We have all enjoyed, if that is the right word, conversations with people who seem to have no great regard for the niceties of argument and evidence – people who tell you that homeopathy does work because it cured them of a common cold, in a few days\u2026 Or that the FBI (or other such agencies) deliberately created the AIDS virus (or crack cocaine) to destroy Africans (or black Americans)\u2026 In many cases, such epistemic lapses are context-specific – the same person who claims that homeopathy does work will insist on proper evidence when buying a dishwasher or deciding on a school for their children.<\/p>\n
A recent book called Panic Virus [1] by Seth Mnookin details the extraordinary story of the \u201cvaccinations cause autism\u201d meme. This started with some inconclusive but over-reported studies by a few marginal scientists, and soon ballooned up into a huge social movement, where thousands of distressed parents could exchange information, share their traumatic experience, and read or listen to many (some naive, some downright mendacious) \u201cscientists\u201d promoting wild theories (autism from vaccines, from the preservatives used in the vaccines, from radiation, from lack of vitamins, etc.) and often peddling expensive, untested and dangerous treatments (like painful testosterone injections).<\/p>\n
As Mnookin relates, the movement soon acquired many characteristics of a cult…<\/p>\n
Specially troubling is the acute paranoia that seems to pervade the online and physical meetings. Most webpages and presentations depict the \u201cestablishment\u201d scientists as insensitive if not corrupt (being \u201cshills\u201d of the vaccination industry) and the fringe doctors as heroic mavericks in touch with parents\u2019 and children\u2019s experiences. Websites describe in detail the \u201cobvious\u201d collusion between the (US) government, Big Pharma and the American Pediatrics Association. Dissenters are not welcome. Even a neutral observer like Mnookin has great difficulty just interviewing some of the participants or being admitted to (officially public) meetings.<\/p>\n
There are many other examples of such beliefs. I chose this because, contrary to standard cases (superstition, gods and ancestors, etc.), it is difficult here to make fun of the believers, if only from a sense of human decency.<\/p>\n
The epistemic perspective<\/p>\n
In circumstances like these, it would seem that people have shifted from their usual, highly adaptive, default-value epistemic vigilance to some form of epistemic recklessness. How does that happen?<\/p>\n
Standard cognitive psychology has several answers. First, the epistemic equipment just isn\u2019t up to par. Humans minds are full of unjustifiable biases and unreliable heuristics. Second, the equipment may misfire because of performance issues \u2013 people are inattentive, tired, drunk, etc. Third, people\u2019s reason may be over-ridden by emotional processes. In this view, there are many beliefs that we hold because we want to hold them.<\/p>\n
Our sophisticated readership will have noticed that these are not very good explanations. Indeed, they are terrible.<\/p>\n
Orthogonal to all this, a traditional question in cognition and culture is how cognitive systems create both evidence-based, flat-footed commitment to verifiable beliefs on the one hand, and free-wheeling, brazen gullibility on the other. For instance, we know that many statements of belief are evidence for reflective beliefs<\/a>\u00a0– that when people say \u201cbulls are cucumbers\u201d, their mental state is \u201c[It is true that] bulls are cucumbers\u201d, or some such meta-representational frame.<\/p>\n
This epistemic perspective<\/a> starts from the assumption that cognitive system, on the whole, evolved to build useful and truthful representations of the environment. It then argues that occasional useless beliefs pose no great threat to that main epistemic function.<\/p>\n
A non-epistemic perspective – communication for alignment<\/p>\n
But we could take another perspective, one I would call strategic.<\/p>\n
(Some versions of this were proposed by others, including Tocqueville, Robert Kurzban [2], Dan Sperber<\/a>, and, inevitably, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides<\/a>).<\/p>\n
Thanks to Coralie Chevallier and Nicolas Baumard, who helped me frame these ideas and to John Christner for ongoing conversations on the topic.<\/p>\n[1] Mnookin, S. (2011). The panic virus: a true story of medicine, science, and fear. Simon and Schuster.<\/p>\n[2] Kurzban, R. (2007). Representational Epidemiology. The evolution of mind: Fundamental questions and controversies, 357.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have all enjoyed, if that is the right word, conversations with people who seem to have no great regard for the niceties of argument and evidence – people who tell you that homeopathy does work because it cured them of a common cold, in a few days\u2026 Or that the FBI (or other such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":714,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n