Depressing but true

[undyingking]

Two roundups which between them demonstrate just how useless humans are at thinking things through.

• Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does
  "If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief...
  "Could this response be why, despite being repeatedly refuted in the media, the percentage of Americans who believe Sen. Obama to be a Muslim continues to grow?
  "It seems to suggest that this effect might lead to problems when it comes to efforts to educate people about controversial or politically charged topics..."

And, as if to neatly support those findings:

• Green idealists fail to make grade, says study
  "According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad...
  "Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts...
  "[O]ne respondent said: 'I recycle 100% of what I can, there's not one piece of paper goes in my bin, so that makes me feel less guilty about flying as much as I do.'"

I'm sure I'm as guilty of this sort of thing as everyone else. Systematic denial of this sort is a mechanism that humans must have evolved very early, as an important species behavioural trait: if we estimated risks and consequences accurately, we'd probably never have bothered coming down from the trees. What's interesting though is that clearly it is possible to overcome it under certain circumstances. How can that effect be spread wider?

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Only the rich have the spare time to worry about the world rather than their own lives of course.

People equate being Green with certain media defined ideals, like recycling or minimising transport, not reducing meat intake or turning down heating. This is irrespective of the actual impact of the change.

My pet beef is the obsession with supermarket plastic bags, which have minimal impact compared with all the other packaging in life, or indeed all the unnecessary purchases of tat people make, use rarely and throw away, like household utensils and clothees.

And I justify my long haul flights and steaks by claiming I'm spending my non-existent children's carbon allowance :-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I guess plastic bags gained traction because they are so very evident by the sides of roads, caught up in trees etc. But presumably you could make thousands of them out of (generic piece of plastic tat).

Only the rich have the spare time to worry about the world rather than their own lives of course.

Which is OK, because the rich cause far more pollution and environmental damage through their consumption than the poor do, so should have more to worry about. But makes it all the more frustrating that their worry is mis-applied.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Oh, on the other half of your posting could be summarised as "mud sticks". You don't need to spread a true rumour, just an entertaining one, and the meme will start replicating. Just look at all the urban legends, or the Pugwash names. Accuracy in gossip is very dull.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Or that bloody statistic about men using 7,000 words a day and women using 20,000, which seems to have been made up rather than based on research but JUST WILL NOT DIE because many people find it entertaining. It was in the Independent last week. Twice.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting about that is that Language Log et al have been pushing the counter-meme (that it's not true) pretty hard for some time, but that doesn't seem to have stuck at all. Clearly at some fairly fundamental level people want it to be true.

(Women being bad drivers is another one. A friend of ours was hit in a bad piece of driving recently and said exasperatedly "It was a woman driver, of course". When I said "But women are much less likely to cause accidents than men are", they just looked rather blank and shrugged.)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED. INFORMATION DOES NOT FIT STEREOTYPES. ABORT/RETRY/IGNORE?

I had a look at the Indy article as we were sorting out the recycling today and it's even worse than I thought. It says "Research has shown..." [insert number of words meme here] "...according to Luan (sic) Brizendine, the author of the study." Er, no it hasn't, there was no study, Louann Brizendine is a quack and you the journalist are a lazy sod.

(Whoops, red mist descended there for a moment. I really hate this sort of pop evolutionary psychology that pours truckloads of purely cultural stuff on you while chuckling knowingly and saying there is no point trying to resist it, it is Natural and all humans have been like that since the Dawn of Time.)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Re: rumours...

I think it all comes down to the nature of understanding, really. The education system brilliantly masks people's ability to follow logical reasoning by never once testing this ability in a way that cannot be substituted by good memory. (Mostly, to be fair, because devising a viable test of this seems to be impossible.)

In areas like politics, what we see is simply the evolutionary consequence of the minimal role played by understanding/reasoning in people's thinking processes. And to some extent things have to work this way, because it's impossible for every voter to be an expert on every issue. so if they did think about everything they'd answer "don't know" all the time and (different) special interest groups would control every vote.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I suppose it comes in in mathematical subjects to some extent. We had quite a lot of "derive the expression for whatever in such-and-such situation" type problem sets -- and of course the ones where you actually did derive it yourself, rather than look it up, laid down a little layer of understanding in the mind that often came in useful later on: because by the end there was just too much stuff for people to memorize it all, if they were lazy like me.

Your evolutionary point is well made, although I guess a seasoning of reasoning does help species progress from time to time (although maybe that's arguable, and what we perceive as "progress" isn't really). If so, it seems to be worth developing a few specialized people in each community who can reason on their behalf.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Reasoning in general is tremendously valuable. The trouble in politics is how to distinguish between the "few specialized people" you propose and other people who talk in the same way and make very similar sounding pronouncements, but are in fact talking complete bobbins.

We have a reliable way to tell the difference: try following their recommendations and then wait and see what the consequences are! Unfortunately, this approach has some... drawbacks. ;-)