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Last March, during the enormous South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, the late-night talk show
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing.
“People who go to music festivals pride themselves on knowing who the
next acts are,” Kimmel said to his studio audience, “even if they don’t
actually know who the new acts are.” So the host had his crew ask
festival-goers for their thoughts about bands that don’t exist.
“The big buzz on the street,” said one of Kimmel’s interviewers to a
man wearing thick-framed glasses and a whimsical T-shirt, “is Contact
Dermatitis. Do you think he has what it takes to really make it to the
big time?”
“Absolutely,” came the dazed fan’s reply.
The prank was an installment of Kimmel’s recurring “Lie Witness News”
feature, which involves asking pedestrians a variety of questions with
false premises. In another episode, Kimmel’s crew asked people on
Hollywood Boulevard whether they thought the 2014 film
Godzilla
was insensitive to survivors of the 1954 giant lizard attack on Tokyo;
in a third, they asked whether Bill Clinton gets enough credit for
ending the Korean War, and whether his appearance as a judge on
America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.”
One can’t help but feel for the people who fall into Kimmel’s trap.
Some appear willing to say just about anything on camera to hide their
cluelessness about the subject at hand (which, of course, has the
opposite effect). Others seem eager to please, not wanting to let the
interviewer down by giving the most boringly appropriate response:
I don’t know.
But for some of these interviewees, the trap may be an even deeper one.
The most confident-sounding respondents often seem to think they do
have some clue—as if there is some fact, some memory, or some intuition
that assures them their answer is reasonable.
At one point during South by Southwest, Kimmel’s crew approached a
poised young woman with brown hair. “What have you heard about Tonya and
the Hardings?” the interviewer asked. “Have you heard they’re kind of
hard-hitting?” Failing to pick up on this verbal wink, the woman
launched into an elaborate response about the fictitious band. “Yeah, a
lot of men have been talking about them, saying they’re really
impressed,” she replied. “They’re usually not fans of female groups, but
they’re really making a statement.” From some mental gossamer, she was
able to spin an authoritative review of Tonya and the Hardings
incorporating certain detailed facts: that they’re real; that they’re
female (never mind that, say, Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper aren’t);
and that they’re a tough, boundary-breaking group.
In many cases, incompetence does not leave people
disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often
blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
To be sure, Kimmel’s producers must cherry-pick the most laughable
interviews to put the air. But late-night TV is not the only place where
one can catch people extemporizing on topics they know nothing about.
In the more solemn confines of a research lab at Cornell University, the
psychologists Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig, and I carry out ongoing
research that amounts to a carefully controlled, less flamboyant version
of Jimmy Kimmel’s bit. In our work, we ask survey respondents if they
are familiar with certain technical concepts from physics, biology,
politics, and geography. A fair number claim familiarity with genuine
terms like
centripetal force and
photon. But interestingly, they also claim some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the
plates of parallax,
ultra-lipid, and
cholarine.
In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one
of the nine fictitious concepts we asked them about. In fact, the more
well versed respondents considered themselves in a general topic, the
more familiarity they claimed with the meaningless terms associated with
it in the survey.
It’s odd to see people who claim political expertise assert their
knowledge of both Susan Rice (the national security adviser to President
Barack Obama) and Michael Merrington (a pleasant-sounding string of
syllables). But it’s not that surprising. For more than 20 years, I have
researched people’s understanding of their own expertise—formally known
as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings
evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning—and the
results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never
dull.
The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that
being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know
and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely
hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even
the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely
invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and
scope of our ignorance.
In 1999, in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that
documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not
recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a
phenomenon that has come to be known as the
Dunning-Kruger effect.
Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor
performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess
the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are
at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good
working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the
incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some
things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave
people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are
often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by
something that feels to them like knowledge.
This isn’t just an armchair theory. A whole battery of studies
conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don’t know
much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend
to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s
grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and
safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in
exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be
worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge
players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed
driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long
shot.
Occasionally, one can even see this tendency at work in the broad
movements of history. Among its many causes, the 2008 financial meltdown
was precipitated by the collapse of an epic housing bubble stoked by
the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers. And
recent research suggests that many Americans’ financial ignorance is of
the inappropriately confident variety. In 2012, the
National Financial Capability Study,
conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (with the U.S.
Treasury), asked roughly 25,000 respondents to rate their own financial
knowledge, and then went on to measure their actual financial literacy.
The roughly 800 respondents who said they had filed bankruptcy within
the previous two years performed fairly dismally on the test—in the
37th percentile, on average. But they rated their overall financial
knowledge more, not less, positively than other respondents did. The
difference was slight, but it was beyond a statistical doubt: 23 percent
of the recently bankrupted respondents gave themselves the highest
possible self-rating; among the rest, only 13 percent did so. Why the
self-confidence? Like Jimmy Kimmel’s victims, bankrupted respondents
were particularly allergic to saying “I don’t know.” Pointedly, when
getting a question wrong, they were 67 percent more likely to endorse a
falsehood than their peers were. Thus, with a head full of “knowledge,”
they considered their financial literacy to be just fine.
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely
tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of
unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years,
I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant
mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think
of it as
misinformed.
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one
that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life
experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms,
heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and
feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate
by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are
unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our
theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an
age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling,
combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes
lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright
dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic
society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense
destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist
Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you
into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
(Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it
was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)
Because of the way we are built, and because of the way we learn from
our environment, we are all engines of misbelief. And the better we
understand how our wonderful yet kludge-ridden, Rube Goldberg engine
works, the better we—as individuals and as a society—can harness it to
navigate toward a more objective understanding of the truth.
BORN WRONG
Some of our deepest intuitions about the world go all the way back to
our cradles. Before their second birthday, babies know that two solid
objects cannot co-exist in the same space. They know that objects
continue to exist when out of sight, and fall if left unsupported. They
know that people can get up and move around as autonomous beings, but
that the computer sitting on the desk cannot. But not all of our
earliest intuitions are so sound.
Very young children also carry misbeliefs that they will harbor, to
some degree, for the rest of their lives. Their thinking, for example,
is marked by a strong tendency to falsely ascribe intentions, functions,
and purposes to organisms. In a child’s mind, the most important
biological aspect of a living thing is the role it plays in the realm of
all life. Asked why tigers exist, children will emphasize that they
were “made for being in a zoo.” Asked why trees produce oxygen, children
say they do so to allow animals to breathe.
Any conventional biology or natural science education will attempt to
curb this propensity for purpose-driven reasoning. But it never really
leaves us. Adults with little formal education show a similar bias. And,
when rushed, even professional scientists start making purpose-driven
mistakes. The Boston University psychologist
Deborah Kelemen
and some colleagues demonstrated this in a study that involved asking
80 scientists—people with university jobs in geoscience, chemistry, and
physics—to evaluate 100 different statements about “why things happen”
in the natural world as true or false. Sprinkled among the explanations
were false purpose-driven ones, such as “Moss forms around rocks in
order to stop soil erosion” and “The Earth has an ozone layer in order
to protect it from UV light.” Study participants were allowed either to
work through the task at their own speed, or given only 3.2 seconds to
respond to each item. Rushing the scientists caused them to double their
endorsements of false purpose-driven explanations, from 15 to 29
percent.
This purpose-driven misconception wreaks particular havoc on attempts
to teach one of the most important concepts in modern science:
evolutionary theory. Even laypeople who endorse the theory often believe
a false version of it. They ascribe a level of agency and organization
to evolution that is just not there. If you ask many laypeople their
understanding of why, say, cheetahs can run so fast, they will explain
it’s because the cats surmised, almost as a group, that they could catch
more prey if they could just run faster, and so they acquired the
attribute and passed it along to their cubs. Evolution, in this view, is
essentially a game of species-level strategy.
This idea of evolution misses the essential role played by individual differences and competition
between
members of a species in response to environmental pressures: Individual
cheetahs who can run faster catch more prey, live longer, and reproduce
more successfully; slower cheetahs lose out, and die out—leaving the
species to drift toward becoming faster overall. Evolution is the result
of random differences and natural selection, not agency or choice.
But belief in the “agency” model of evolution is hard to beat back.
While educating people about evolution can indeed lead them from being
uninformed to being well informed, in some stubborn instances it also
moves them into the confidently misinformed category. In 2014, Tony
Yates and Edmund Marek published a study that tracked the effect of high
school biology classes on 536 Oklahoma high school students’
understanding of evolutionary theory. The students were rigorously
quizzed on their knowledge of evolution before taking introductory
biology, and then again just afterward. Not surprisingly, the students’
confidence in their knowledge of evolutionary theory shot up after
instruction, and they endorsed a greater number of accurate statements.
So far, so good.
The trouble is that the number of misconceptions the group endorsed
also shot up. For example, instruction caused the percentage of students
strongly agreeing with the true statement “Evolution cannot cause an
organism’s traits to change during its lifetime” to rise from 17 to 20
percent—but it also caused those strongly disagreeing to rise from 16 to
19 percent. In response to the likewise true statement “Variation among
individuals is important for evolution to occur,” exposure to
instruction produced an increase in strong agreement from 11 to 22
percent, but strong disagreement also rose from nine to 12 percent.
Tellingly, the only response that uniformly went down after instruction
was “I don’t know.”
And it’s not just evolution that bedevils students. Again and again,
research has found that conventional educational practices largely fail
to eradicate a number of our cradle-born misbeliefs. Education fails to
correct people who believe that vision is made possible only because the
eye emits some energy or substance into the environment. It fails to
correct common intuitions about the trajectory of falling objects. And
it fails to disabuse students of the idea that light and heat act under
the same laws as material substances. What education often does appear
to do, however, is imbue us with confidence in the errors we retain.
MISAPPLIED RULES
Imagine that the illustration below represents a curved tube lying horizontally on a table:
In a study of intuitive physics in 2013, Elanor Williams, Justin
Kruger, and I presented people with several variations on this
curved-tube image and asked them to identify the trajectory a ball would
take (marked A, B, or C in the illustration) after it had traveled
through each. Some people got perfect scores, and seemed to know it,
being quite confident in their answers. Some people did a bit less
well—and, again, seemed to know it, as their confidence was much more
muted.
But something curious started happening as we began to look at the
people who did extremely badly on our little quiz. By now, you may be
able to predict it: These people expressed more, not less, confidence in
their performance. In fact, people who got none of the items right
often expressed confidence that matched that of the top performers.
Indeed, this study produced the most dramatic example of the
Dunning-Kruger effect we had ever seen: When looking only at the
confidence of people getting 100 percent versus zero percent right, it
was often impossible to tell who was in which group.
(Photo: Gregg Segal)
Why? Because both groups “knew something.” They knew there was a
rigorous, consistent rule that a person should follow to predict the
balls’ trajectories. One group knew the right Newtonian principle: that
the ball would continue in the direction it was going the instant it
left the tube—Path B. Freed of the tube’s constraint, it would just go
straight.
People who got every item wrong typically answered that the ball
would follow Path A. Essentially, their rule was that the tube would
impart some curving impetus to the trajectory of the ball, which it
would continue to follow upon its exit. This answer is demonstrably
incorrect—but a plurality of people endorse it.
These people are in good company. In 1500 A.D., Path A would have
been the accepted answer among sophisticates with an interest in
physics. Both Leonardo da Vinci and French philosopher Jean Buridan
endorsed it. And it does make some sense. A theory of curved impetus
would explain common, everyday puzzles, such as why wheels continue to
rotate even after someone stops pushing the cart, or why the planets
continue their tight and regular orbits around the sun. With those
problems “explained,” it’s an easy step to transfer this explanation to
other problems like those involving tubes.
What this study illustrates is another general way—in addition to our
cradle-born errors—in which humans frequently generate misbeliefs: We
import knowledge from appropriate settings into ones where it is
inappropriate.
Here’s another example: According to
Pauline Kim,
a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make
inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal
social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their
rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In
1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a
series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee
is fired for reporting that a co-worker has been stealing from the
company—that were nonetheless legal under the state’s “at-will”
employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly
identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how
little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy
to fire employees. (Why does this matter? Legal scholars had long
defended “at-will” employment rules on the grounds that employees
consent to them in droves without seeking better terms of employment.
What Kim showed was that employees seldom understand what they’re
consenting to.)
Doctors, too, are quite familiar with the problem of inappropriately
transferred knowledge in their dealings with patients. Often, it’s not
the medical condition itself that a physician needs to defeat as much as
patient misconceptions that protect it. Elderly patients, for example,
frequently refuse to follow a doctor’s advice to exercise to alleviate
pain—one of the most effective strategies available—because the physical
soreness and discomfort they feel when they exercise is something they
associate with injury and deterioration. Research by the behavioral
economist Sendhil Mullainathan has found that mothers in India often
withhold water from infants with diarrhea because they mistakenly
conceive of their children as leaky buckets—rather than as increasingly
dehydrated creatures in desperate need of water.
MOTIVATED REASONING
Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive
childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very
values and philosophies that define
who we are as individuals.
Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the
self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated:
To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As
such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. And any information
that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or
forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain
whole and unharmed.
The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as
an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural
antidote. But education can produce illusory confidence.
One very commonly held sacrosanct belief, for example, goes something like this:
I am a capable, good, and caring person.
Any information that contradicts this premise is liable to meet serious
mental resistance. Political and ideological beliefs, too, often cross
over into the realm of the sacrosanct. The anthropological theory of
cultural cognition suggests that people everywhere tend to sort
ideologically into cultural worldviews diverging along a couple of axes:
They are either individualist (favoring autonomy, freedom, and
self-reliance) or communitarian (giving more weight to benefits and
costs borne by the entire community); and they are either hierarchist
(favoring the distribution of social duties and resources along a fixed
ranking of status) or egalitarian (dismissing the very idea of ranking
people according to status). According to the theory of cultural
cognition, humans process information in a way that not only reflects
these organizing principles, but also reinforces them. These ideological
anchor points can have a profound and wide-ranging impact on what
people believe, and even on what they “know” to be true.
It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that facts, logic, and
knowledge can be bent to accord with a person’s subjective worldview;
after all, we accuse our political opponents of this kind of “motivated
reasoning” all the time. But the extent of this bending can be
remarkable. In ongoing work with the political scientist Peter Enns, my
lab has found that a person’s politics can warp other sets of logical or
factual beliefs so much that they come into direct contradiction with
one another. In a survey of roughly 500 Americans conducted in late
2010, we found that over a quarter of liberals (but only six percent of
conservatives) endorsed both the statement “President Obama’s policies
have already created a strong revival in the economy” and “Statutes and
regulations enacted by the previous Republican presidential
administration have made a strong economic recovery impossible.” Both
statements are pleasing to the liberal eye and honor a liberal ideology,
but how can Obama have already created a strong recovery that
Republican policies have rendered impossible? Among conservatives, 27
percent (relative to just 10 percent of liberals) agreed both that
“President Obama’s rhetorical skills are elegant but are insufficient to
influence major international issues” and that “President Obama has not
done enough to use his rhetorical skills to effect regime change in
Iraq.” But if Obama’s skills are insufficient, why should he be
criticized for not using them to influence the Iraqi government?
Sacrosanct ideological commitments can also drive us to develop
quick, intense opinions on topics we know virtually nothing about—topics
that, on their face, have nothing to do with ideology. Consider the
emerging field of nanotechnology. Nanotech, loosely defined, involves
the fabrication of products at the atomic or molecular level that have
applications in medicine, energy production, biomaterials, and
electronics. Like pretty much any new technology, nanotech carries the
promise of great benefit (antibacterial food containers!) and the risk
of serious downsides (nano-surveillance technology!).
In 2006,
Daniel Kahan,
a professor at Yale Law School, performed a study together with some
colleagues on public perceptions of nanotechnology. They found, as other
surveys had before, that most people knew little to nothing about the
field. They also found that ignorance didn’t stop people from opining
about whether nanotechnology’s risks outweighed its benefits.
When Kahan surveyed uninformed respondents, their opinions were all
over the map. But when he gave another group of respondents a very
brief, meticulously balanced description of the promises and perils of
nanotech, the remarkable gravitational pull of deeply held sacrosanct
beliefs became apparent. With just two paragraphs of scant (though
accurate) information to go on, people’s views of nanotechnology split
markedly—and aligned with their overall worldviews.
Hierarchics/individualists found themselves viewing nanotechnology more
favorably. Egalitarians/collectivists took the opposite stance,
insisting that nanotechnology has more potential for harm than good.
Why would this be so? Because of underlying beliefs. Hierarchists,
who are favorably disposed to people in authority, may respect industry
and scientific leaders who trumpet the unproven promise of
nanotechnology. Egalitarians, on the other hand, may fear that the new
technology could present an advantage that conveys to only a few people.
And collectivists might worry that nanotechnology firms will pay
insufficient heed to their industry’s effects on the environment and
public health. Kahan’s conclusion: If two paragraphs of text are enough
to send people on a glide path to polarization, simply giving members of
the public more information probably won’t help them arrive at a
shared, neutral understanding of the facts; it will just reinforce their
biased views.
One might think that opinions about an esoteric technology would be
hard to come by. Surely, to know whether nanotech is a boon to humankind
or a step toward doomsday would require some sort of knowledge about
materials science, engineering, industry structure, regulatory issues,
organic chemistry, surface science, semiconductor physics,
microfabrication, and molecular biology. Every day, however, people rely
on the cognitive clutter in their minds—whether it’s an ideological
reflex, a misapplied theory, or a cradle-born intuition—to answer
technical, political, and social questions they have little or no direct
expertise in. We are never all that far from Tonya and the Hardings.
SEEING THROUGH THE CLUTTER
Unfortunately for all of us, policies and decisions that are founded
on ignorance have a strong tendency, sooner or later, to blow up in
one’s face. So how can policymakers, teachers, and the rest of us cut
through all the counterfeit knowledge—our own and our neighbors’—that
stands in the way of our ability to make truly informed judgments?
The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of
knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But
education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.
Here’s a particularly frightful example: Driver’s education courses,
particularly those aimed at handling emergency maneuvers, tend to
increase, rather than decrease, accident rates. They do so because
training people to handle, say, snow and ice leaves them with the
lasting impression that they’re permanent experts on the subject. In
fact, their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course.
And so, months or even decades later, they have confidence but little
leftover competence when their wheels begin to spin.
In cases like this, the most enlightened approach, as proposed by
Swedish researcher Nils Petter Gregersen, may be to avoid teaching such
skills at all. Instead of training drivers how to negotiate icy
conditions, Gregersen suggests, perhaps classes should just convey their
inherent danger—they should scare inexperienced students away from
driving in winter conditions in the first place, and leave it at that.
But, of course, guarding people from their own ignorance by
sheltering them from the risks of life is seldom an option. Actually
getting people to part with their misbeliefs is a far trickier, far more
important task. Luckily, a science is emerging, led by such scholars as
Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol and Ullrich Ecker of
the University of Western Australia, that could help.
In the classroom, some of best techniques for disarming
misconceptions are essentially variations on the Socratic method. To
eliminate the most common misbeliefs, the instructor can open a lesson
with them—and then show students the explanatory gaps those misbeliefs
leave yawning or the implausible conclusions they lead to. For example,
an instructor might start a discussion of evolution by laying out the
purpose-driven evolutionary fallacy, prompting the class to question it.
(How do species just magically know what advantages they should develop
to confer to their offspring? How do they manage to decide to work as a
group?) Such an approach can make the correct theory more memorable
when it’s unveiled, and can prompt general improvements in analytical
skills.
(Photo: Gregg Segal)
Then, of course, there is the problem of rampant misinformation in
places that, unlike classrooms, are hard to control—like the Internet
and news media. In these Wild West settings, it’s best
not to
repeat common misbeliefs at all. Telling people that Barack Obama is not
a Muslim fails to change many people’s minds, because they frequently
remember everything that was said—except for the crucial qualifier
“not.” Rather, to successfully eradicate a misbelief requires not only
removing the misbelief, but filling the void left behind (“Obama was
baptized in 1988 as a member of the United Church of Christ”). If
repeating the misbelief is absolutely necessary, researchers have found
it helps to provide clear and repeated warnings that the misbelief is
false. I repeat, false.
The most difficult misconceptions to dispel, of course, are those
that reflect sacrosanct beliefs. And the truth is that often these
notions can’t be changed. Calling a sacrosanct belief into question
calls the entire self into question, and people will actively defend
views they hold dear. This kind of threat to a core belief, however, can
sometimes be alleviated by giving people the chance to shore up their
identity elsewhere. Researchers have found that asking people to
describe aspects of themselves that make them proud, or report on values
they hold dear, can make any incoming threat seem, well, less
threatening.
For example, in a study conducted by Geoffrey Cohen, David Sherman,
and other colleagues, self-described American patriots were more
receptive to the claims of a report critical of U.S. foreign policy if,
beforehand, they wrote an essay about an important aspect of themselves,
such as their creativity, sense of humor, or family, and explained why
this aspect was particularly meaningful to them. In a second study, in
which pro-choice college students negotiated over what federal abortion
policy should look like, participants made more concessions to
restrictions on abortion after writing similar self-affirmative essays.
Sometimes, too, researchers have found that sacrosanct beliefs
themselves can be harnessed to persuade a subject to reconsider a set of
facts with less prejudice. For example, conservatives tend not to
endorse policies that preserve the environment as much as liberals do.
But conservatives do care about issues that involve “purity” in thought,
deed, and reality. Casting environmental protection as a chance to
preserve the purity of the Earth causes conservatives to favor those
policies much more, as research by Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer of
Stanford University suggests. In a similar vein, liberals can be
persuaded to raise military spending if such a policy is linked to
progressive values like fairness and equity beforehand—by, for instance,
noting that the military offers recruits a way out of poverty, or that
military promotion standards apply equally to all.
But here is the real challenge: How can we learn to recognize our own
ignorance and misbeliefs? To begin with, imagine that you are part of a
small group that needs to make a decision about some matter of
importance. Behavioral scientists often recommend that small groups
appoint someone to serve as a devil’s advocate—a person whose job is to
question and criticize the group’s logic. While this approach can
prolong group discussions, irritate the group, and be uncomfortable, the
decisions that groups ultimately reach are usually more accurate and
more solidly grounded than they otherwise would be.
For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to
think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask
yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out
differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the
psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I
often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong
in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led
to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own
misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious
person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.
CIVICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DUMMIES
In an edition of “Lie Witness News” last January, Jimmy Kimmel’s cameras decamped to the streets of Los Angeles the day
before
President Barack Obama was scheduled to give his annual State of the
Union address. Interviewees were asked about John Boehner’s nap during
the speech and the moment at the end when Obama faked a heart attack.
Reviews of the fictitious speech ranged from “awesome” to “powerful” to
just “all right.” As usual, the producers had no trouble finding people
who were willing to hold forth on events they couldn’t know anything
about.
American comedians like Kimmel and Jay Leno have a long history of
lampooning their countrymen’s ignorance, and American scolds have a long
history of lamenting it. Every few years, for at least the past
century, various groups of serious-minded citizens have conducted
studies of civic literacy—asking members of the public about the
nation’s history and governance—and held up the results as cause for
grave concern over cultural decline and decay. In 1943, after a survey
of 7,000 college freshmen found that only six percent could identify the
original 13 colonies (with some believing that Abraham Lincoln, “our
first president,” “emaciated the slaves”), the
New York Times
lamented the nation’s “appallingly ignorant” youth. In 2002, after a
national test of fourth, eighth, and 12th graders produced similar
results, the
Weekly Standard pronounced America’s students “dumb as rocks.”
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of
others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you.
But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.
In 2008, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed 2,508
Americans and found that 20 percent of them think the electoral college
“trains those aspiring for higher political office” or “was established
to supervise the first televised presidential debates.” Alarms were
again raised about the decline of civic literacy. Ironically, as
Stanford historian Sam Wineburg has written, people who lament America’s
worsening ignorance of its own history are themselves often blind to
how many before them have made the exact same lament; a look back
suggests not a falling off from some baseline of American greatness, but
a fairly constant level of clumsiness with the facts.
The impulse to worry over all these flubbed answers does make a
certain amount of sense given that the subject is civics. “The questions
that stumped so many students,” lamented Secretary of Education Rod
Paige after a 2001 test, “involve the most fundamental concepts of our
democracy, our growth as a nation, and our role in the world.” One
implicit, shame-faced question seems to be: What would the Founding
Fathers think of these benighted descendants?
But I believe we already know what the Founding Fathers would think.
As good citizens of the Enlightenment, they valued recognizing the
limits of one’s knowledge at least as much as they valued retaining a
bunch of facts. Thomas Jefferson, lamenting the quality of political
journalism in his day, once observed that a person who avoided
newspapers would be better informed than a daily reader, in that someone
“who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled
with falsehoods and errors.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that “a learned
blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.” Another quote
sometimes attributed to Franklin has it that “the doorstep to the temple
of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.”
The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we
accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they
do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such,
wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to
recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our
cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not
constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial
signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward
the truth.
