International Law

Why Hoaxes Work

Interesting observation by Michael Shermer on Sokal's book, Beyond the Hoax, about why we fail to think.

Sokal was an academic who published, by design, a completely nonsensical article in post-modernism language in a refereed journal.

It was a sensation - a modern Turing test for nonsense, which the post-modernists failed. They could not distinguish between made up silliness and what would pass for thought in their tradition. Oops.

But my interest is not with post-modernism, but rather what Shermer said about thinking and decision making.

"Decades of careful and extensive research into cognition and the psychology of how beliefs are formed show that none of us simply gather facts and draw conclusions from them in an inductive process.

Most of us, most of the time, arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our beliefs are shaped by our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at large.

We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional comfort, because they fit well with our lifestyles or career choices, or because they work within the larger context of our family dynamics or social network.

Then we build back into those beliefs reasons for why we hold them.

This process is driven by two well-known cognitive biases: the hindsight bias, where once an event has happened or a belief is formed it is easy to look back and reconstruct not only how it happened or was formed, but also why it had to be that way and not some other way; and the confirmation bias, in which we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence."

Interesting. Does it sound like any franchise sales pitch that you heard?

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on May 25, 2008 (boomark / email).