a mile in the shoes of a barefoot believer
Last week I read Don’t Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson, who tries to explore the gap between how those of us with scientific training and a public which largely isn’t interested in science or wants to get a good story instead of factual accounts, see the world. The book wasn’t as profound as Chris Mooney claims in the blurbs, but it did provide very insightful glimpses into different styles of thinking and communicating. And one of those insights pointed me to a potential reason why many people cling to pseudoscientific beliefs even after being shown as mistaken time and time again. Unlike scientists and engineers who are used to taking long, sharp, serrated knives to their work and debating every in and out, the woo faithful take the whole thing excruciatingly close to heart and after putting out their beliefs and feelings into the world, they feel exposed and vulnerable.
And that’s when we hit them and criticize those highly personal beliefs they just laid out for us. When we start giving out data and explaining how things really work, they don’t actually hear anything past the disagreement because they’re feeling offended and under attack. And now, cue the trademark scorn and accusations of all skeptics being mean, cynical bastards with no respect for others. Being criticized with the zeal specific to very small parts of the population is just so alien and crude to them, they’re not sure what to do about it and resort to a defense mechanism. They might have just told you that angelic aliens just walked into their bedrooms to have a chat about the future of the human race and how we’re all connected to the fabric of space and time by a stream of consciousness waves emanating from our upper chakras. Or in other words, a whole lot of what we’d reflexively call New Age gibberish because, well, that’s what it is. But they just emptied their heart to you and the last thing they want is a cold, analytical dissection of what is and isn’t possible.
Men like me would compare it to one of those conversation with our girlfriends in which we’re only supposed to listen, nod and acknowledge that we feel sorry that she had such a miserable day while keeping our ideas of what she could do about her boss or backstabbing friend to ourselves because she just wants to vent, not solve problems. It’s kind of the same thing with the woo faithful. They want to hear supportive feedback and if they don’t get it, a fight will ensue. To use Olson’s explanation, their mantras come from the heart, not from the brain. Of course the problem with which we’re presented is that we’re not going to debunk pseudoscience or technobabble with an emotional speech. We can open with one, but ultimately, the logic has to take over and a serious shift towards facts, data and critical thinking needs to happen in the discussion, otherwise it’s only an unfiltered stream of feelings gushing back and forth. This is where Olson doesn’t provide a good way to tackle the problem, devoting much of his time criticizing academics’ bad habits instead.
So how do we engage the believers? One way is to be as gentle as possible but that quickly runs into a major problem. Being nice often leads to being ignored. You’re dismissed as not being a real challenge, too soft for the skeptics and as just someone who doesn’t get it by the woo faithful. The other way to address woo is to be direct and confront it head on, being polite and stern at first while clamping down with every repeat offense. It’s not going to endear you to the believers but you’re going to actually challenge their minds and when they start with another argument, they’ll have to think of what you’ll say and what points you’ll assail. And that’s an ember of scientific thought glowing in the darkness. Taking criticism into account, shaping a line of debate to defend the idea from a logical dissection, expecting to be questioned. Pose enough of a challenge and you’ll impart a smidgen of critical thinking. You’re not going to work a miracle and suddenly break down years of faith which required a massive personal investment. But by playing the role of a villain, you’ll be able to accomplish more than by playing Mr. or Miss Congeniality. A handshake at the end of the conversation doesn’t equal progress, but a scowl as someone thinks how to defend his or her opinions with something is a baby step towards it.
Ultimately, woo is always going to be with us and there will be those who can’t let go of it because that’s how they make a living or they simply can’t deal with criticism and shut down at the slightest objection to what they choose to say. We can’t solve it by being milquetoasts, but we can do something about it by tacking woo being pitched to the public and challenging its adherents to defend their claims until they either find their ideas just as lacking as we do or simply can’t defend them anymore and abandon them for something new. Those who say that we need to find some sort of golden middle and that everything will be just fine if we do a good job of communicating the scientific points of view are missing two important qualifiers. There may not be a golden middle because in much of science, statements are either right or wrong. If you say that 2+2=4 and someone says that it equals five, you can’t start the discussion be agreeing it’s probably somewhere around 4.5 since it goes against the basic rules of math. And the audience has to be willing to take criticism, which is where we can do our part in realizing how incredibly, deeply personal woo beliefs and the act of sharing them with those in the outside world can be and refrain from going for the jugular until a blatant repeat offense or transparently obvious profiteering like we see from New Age gurus and homeopaths.
I want to tell my co-worker off every time I hear his homeopathic remedies, but he’s been a friend since long before I worked for him. So in the interest of work harmony (and favorable year-end reviews) and maintaining friendship outside the workplace (he’s a golf buddy) I clam up. It amazes me how many expensive unproven remedies he’s tried while he cuts coupons and pinches pennies for every other expense. And he can’t resist printing off reviews from woo peddlers and passing them to others at work (and babbling about them for the entire 18-hole round on the golf course) as if he’s the only one on the planet “in on the cure”.
It has reached the point of patronizing, as if the rest of us couldn’t possibly know the best way to take care of ourselves.
Could he be like conspiracy theorists and cultists in that he takes certain comfort in thinking he’s in on something the rest of the world couldn’t possibly understand? To burst that bubble is to also pierce that shroud of comfort. To him, to think critically about the actual science involved would cast him asea at a point in his life far beyond that of developmental thinking, that is, the formative years of education. He’s close to retirement, and overall sees no reason to further expand his learning. He has a nice nest egg. He will continue to distrust doctors until he has no control over his bodily functions. At the very least his family will (hopefully) have the financial resources to make the correct medical decisions once that occurs. Who knows, maybe he’s naturally healthy enough in the first place to have never had to think about medical solutions enough that the woo has had a chance to convince him that they’re the reason he is that healthy.
I don’t wish bad health upon him just to prove a point, but some times it’s tempting.
By there very nature you can’t really “challenge” beliefs – what you have to do is offer a replacement. In the case of “woo” beliefs that includes replacing the comfort and sometimes “beauty” that they offer people. Carl Sagan did this brilliantly, offering us a truly awe-inspiring and beautiful vision of the universe, one that can compete with, indeed in my view out-compete, “the glory of god”.
Dawkins does this to a certain extent in some of his books, but isn’t so good at in person or on TV. Randi, Pen & Teller, and to a lesser extent Shermer tend to do the exact opposite – while it has it’s place, hard core factual challenges of woo beliefs tends to *strengthen* beliefs rather than undermine them – this issue as been well investigated by psychologists and marketers (read Cialdini’s “Influence” for a primer), but is ignored by much of the skeptical community.
In sales and marketing you’re taught how crucial it is to talk about a products *benefits* not just it’s features. I feel most public skeptics tend to focus on features and logic, and features and logic aren’t what ultimately sell, it’s benefits and feelings that sell.
So, if you want to replace one “belief product” with another, you have to offer something that offers the “consumer” more than what they get from their current “product”. So far we’re failing at communicating that option.
gfish, the more I read your blog entries on woo, the more I’m convinced I should give up on a normal career and should start peddling nonsense instead. All I have to do is come up with wacky hypothesis based very loosely on some distant truth, refuse to accept criticism, play the persecuted victim any time someone punches holes in my “product,” offer a perceived bargain on whatever I’m selling and I’ll be rich.
Thanks for the road map to easy success! :)
“I feel most public skeptics tend to focus on features and logic, and features and logic aren’t what ultimately sell, it’s benefits and feelings that sell.”
David, it’s actually pretty understandable that their focus is on the facts because they form their views from an analysis of those facts. But I agree with you on the issue of how the actual communication of what these facts really mean can use a lot of work from today’s skeptics. I know this is one area where I need to improve.
Russ Toelke said: “Could he be like conspiracy theorists and cultists in that he takes certain comfort in thinking he’s in on something the rest of the world couldn’t possibly understand?”
Russ, I’m very inclined to think the same way, and in fact you beat me to posting it. Years back when I debated UFO believers I stumbled upon it with an offhand comment someone made, and it started looking a lot clearer. I think a lot of people who hold questionable beliefs do so because it makes them special in their own way, privy to knowledge that only few have, and thus part of the elite, if you’ll pardon the hyperbole to make the point.
I think there’s a lot of other factors involved, too. We have problem-solving brains, and it may be safe to say this is a survival trait and an ingrained behavior. We feel good when we’ve figured something out. In the absence of true problems (or, for that matter, true solutions,) do we tend to latch onto answers for the sake of simply having an answer? I believe this is very common. And yes, when someone else demonstrates that their answer is wrong, it becomes almost personal, because it runs against an internal drive.
‘Course, that’s the theory of this high-school dropout, so it still needs some work ;-)
As for how to counter it? I doubt there’s a quick and easy way. For Russ’ golfing buddy, it might simply be headed off with a simple comment of, “I’ve just never believed that water that travels around the globe, through thunderstorms and over rapids, and through the systems of countless animals, suddenly develops a memory for a sprig of Witch Hazel.” In my experience, simply announcing that you’re skeptical, in a non-confrontational way, lowers the likelihood that believers will bring the subject up – they want to impress people with their knowledge, not have it challenged. It may not change his beliefs, but it might start the ball rolling, and at the very least might just quiet him down a bit.
On the larger scale, though, I think it has to be approached as a long-term issue, a tough situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into and now have a bit of a haul to get out of. People have a bad tendency to think that an answer they like must therefor be “right,” and the opposite as well. This leads to the well-known “confirmation bias.” And perhaps we need to start early on in teaching kids that this is a bad way of thinking. Let them learn about gross mistakes and incorrect ideas as part of the process of determining the correct ones.
For adults, this is tougher. Sometimes you simply comment and move on, “planting the seed” and letting it germinate on its own. That way, people can think they arrived at the correct answer themselves. But the comments you make, on a one-on-one basis anyway, have to be conducive to this – not derogatory or negative, but thought-provoking and neutral.
There are times when I think negativity has its place. When responding to the latest cosmic flatulence of Deepak Chopra, for example – nothing is really served by being polite over something that’s abysmally ignorant. Politeness, far from being considered respectable, is instead considered tacit agreement, or at least a lack of strong disagreement (which to many is the exact same thing.) It’s often argued that being sarcastic or vehement is a losing proposition, but so is saying nothing. When faced with a lose/lose situation, you aim for which one loses the least. But I also think that sarcasm and satire have much more of a positive effect than a negative one, despite the wails of the people who don’t like it. Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show have certainly made a distinct impact on some of the stupider aspects of our politics. Used correctly, they have their own strengths.
Oh, yes, he wants to impress with his knowledge.
I’m a sarcastic kinda guy, so I think I’ll stick with that.
“2+2 can never = 5″ Tell that to Winston Smith.
gfish, the real question is: Do we have an obligation to help true believers?
I’ve never had a problem with the answer. But then I have the delicate sensitivity toward other’s yittle feweeings of a wild hog. I’ve been known to state in a loud clear voice, “Bullshit!”
I’m an engineer and perhaps society expects engineers to be insensitive. And yes, I expect it’s cost me more than I will ever know. My second wife reacted to one of my scathing retorts with, “Don’t you trust me?!!” I responded, “Sweetheart, I’m an engineer and surveyor, if I couldn’t stand for people to check my work, I be a basket case. Trust is not just stupid, it’s antithetical to good science and sound reasoning, get over it.” She was not amused. She flat couldn’t understand that I could love her and still question her facts.
It’s hopeless. Get past it. There are those who wish to think, and them who choose not to, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The fact that they know we’re out here checking is the best we can do.
PS. I’m impressed with your choice of highlight images. Man, now that’s a reason not to be so scientific. As a matter of fact, that girl could scramble our scientific brains with one smile. Touche!
“Do we have an obligation to help true believers?”
I would say we have an obligation to stop them from hurting themselves or others by either trying to undermine their medical and financial well being or those of people they try to convert to their beliefs, as well as trying to dismantle scientific education in order to replace them with woo and theological platitudes.
Now, we can’t force anyone to listen to us, but we at least have to jump in and point out the problems with the woo they try to preach.
But I agree with you on the issue of how the actual communication of what these facts really mean can use a lot of work from today’s skeptics. I know this is one area where I need to improve.
gfish, I think you’re doing better than many! Pics of naked women help :) Seriously though, your regular choice of beautiful imagery to accompany your posts is part of making what you say more “attractive” to readers.
Marketing matters, whether we like it or not.
David,
She’s not naked. She’s covered by a towel to illustrate the vulnerability of those who believe in New Age post-modernism or some religious ideology, and how close they come to exposing themselves when talking about their beliefs.
Yeah, right. That’s the story I’m sticking to…
Great, if she’s not naked, then next post I want a shot with the sheet removed … just of course to demonstrate the honesty of science and skepticism, where nothing is hidden! :-)
Yes, as David says, let me see the science!
Oh, and great post, Fish.
There is a wonderful little podcast on this very subject:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4187
_Emergency Handbook: What to Do When a Friend Loves Woo _
It has a different take from gfish. It’s worth a comparison.