Not Born Yesterday

by Hugo Mercier

  pro cess of calling nature what you exclude from the mere fact

  that you are interested in something, this something that

  distinguishes itself from being named, nature doesn’t risk

  anything but to affirm being a potpourri of non- nature.3

  Degrees of Counterintuitiveness

  What do these very diverse ideas, from the Trinity to plate tec-

  tonics to Lacan’s musings, have in common? First, they have

  proved at least somewhat influential, at most widely culturally

  successful. Across the world, around 2.4 bil ion people share the

  Christian faith. Belief in the god of the Bible is accepted by

  sh a l l o w g ur us 219

  56 percent of Americans (as of 2018).4 Most people in rich

  countries trust science to a significant extent and accept the

  majority of the theories scientists agree on (with the odd but

  worrying exception).5 Obviously, Lacan could never claim the

  same reach, but his authority ran deep, and he boasted many

  distinguished intellectuals as his groupies. Twenty years after

  his death, Lacan’s teachings were still influential, in France at

  least— I should know, having had to suffer through them when

  I started my BA in psy chol ogy. More generally, postmodern

  thinkers held center stage in the Western intel ectual world for

  a good chunk of the twentieth century and exert their influ-

  ence to this day. Bruno Latour, who used to be one of them,

  now bemoans that “entire Ph.D. programs are still running to

  make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way

  that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natu ral,

  unmediated, unbiased access to truth; that we are always pris-

  oners of language.”6

  Besides their popularity, these ideas share another trait: they

  do not fit with our intuitions. They either challenge them or pass

  them by altogether.

  Concepts can be more or less intuitive.7 Take the concept of

  “ human.” Once we categorize an agent as human, we can make

  a wide variety of inferences: that this agent perceives things,

  forms beliefs, has desires and overcomes obstacles to fulfill them,

  likes some people more than others, needs to eat and drink, has

  a material body, has ancestors who were also humans, eventu-

  ally dies, and so forth. Because these inferences come naturally,

  the concept of “ human” is intuitive.

  Some ideas fail to tap into any of our intuitive concepts: they

  are essentially incomprehensible. “Something that distinguishes

  itself from being named” doesn’t trigger any concept I’ve mas-

  tered, and it fails to ring any inferential bel s.

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  Other concepts yet go against the grain of our intuitions.8 For

  instance, because we don’t have well- worked- out concepts of

  super natural entities, we have to rely on our concept of human,

  even though super natural beings by definition violate a number

  of our intuitions. Ghosts are a kind of human that can walk

  through walls. Zeus is a kind of human who is immortal and

  shoots lightning bolts. The Christian god is a kind of human who

  is also an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, all- loving being.

  All of these concepts are, in some ways, counterintuitive.

  Religious concepts are often counterintuitive, but not all to

  the same degree. Pascal Boyer has argued that the vast majority

  of concepts of super natural agents found across the world are

  only minimally counterintuitive.9 For example, Zeus violates

  some of our assumptions about human agents—he is immortal,

  for one. But he still re spects most of our preconceptions: he per-

  ceives things through his senses, forms beliefs, has desires and

  overcomes obstacles to fulfill them, likes some people (or gods)

  more than others. Likewise, ghosts are immaterial, but they stil

  perceive things through their senses, and so forth.

  By contrast, the Christian god, in his ful theological garb, vio-

  lates just about every assumption we have about humanlike

  agents. Not only is he immortal and immaterial, but he doesn’t

  perceive things through his senses or form beliefs (he already

  knows every thing), he doesn’t need to overcome obstacles (he

  can do every thing he wants), and he doesn’t prefer some people

  to others (he loves every one).

  Much like the theologically correct Christian god, many sci-

  entific concepts are full-on counterintuitive. Our concept of what

  moving entails— the feeling that we’re moving, movements of

  air, and so forth—is violated by the idea that we’re barreling

  through space at a tremendous speed. Our naive sense of biology

  tel s us that like begets like, and that microorganisms definitively

  sh a l l o w g ur us 221

  don’t beget humans. Our naive sense of physics suggests that

  humongous rocks don’t drift about with no apparent cause.

  To be accepted, ideas that don’t tap into our intuitive con-

  cepts, or that go against them, face severe obstacles from open

  vigilance mechanisms. We have no reasons to accept ideas we

  don’t understand, and we have reasons to reject counterintuitive

  ideas. When we engage in plausibility checking, we don’t tend

  to reject only ideas that directly clash with our previous views

  but also ideas that don’t fit with our intuitions more generally.

  For instance, you’ve prob ably never thought about whether there

  are penguins on Jupiter. Yet if I told you that some had been re-

  cently discovered, you would be skeptical: you have an intuition

  that no animals, and especially no terrestrial animals, would be

  found there.

  Open vigilance also contains mechanisms to overcome plau-

  sibility checking and accept beliefs that clash with our previous

  views or intuitions: argumentation and trust.

  Argumentation is unlikely to play a significant role in the wide

  distribution of incomprehensible ideas or counterintuitive con-

  cepts. Argumentation works because we find some arguments

  intuitively compel ing. This means that premises and conclusions

  must be linked by some intuitive inferential pro cess, as when

  someone says, “Joe has been very rude to many of us, so he’s a jerk.”

  Every one can understand how being repeatedly rude entails

  being a jerk. But if a proposition is incomprehensible, then it

  can’t properly be argued for. That’s prob ably why Lacan asserts,

  rather than argues, that “nature’s specificity is to not be one.”10

  Argumentation plays a crucial role in the spread of counter-

  intuitive religious and scientific concepts, but only in the small

  community of theologians and scientists who can make enough

  sense of the arguments to use and construct them. Beyond that,

  few people are competent and motivated enough to properly

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  evaluate the technical defense of the Christian god’s omnipo-

  tence, or of relativity theory. For example, most U.S. university

  students who accept evolution by natu ral se lection don’t under-

  stand its princi ples properly.11

  Precio
us Shallowness

  If argumentation can’t explain the widespread ac cep tance of

  incomprehensible or counterintuitive beliefs, then it must be

  trust. Trust takes two main forms: trust that someone knows

  better (chapter 5), and trust that they have our best interests

  at heart (chapter 6). To really change our minds about some-

  thing, the former kind of trust is critical: we must believe that

  someone knows better than we do and defer to their superior

  knowledge.

  The preceding examples suggest that people are often so

  deferential toward individuals (Lacan), books (the Bible), or

  specialized groups (priests, scientists) that they accept incom-

  prehensible or counterintuitive ideas. From the point of view

  of open vigilance, the latter is particularly problematic. Accept-

  ing counterintuitive concepts, concepts that could wreak havoc

  with our cognitive systems, seems eminently dangerous, as it

  would involve letting other people play around with our way

  of thinking. For example, believing that an agent can have the

  properties of the Christian god could jeopardize our ability to

  draw inferences about humans more generally— after all, our

  assumptions about humans are quite sound, and it would be a

  shame if something happened to them.

  Experiments have shown that, in fact, counterintuitive con-

  cepts do not have much of an influence on our intuitive way of

  thinking. In the religious domain, psychologist Justin Barrett has

  shown that many Christians abide by a form of “theological cor-

  sh a l l o w g ur us 223

  rectness,” but that their theologically correct beliefs have little

  impact on how they actually think about god.12 The Christians

  Barrett interviewed were able to describe god’s canonical

  features—he knows every thing, is everywhere, and so forth.13

  However, when praying, they saw god “like an old man, you

  know, white hair,” even though they “know that’s not true.”14

  Moreover, when asked to retell a story about god intervening to

  save a drowning child, many described god’s actions as sequen-

  tial: first, he finishes answering one prayer, then he turns his

  attention and powers to the child.15 Omniscient and omnipotent

  beings aren’t supposed to get busy or distracted.16

  This doesn’t mean Christians can’t draw inferences from their

  theologically correct views. If asked whether god is omnipres-

  ent, and then whether god is in both this room and the next, they

  would answer “yes.” Stil , Barrett’s observations suggest that the

  ac cep tance of counterintuitive ideas remains shallow: we can as-

  sent to them, even draw inferences from them when pushed,

  but they do not affect the way we think intuitively. On the con-

  trary, our intuitive way of thinking tends to seep into how we treat

  counterintuitive concepts, as when Barrett’s participants implic-

  itly thought that god had a limited attention span.

  The same logic applies to scientific concepts. Psychologist

  Michael McCloskey and his colleagues were among the first to

  systematically investigate students’ intuitive physics: how they

  answer simple physics prob lems intuitively, without having re-

  course to the explicit knowledge of physics acquired in the class-

  room.17 One of the experiments involved students at an elite

  U.S. university, most of whom had taken some physics classes.

  McCloskey and his colleagues confronted the students with a

  series of prob lems, such as the one illustrated in figure 4.

  Fewer than half of the students were able to provide the cor-

  rect answer, namely, that the ball goes on in a straight line. Most

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  Figure 4. What path does a ball launched at the arrow follow when it exits the tube?

  Source: Redrawn from McCloskey, Caramazza, & Green, 1980, p. 1139.

  said it would keep going in a curve. This means that fewer than

  half of the students were able to apply the understanding of iner-

  tia they had acquired in school, according to which, in the ab-

  sence of any force exerted on them, objects move in a straight line

  at constant speed. This notion of inertia is counterintuitive: for

  example, our experience tel s us that objects stop moving seem-

  ingly of their own accord, absent the application of any force (a

  bal eventual y stops rol ing even if it doesn’t hit a wal ). The

  counterintuitiveness of the correct notion of inertia means that

  it is easily overridden by the students’ intuitions about object

  movement. If that seems unfortunate, we should on the whole be

  thankful for the limited cognitive influence of counterintuitive

  scientific concepts. If our brains could truly pro cess the idea that

  we’re darting across space at tremendous speeds following com-

  plex curves, we would constantly suffer from motion sickness.18

  sh a l l o w g ur us 225

  These observations show that counterintuitive ideas, even

  when they are held confidently, have no or very limited impact

  on the functioning of the intuitive systems with which they are

  at loggerheads. To some extent, counterintuitive ideas are pro-

  cessed like incomprehensible ideas: even though, in theory, they

  should constantly clash with our intuitions, in practice they sim-

  ply pass them by. Like many of the misconceptions we have

  explored in the last chapters, they remain reflective, detached

  from the rest of our cognition.

  Charismatic Authority?

  The cognitive shal owness of counterintuitive ideas mitigates the

  challenge they raise for open vigilance, as accepting such ideas

  is much less risky than it would be if they had affected our intui-

  tive cognitive mechanisms. But this shallowness doesn’t explain

  why people would accept a bunch of bizarre beliefs, some of

  which clash with their intuitions: it still seems that people are often

  unduly deferential, seeing some authorities as more knowledge-

  able than they really are (except for scientists, whose knowledge,

  if anything, is likely underestimated).

  A common explanation for this undue deference is that some

  people are charismatic: their attitude, their voice, their nonver-

  bal language make them uniquely enthralling and even credible.

  Anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss wasn’t a Lacan groupie, and

  yet he described “the power, the hold over the audience that ema-

  nated both from Lacan’s physical person and from his diction,

  his movements.”19 Lacan’s sycophantic French Wikipedia page

  even claims that his “style of discourse” “irrevocably affected” the

  French language.20

  When it comes to widespread religious or scientific beliefs,

  charisma cannot be the main explanation. None of our Christian

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  contemporaries have met Jesus, and I’ve managed to accept the

  concept of inertia without meeting Galileo. I don’t think that per-

  sonal charisma explains at all why some people are deemed

  more credible than others. Instead, I outline three mechanisms

  that lead some individuals to be perce
ived as more knowledge-

  able than they are, making their audience unduly deferential. I

  believe that the spread of incomprehensible and counterintui-

  tive beliefs largely stems from a mix of these three mechanisms.

  Reputation Credit

  To understand why we sometimes end up thinking some people

  more knowledgeable than they really are, we must go back to

  the cues we use to deem individuals more or less knowledge-

  able. One of the main cues we rely on is past per for mance.

  Someone who is able to consistently fix computers is deemed

  competent in this area, and we are more likely to believe them

  when they advise us on how to fix our stalled PC. Past per for-

  mance doesn’t comprise only actions but also words. People

  who give us valuable information are deemed more competent,

  which leads to the question of how we decide what information

  is valuable.

  In many cases, we can judge whether a piece of information

  is valuable after the fact: Did our friend’s advice help us fix our

  computer? In other cases, we deem a piece of information po-

  tentially valuable, and think its source competent, before being

  sure that the information is really valuable. We give a kind of

  reputation credit. For information to be deemed valuable, it must

  be both plausible and useful.21 For example, information about

  threats has the potential to be very useful, as it can help us avoid

  significant costs. In a series of experiments, Pascal Boyer and psy-

  chologist Nora Parren showed that people who transmit infor-

  sh a l l o w g ur us 227

  mation about threats, by contrast with other types of informa-

  tion, are seen as more competent.22

  Attributing competence on credit, before we’re sure whether

  a message is actually useful or not, works well on the whole, but

  there are some loopholes. For instance, we might tend to over-

  estimate the usefulness of threat information, deeming it rele-

  vant even when we have few chances of ever being exposed to

  the actual threat. In Boyer and Parren’s experiments, one of the

  stories given to participants mentioned the risk of encountering

  leaches when trekking in the Amazon, a situation few partici-

  pants would ever face. This meant not only that the information

  was not all that useful but also that the participants would never

  find out whether or not it was accurate. Indeed, this is a general