Now Steve has been doing this work for a while,
looking at the nature of conspiracy theories
and how they're operating, and he mentioned
a couple of the psychological mechanisms that
are operating. One is related to the confirmation
bias when you're only looking at the evidence
that supports what you want to believe, seeing
what you expect to see, seeing what you want to see, in a sense.
When it comes to climate-change denial, climate-change
deniers actually only cite the evidence that
doesn't support the fact that the climate
is changing due to human involvement and so on.
Paying attention to that one thermometer and
ignoring the other.
That's right. All the billions of thermometers
out there just focusing on the one that supports
the evidence that you're looking for, yes,
and kind of picturing it in a two-by-two table—you're
only focusing on the positive-positive cell.
That's the confirmation bias in a sense and
cherry-picking the evidence that you're looking
for.
This is related to a really nice paper by
Hastorf and Cantril. What they did back in
1954, what they did was they essentially interviewed
fans of a football team. There's a football
game, football match that was happening, and
you have fans watching exactly the same football
game, and you ask people about their perceptions
of dirty play during this football game, and
each team reported that the other team was
playing more dirty then then their own. Yes,
they're watching exactly the same game, but
they have completely different perceptions
of what actually happened. You can imagine
this. This is just at the level of a single
game—people looking at exactly the same
thing.
This is also related to this idea of availability,
in a sense. You're only exposing yourself
to a certain type of information, so when
you're reading about climate change, the news
that you get is always based on a subset of
news in some respects. People who read Facebook
are only exposed to information from their
friends on Facebook, very like-minded individuals.
In fact, things like Facebook and Google only
show you the things that you like and therefore
probably agree with, which is going to bias
you even further.
Exactly, as Steve was talking about. Our news
is being shaped now that the information we
get on the Web is being more and more encapsulated,
so when you do a Google search, it's catered
to you, in a sense. The information that it
pops up is not the information that I would
get when I do the same search, which is fairly
strange—same as Facebook and everything
else. We're, in a sense, suffering from what's
called false consensus. You have this perception
that other people think the same way that
you do.
Now we asked a really nice question at the
beginning of this episode, beginning of the
course, rather, in the About You section.
We asked people whether they've had anything
strange happen to them that science can't
really explain. We asked people that question,
and half of the people in the course, tens
of thousands of people said yes. Also, tens
of thousands people said no, so roughly 50/50.
We had a nice split between the two. Half
the people said, "Yes, something weird has
happened to me that science can't explain,"
and half the people said, "No, nothing like
that has happened to me."
Now that's interesting in and of itself, but
the very next question we asked people to
guess what percentage of the class agrees
with them. What percentage of the class also
said yes or also said no. What we did was
we compared the results. Of the people who
said, yes, that something weird has happened
to them, they estimated that 69 percent of
people agreed with them. The opposite is true.
The people who said, "No, nothing weird has
ever happened to me," said that 64 percent
of people agreed with them. This is massive.
I didn't expect actually the false consensus
effect to be so big in this case, but it's
huge. People literally think that people agree
with them. They think that, by virtue of being
exposed to the same sort of information, that
other people have the same sort of life experiences
and other people around the world think the
same way that they do.
Yes, and scale that up, so the influence of
the media, the information you expose yourself
to, the more narrowly you focus on where you
get your information, the more and more you're
going to be reinforced and think that people
agree with you; more and more people think
the same way as I do. It's almost like an
availability cascade. It just keeps going and going.
That's exactly right. In terms of narrowness,
if all you're doing—this is the nature of
conspiracy theories. If I'm a climate-change
denier, it's very unlikely that I'm reading
the scientific evidence for and against climate
change. I'm focused on this one small bit
of evidence. I surround myself with like-minded
people who also cite the same sort of evidence.
It just keeps building and propagating, exactly
as you said.
This, and the anti-establishment bias is operating
as well. If the government or an official
body releases some information and says, "Here
are the data. This is what's happening in
the case," well, that's not just ignored.
It's taken as evidence that the opposite is
happening. If the authority or if the official
body says one thing, then it's probably actually
the opposite thing that's going on. It's going
to be really difficult to change your mind,
probably unless you have some help. Unless
somebody is helping you through the six leads
to find out whether you are focusing on particular
information, falling prey to the confirmation
bias, it's going to be really difficult to
change your mind and get out of that sort of thinking.
This is related to two other biases that are
somewhat related when we're dealing with issues
in the media. One is called the it-must-be-in-the-middle
heuristic, in a sense. You can imagine what's
happening here. Someone presents one thing;
someone presents something that's the opposite,
and the person who's listening casually just
goes, "Yes, well, there's a bit of truth in
both sides. It must be somewhere in the middle."
Maybe, but in a lot of cases, it's not somewhere
in the middle. If I say that, "On one hand,
the UFO was big. On the other hand, it was
small. It must be medium-sized," it might
not be true at all.
A lot of people would argue in the case of
climate change that's exactly what's happening.
You say that the vast majority of the scientists
around the world, 99.9 percent of scientists,
think that something is happening due to humans
that's changing the climate. On the other
hand, when you're covering this sort of thing
in the media, you bring on a climate-change
denier and the casual listener would say,
"Well, it must be happening. Maybe, maybe not, somewhere in the middle."
That's related to a second bias called "be-fair-to-both-sides".
The media is trying to be fair and balanced,
and so they include both. You can see how
these two go hand in hand. If you're being
fair to both sides, then you feature both,
and thinking about it in terms of availability,
then you're giving both of these things equal
weight and people think they are much more common than they are.
Yes. We have tried to apply everything we've
learned so far in the course to three specific
examples in this episode. We looked at facilitated
communication, expertise in forensic science,
and conspiracy theories, especially about
climate change. Those are just three that
we picked mostly because we're actually interested
in them, but I hope that people can see that
the mechanisms that are operating here, the
tools they now have, could be applied to any
other area, anything, their pet project that
they are particularly interested in. You can
use the six leads; you can have a look; you
can try and disentangle what's operating in
really specific cases, so gay marriage, whether
to put fluoride in the water or not...
Vegetarianism, gun laws. Absolutely. Anything
that you can think of. People have the tools.
Go out and conquer. Figure out—take a very
specific example like these. Take gay marriage,
take anything, asylum seekers, you name it.
All of these very relevant topics that are
happening in their lives, something that's
important to them, and apply everything that
we've been teaching them to these particular
areas, and they'll see it. They will absolutely
see what's happening in each of these cases.
