Early in the episode and earlier in the course, we've seen that people are a little bit too
overeager when it comes to seeing patterns and noise. As Tom Gilovich said in the interview,
if you take a bag of M&Ms and pour it on the table, it doesn't look random. You see pockets
of color here and there. You see faces in the things and so on. This happens all of
the time. We see patterns among seemingly random events. Yes, this is true, and it's
very common. It's been studied for ages.
Something else that happens, which is quite interesting, is detecting relationships that
don't exist as well. What do we mean by that? There's a really good one by Danny Kahneman
and Amos Tversky—surprise, surprise. They tested the claim that or they looked into
the claim that people report arthritis pain when there's a storm approaching. It turns
out there's nothing, no evidence for that whatsoever. Another one is emergency room
nurses claim that there's a lot more activity when there's a full moon during regular days
of the month. Sportspeople, athletes, routinely engaged in all sorts of superstitious types
of beliefs. They tie their shoes in a particular way. They bounce the ball exactly five times.
They wear their pair of lucky socks or a pair of lucky shorts before a game or a competition.
This happens all the time. These are superstitious beliefs as a result of seeing that two things
tend to be linked: a pair of lucky socks and how they perform, or the full moon and the
activity in that evening, but there is no link. There can't be any link between them,
but people see certainly that there is a link.
Yes. These superstitions, I think, is related to something called the conformation bias
that we briefly touched on in episode three when we talked about the interview illusion.
Now simply, that is we tend to notice things that confirm our beliefs, and we don't notice
the things that contradict our beliefs. I chatted to Tom Gilovich about this, and here's what he had to say.
So, formally, one of the other kinds of cognitive mechanisms that are operating when we have
these beliefs or opinions?
Yes. I think one of the most powerful and most interesting ones is something that a
colleague, a former student here at Cornell, Scott Lilienfeld, calls the mother of all
biases known as the confirmation bias. That's a term that most people are familiar with.
They're familiar with the idea that if we want to believe something, we'll go and seek
out evidence for it and we won't seek out evidence against it. That is really true.
It's a very pronounced tendency to treat information that's consistent with what we want to believe
in a pretty friendly way and be really hostile to information that's consistent with something
we don't want to believe. It's almost as if we ask ourselves of something that we want
to believe: can I believe this, or is there evidence for this? There's evidence for almost
anything. Even the most outlandish things, there is some evidence for it. The question
is: is there enough evidence? Is there sufficient evidence? We don't tend to ask ourselves:
must I believe this? Is there enough evidence here?
So all of that's true. All of people can relate to that, but it's even more pronounced than
that—that is, even if you don't care about a particular belief, you have no vested interest
in it, you tend to look for evidence consistent with the idea rather than information that's
inconsistent with it, which, of course, if we want to have a balanced picture, we've
got to look at both. If I asked you—I gave you some plants, a bunch of hostas, and say,
"You're a nice guy. Here are some extra hostas from my garden. I think they probably need
a lot of water," but you might want to test that. How would you test that? Well, if you're
like most people, you'd give it a lot of water and see how they do. What you wouldn't do
is give some a lot of water, some hardly any water at all, and see which one does better.
You look for evidence for it rather than against it.
That's a very natural tendency. At some level, it make sense because it reflects a broader
belief that, "Look, if this thing's true, there must be some evidence for it, so let
me look for some evidence for it." You're doing a very reasonable thing. However, you're
doing an incomplete thing as well. You need to look not only for evidence for something
but evidence against it. So if you believe that cheerful people are more likely to overcome
a bout of cancer, you need to look not just who are the cheerful people you know who've
done very well, but maybe you know some dour people also who've recovered. That's the latter
step that we tend not to do.
In this episode, we started by introducing the intuitive scientist. We spoke about how
we can take some of the formal claims of science and bring them into the kitchen and to our
everyday lives. We also chatted about our tendency to misperceive random events and
random relationships. We spoke a lot about how we can contest claims, how it is that
we can convince ourselves and others that there's a real effect here. There's something
genuine that we should pay attention to.
Now next week in episode seven, we're going to build on this. We're going to talk more
generally about finding things out, about testing claims, and how to change opinions.