mental illness.

The rise and fall of the ice-pick lobotomy had a lot to do with the argument from authority. Freeman and others had jumped the gun on the scientific evidence. Without all the facts in place, they used psychosurgery because it gave them the results they were looking for. Hospitals welcomed Dr. Freeman; his authority went unquestioned as, one after another, he pulled aside patients who needed help and turned them into zombies. Just two decades later, the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one. His license to practice was revoked, and he died an outcast. The same community who lauded him in one era rejected him in another.

This sort of turnover in science is common, although it happens less today than in years past when so little was understood about these sorts of influences. Like most modern professions, science guards against the argument from authority by working against it, questioning every nugget of new info so as to avoid what happened in neurology throughout the 1940s. Still, the argument does play a role. Whether in churches or legislatures, botany or business, those who are held in high regard can cause a lot of damage when no one is willing to question their authority.

You naturally look to those in power as having something special you lack, a spark of something you would like to see inside yourself. This is why people sometimes subscribe to the beliefs of celebrities who endorse exotic religions or denounce sound medicines.

If you feel more inclined to believe something is true because it comes from a person with prestige, you are letting the argument from authority spin your head. If something is controversial, it usually means there are many experts who disagree. You would be wise to come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, not the people delivering it. On the other hand, if there is widespread consensus, you can relax your skepticism. Just don’t relax it completely.

If a celebrity basketball player tells you to buy a particular brand of batteries, ask yourself if the basketball player seems like an expert on electrochemical energy storage units before you take the player’s word.

There is a pleasant sense of wonder that can fill your heart when you take in the natural world and realize how much you don’t know.

How does the mighty oak spring from a lowly acorn? How does a river carve out a vast canyon? How could the universe begin from a microscopic dot and explode into all the matter and energy you see today? How can you be thinking about calling someone right as they dial your number and tell you they were thinking of you too?

It is easy to succumb to mystical thinking when you compare what you know for sure to the vast expanse of things yet unsolved. If you aren’t up-to-date on the latest scientific research, you may put concepts like tiny seeds becoming giant plants in the realm of the unknown. You’ve probably met people like this, who see things like magnets and Stonehenge as unsolvable mysteries. People in awe of such things see them as magical and miraculous, or perhaps believe the explanation is beyond modern human comprehension. The emotions roused when you are humbled by the splendor of nature and the ingenuity of ancient people are nice. It feels good to ponder the mysterious.

The only problem with these emotions is science has explained much of the world both outside and inside your head. This is a bummer for fans of
Unsolved Mysteries
or
Ripley’s Believe it or Not
or
In Search Of
. More recently,
Ghost Hunters
and
The Unexplained
have earned big ratings by showcasing the spooky stuff science has ruined.

Outside of science, mystical New Age props like crystals and dowsing rods play on your tendency toward pattern recognition. You look for cause and effect, but when the cause is unclear you commit a logical fallacy by thinking all the possible causes are equal.

That strange feeling you get when you walk into an old house—could it be a haunting? Are those strange creaks and bumps attempts at communication from the spirit realm? The strange lights in the sky, are they aliens preparing to probe unsuspecting farm families? Did those tracks in the forest come from a friendly, misunderstood Sasquatch?

Most of what gets filed under the realm of the paranormal is the result of people committing the argument-from-ignorance fallacy, or
argumentum ad ignorantiam
if you prefer the Latin logic terminology. Put simply, this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary. You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another. Maybe those lights were alien spacecraft, maybe not. You don’t know, so you think the likelihood they were intergalactic visitors is roughly the same as those lights being from a helicopter far away.

You can’t disprove something you don’t know anything about, and the argument-from-ignorance fallacy can make you feel as though something is possible because you can’t prove otherwise. You know this book is in your hands right now, but when you leave the room you can’t be sure it does not come to life and eat your dust bunnies for sustenance. Despite this, you don’t feel inclined to lock away this book at night just in case it builds up enough strength to devour your face. You not being able to disprove this book secretly hungers for flesh does not improve the odds it does. The same holds true for leprechauns and unicorns, chupacabra and the Loch Ness Monster. These things aren’t more likely just because you can’t prove they don’t exist.

Lack of proof neither confirms nor denies a proposition. Is there life on other planets? We can’t say yes or no just because it hasn’t been discovered yet. No matter how you feel about the question, you would be incorrect to assume the lack of evidence proves your assumption. At the same time, you can’t just live your life so open-minded you never accept proof. Was Michael Jackson a time traveler sent from the future to teach the world to moonwalk? You can’t exactly prove this is false, but there is enough evidence to the contrary to assume he was a singer born in 1958, not a time lord from 3022.

Some people think the Holocaust didn’t happen, or human beings never walked on the moon, but there is plenty of evidence for both. People who refuse to believe such things claim they need more evidence before they can change their minds, but no amount of evidence will satisfy them. Any shred of doubt allows them to argue from ignorance.

When you are losing an argument, you often use a variety of deceptive techniques to bolster your opinion. You aren’t trying to be sneaky, but the human mind tends to follow predictable patterns when you get angry with other people and do battle with words.

One of the most reliable and sturdy logical fallacies is the straw man, and even though its probability of appearing is high, you often don’t notice when you are using it or being beat over the head with it.

It works like this: When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.

It happens so often, professional debaters and science advocates are trained to look for the straw man fallacy both in themselves and opponents when asserting their opinions or shooting down the claims of others. The straw man fallacy takes the facts and assertions of your opponent and replaces them with an artificial argument you feel more comfortable dealing with.

The straw man fallacy follows a familiar pattern. You first build the straw man, then you attack it, then you point out how easy it was to defeat it, and then you come to a conclusion.

For instance, say you are arguing about whether or not people should be allowed to own pet chickens. You think chickens are hideous creatures, thanks to an unfortunate incident in childhood when you were attacked by a bloodthirsty hen at a petting zoo, and since then you have made it your life’s mission to keep poultry away from children. Your opponent wants the city ordinances to be changed so he can breed fancy varieties of chickens who look like sea anemones and sell them to pet stores.

You say, “If we allow people to breed chickens in their backyards, soon they’ll be in the streets and on the subway. Eventually, people will be taking their chickens to work with them and including them in Christmas cards with the rest of the family. In a world like that, what will happen to the poultry industry? No one will want to eat something that could be their pet. I don’t think I want to live in a world like that, would you? So, no, we shouldn’t allow this ordinance to pass.”

In creating a fantasy scenario where the world goes mad if the other person’s argument were to win, you have constructed a straw man. It is easy to see the downsides of and hard to defend, but it also isn’t what the other person was suggesting. Now the other person has to clarify his or her argument by assuring everyone he or she has no desire to see restaurant chains close because of this proposal. The other person now must argue against the feathery doomsday you’ve invented instead of just pointing out the reasonable ways people could be allowed to raise a few domesticated fowl.