Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’ representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual claims.76

  This ethic would have served us well in earlier decades when false rumors regularly set off pogroms, riots, lynchings, and wars (including the Spanish-American War in 1898, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964, the Iraq invasion of 2003, and many others).77 It was not applied rigorously enough to prevent Trump’s victory in 2016, but since then his fibs and those of his spokespeople have been mercilessly ridiculed in the media and popular culture, which means that the resources for favoring truth are in place even if they don’t always carry the day.

  Over the long run, the institutions of reason can mitigate the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and allow the truth to prevail. For all of our current irrationality, few influential people today believe in werewolves, unicorns, witches, alchemy, astrology, bloodletting, miasmas, animal sacrifice, the divine right of kings, or supernatural omens in rainbows and eclipses. Moral irrationality can be outgrown as well. As recently as my childhood, the Virginia judge Leon Bazile upheld the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving for their interracial marriage with an argument that not even the most benighted conservative would advance today:

  The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy . . . upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. . . . Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.78

  And presumably most liberals would not be persuaded by this defense of Castro’s Cuba by the intellectual icon Susan Sontag in 1969:

  The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print-culture. In short, their problem is almost the obverse of ours—and we must be sympathetic to their efforts to solve it. Suspicious as we are of the traditional Puritanism of left revolutions, American radicals ought to be able to maintain some perspective when a country known mainly for dance music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life and pornographic movies gets a little up-tight about sexual morals and, in one bad moment two years ago, rounds up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and sends them to a farm to rehabilitate themselves.79

  In fact, these “farms” were forced labor camps, and they arose not as a correction to spontaneous gaiety and freaking out but as an expression of a homophobia that was deeply rooted in that Latin culture. Whenever we get upset about the looniness of public discourse today, we should remind ourselves that people weren’t so rational in the past, either.

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  What can be done to improve standards of reasoning? Persuasion by facts and logic, the most direct strategy, is not always futile. It’s true that people can cling to beliefs in defiance of all evidence, like Lucy in Peanuts who insisted that snow comes out of the ground and rises into the sky even as she was being slowly buried in a snowfall. But there are limits as to how high the snow can pile up. When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.80 The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.81 As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to happen with public opinion on climate change. And entire populations can shift when a critical nucleus of persuadable influencers changes its mind and everyone else follows along, or when one generation is replaced by another that doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral).

  Across the society as a whole the wheels of reason often turn slowly, and it would be nice to speed them up. The obvious places to apply this torque are in education and the media. For several decades fans of reason have pressured schools and universities to adopt curricula in “critical thinking.” Students are advised to look at both sides of an issue, to back up their opinions with evidence, and to spot logical fallacies like circular reasoning, attacking a straw man, appealing to authority, arguing ad hominem, and reducing a graded issue to black or white.82 Related programs called “debiasing” try to inoculate students against cognitive fallacies such as the Availability heuristic and confirmation bias.83

  When they were first introduced, these programs had disappointing outcomes, which led to pessimism as to whether we could ever knock sense into the person on the street. But unless risk analysts and cognitive psychologists represent a superior breed of human, something in their education must have enlightened them about cognitive fallacies and how to avoid them, and there is no reason those enlightenments can’t be applied more widely. The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason. A second look at critical thinking and debiasing programs has shown what makes them succeed or fail.

  The reasons are familiar to education researchers.84 Any curriculum will be pedagogically ineffective if it consists of a lecturer yammering in front of a blackboard, or a textbook that students highlight with a yellow marker. People understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to effective teaching is that pupils don’t spontaneously transfer what they learned from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category. Students in a math class who learn how to arrange a marching band into even rows using the principle of a least common multiple are stymied when asked to arrange rows of vegetables in a garden. In the same way, students in a critical thinking course who are taught to discuss the American Revolution from both the British and American perspectives will not make the leap to consider how the Germans viewed World War I.

  With these lessons about lessons under their belt, psychologists have recently devised debiasing programs that fortify logical and critical thinking curricula. They encourage students to spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range of contexts.85 Some use computer games that provide students with practice, and with feedback that allows them to see the absurd consequences of their errors. Other curricula translate abstruse mathematical statements into concrete, imaginable scenarios. Tetlock has compiled the practices of successful forecasters into a set of guidelines for good judgment (for example, start with the base rate; seek out evidence and don’t overreact or underreact to it; don’t try to explain away your own errors but instead use them as a source of calibration). These and other programs are provably effective: students’ newfound wisdom outlasts the training session and transfers to new subjects.

  Despite these successes, and despite the fact that the ability to engage in unbiased, critical reasoning is a prerequisite to thinking about anything else, few educational institutions have set themselves the goal of enhancing rationality. (This includes my own university, where my suggestion during a curriculum review that all students should learn about cognitive biases fell deadborn from my lips.) Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away” as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare.86
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  Effective training in critical thinking and cognitive debiasing may not be enough to cure identity-protective cognition, in which people cling to whatever opinion enhances the glory of their tribe and their status within it. This is the disease with the greatest morbidity in the political realm, and so far scientists have misdiagnosed it, pointing to irrationality and scientific illiteracy instead of the myopic rationality of the Tragedy of the Belief Commons. As one writer noted, scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly.87

  Making the world more rational, then, is not just a matter of training people to be better reasoners and setting them loose. It also depends on the rules of discourse in workplaces, social circles, and arenas of debate and decision-making. Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities.88 One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the truth usually wins.89 Scientists themselves have hit upon a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it.90

  Even the mere requirement to explicate an opinion can shake people out of their overconfidence. Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.91 Though we think we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have no idea. That is also true of hot-button political issues. When people with die-hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking about, and become more open to counterarguments. Perhaps most important, people are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the consequences of their opinions. In a review of the literature on rationality, the anthropologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber conclude, “Contrary to common bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities, people are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate.”92

  The way that the rules in particular arenas can make us collectively stupid or smart can resolve the paradox that keeps popping up in this chapter: why the world seems to be getting less rational in an age of unprecedented knowledge and tools for sharing it. The resolution is that in most arenas, the world has not been getting less rational. It’s not as if hospital patients are increasingly dying of quackery, or planes are falling out of the sky, or food is rotting on wharves because no one can figure out how to get it into stores. The chapters on progress have shown that our collective ingenuity has been increasingly successful in solving society’s problems.

  Indeed, in one realm after another we are seeing the conquest of dogma and instinct by the armies of reason. Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and punditry with statisticians and fact-checking squads.93 The cloak-and-dagger world of national intelligence is seeing farther into the future by using the Bayesian reasoning of superforecasters.94 Health care is being reshaped by evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long ago).95 Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-Informed Treatment.96 In New York, and increasingly in other cities, violent crime has been reduced with the real-time data-crunching system called Compstat.97 The effort to aid the developing world is being guided by the Randomistas, economists who gather data from randomized trials to distinguish fashionable boondoggles from programs that actually improve people’s lives.98 Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.99 Sports has seen the advent of Moneyball, in which strategies and players are evaluated by statistical analysis rather than intuition and lore, allowing smarter teams to beat richer teams and giving fans endless new material for conversations over the hot stove.100 The blogosphere has spawned the Rationality Community, who urge people to be “less wrong” in their opinions by applying Bayesian reasoning and compensating for cognitive biases.101 And in the day-to-day functioning of governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge) and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax dollars.102 In area after area, the world has been getting more rational.

  There is, of course, a flaming exception: electoral politics and the issues that have clung to it. Here the rules of the game are fiendishly designed to bring out the most irrational in people.103 Voters have a say on issues that don’t affect them personally, and never have to inform themselves or justify their positions. Practical agenda items like trade and energy are bundled with moral hot buttons like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Each bundle is strapped to a coalition with geographic, racial, and ethnic constituencies. The media cover elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches. All of these features steer people away from reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression. Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter 14). As a result, reforms that are designed to make governance more “democratic,” such as plebiscites and direct primaries, may instead have made governance more identity-driven and irrational. The conundrums are inherent to democracy and have been debated since the time of Plato.104 They have no instant solution, but identifying the worst of the current problems and setting the goal of mitigating them is the place to start.

  When issues are not politicized, people can be altogether rational. Kahan notes that “bitter public disputes over science are in fact the exception rather than the rule.”105 No one gets exercised over whether antibiotics work, or whether driving drunk is a good idea. Recent history proves the point in a natural experiment, complete with a neatly matched control group.106 The human papillomavirus (HPV) is sexually transmitted and a major cause of cervical cancer but can be neutralized with a vaccine. Hepatitis B is also sexually transmitted, also causes cancer, and also can be prevented by a vaccine. Yet HPV vaccination became a political firestorm, with parents protesting that the government should not be making it easier for teenagers to have sex, while hepatitis B vaccination is unexceptionable. The difference, Kahan suggests, lies in the way the two vaccines were introduced. Hep B was treated as a routine public health matter, like whooping cough or yellow fever. But the manufacturer of the HPV vaccine lobbied state legislatures to make vaccination mandatory, starting with adolescent girls, which sexualized the treatment and raised the dander of puritanical parents.

  To make public discourse more rational, issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible. Experiments have shown that when people hear about a new policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they are reacting to it on its objective merits.107 That implies that spokespeople should be chosen carefully. Several climate activists have lamented that by writing and starring in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore may have done the movement more harm than good, because as a former Democratic vice-president and presidential nominee he stamped climate change with a left-wing seal. (It’s hard to believe today, but environmentalism was once denounced as a right-wing cause, in which the gentry frivolously worried about habitats for d
uck-hunting and the views from their country estates rather than serious issues like racism, poverty, and Vietnam.) Recruiting conservative and libertarian commentators who have been convinced by the evidence and are willing to share their concern would be more effective than recruiting more scientists to speak more slowly and more loudly.108

  Also, the factual state of affairs should be unbundled from remedies that are freighted with symbolic political meaning. Kahan found that people are less polarized in their opinion about the very existence of anthropogenic climate change when they are reminded of the possibility that it might be mitigated by geoengineering than when they are told that it calls for stringent controls on emissions.109 (This does not, of course, mean that geoengineering itself need be advocated as the primary solution.) Depoliticizing an issue can lead to real action. Kahan helped a compact of Florida businesspeople, politicians, and resident associations, many of them Republican, agree to a plan to adapt to rising sea levels that threatened coastal roads and freshwater supplies. The plan included measures to reduce carbon emissions, which under other circumstances would be politically radioactive. But as long as the planning was focused on problems they could see and the politically divisive backstory was downplayed, they acted reasonably.110

  For their part, the media could examine their role in turning politics into a sport, and intellectuals and pundits could think twice about competing. Can we imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and talking heads have no predictable political orientation but try to work out defensible conclusions on an issue-by-issue basis? A day in which “You’re just repeating the left-wing [or right-wing] position” is considered a devastating gotcha? In which people (especially academics) will answer a question like “Does gun control reduce crime?” or “Does a minimum wage increase unemployment?” with “Wait, let me look up the latest meta-analysis” rather than with a patellar reflex predictable from their politics? A day when writers on the right and left abandon the Chicago Way of debating (“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue”) and adopt the arms-controllers’ tactic of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction (make a small unilateral concession with an invitation that it be reciprocated)?111