Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We search for meaning in a complex, quirky, and contingent world. But we are also storytelling animals, and for thousands of years our myths and religions have sustained us with stories of meaningful patterns—of gods and God, of supernatural beings and mystical forces, of the relationship between humans with other humans and their creators, and of our place in the cosmos. One of the reasons why humans continue thinking magically is that the modern, scientific way of thinking is a couple of hundred years old, whereas humanity has existed for a couple of hundred thousand years. What were we doing all those long gone millennia? How did our brains evolve to cope with the problems in that radically different world?

  This is a problem tackled by evolutionary psychologists—scientists who study brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. They make the very reasonable argument that the brain (and along with it the mind and behavior) evolved over a period of two million years from the small fist-sized brain of the Australopithecine to the melon-sized brain of modern Homo sapiens. Since civilization arose only about 13,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, 99.99% of human evolution took place in our ancestral environment (called the EEA—environment of evolutionary adaptation). The conditions of that environment are what shaped our brains, not what happened over the past thirteen millennia. Evolution does not work that fast. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Co-Directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have summarized the field this way in a 1994 descriptive brochure:

  Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems— programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.

  In his new book, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton, 1997), Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as "mental modules." The "module" is a metaphor, and is not necessarily located in a single spot in the brain, and should not be confused with the nineteenth century notion of phrenologists who allocated specific bumps on the head for specific brain functions. A module, says Pinker, "may be broken into regions that are interconnected by fibers that make the regions act as a unit." A bundle of neurons here connected to another bundle of neurons there, "sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain" might form a module (pp. 27-31). Their interconnectedness is the key to the module's function, not its location.

  While most mental modules are thought of as quite specific, however, evolutionary psychologists argue about mental modules being "domain-specific" vs. "domain-general." Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker, for example, reject the idea of a domain-general processor, whereas many psychologists accept the notion of a global intelligence, called "g." Archaeologist Steven Mithen, in his book. The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames and Hudson, 1996) goes so far as to say that it is a domain-general processor that makes us modern humans: "The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover, the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity" (p. 163).

  Instead of the metaphor of a module, then, I would like to suggest that we evolved a more general Belief Engine, which is Janus-faced—under certain conditions it leads to magical thinking—a Magic Belief Engine; under different circumstances it leads to scientific thinking. We might think of the Belief Engine as the central processor that sits beneath more specific modules. Allow me to explain.

  We evolved to be skilled, pattern-seeking, causal-finding creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not. Unfortunately our brains are not always good at determining the difference. The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern (painting animals on a cave wall before a hunt) usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in uncertain situations. So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: rejecting a truth. Since these errors will not necessarily get us killed, they persist. The Belief Engine has evolved as a mechanism for helping us to survive because in addition to committing Type 1 and Type 2 Errors, we also commit what we might call a Type 1 Hit: not believing a falsehood and a Type 2 Hit: believing a truth.

  It seems reasonable to argue that the brain consists of both specific and general modules, and the Belief Engine is a domain-general processor. It is, in fact, one of the most general of all modules because at its core it is the basis of all learning. After all, we have to believe something about our environment, and these beliefs are learned through experience. But the process of forming beliefs is genetically hardwired. To account for the fact that the Belief Engine is capable of both Type 1 and 2 Errors along with Type 1 and 2 Hits, we have to consider two conditions under which it evolved:

  1. Natural Selection: The Belief Engine is a useful mechanism for survival, not just for learning about dangerous and potentially lethal environments (where Type 1 and 2 Hits help us survive), but in reducing anxiety about that environment through magical thinking—there is psychological evidence that magical thinking reduces anxiety in uncertain environments, medical evidence that prayer, meditation, and worship may lead to greater physical and mental health, and anthropological evidence that magicians, shamans, and the kings who use them have more power and win more copulations, thus spreading their genes for magical thinking.

  2. Spandrel: The magical thinking part of the Belief Engine is also a spandrel—Stephen Jay Gould's and Richard Lewontin's metaphor for a necessary by-product of an evolved mechanism. In their influential 1979 paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" (Proceedings of the Royal Society, V. B205: 581-598), Gould and Lewontin explain that in architecture a spandrel is "the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angle." This leftover space in medieval churches is filled with elaborate, beautiful designs so purposeful looking "that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis." To ask "what is the purpose of the spandrel" is to ask the wrong question. It would be like asking "why do males have nipples?" The correct question is "why do females have nipples?" The answer is that females need them to nurture their babies, and males and females are built on the same architectural frame. It was simply easier for nature to construct males with worthless nipples rather than reconfigure the underlying genetic architecture.

  In this sense the magical thinking component of the Belief Engine is a spandrel. We think magically because we have to think causally. We make Type 1 and 2 Errors because we need to make Type 1 and 2 Hits. We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-finding. The two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is a necessary by-product of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking. In my next book, Why People Believe in God, can be found an expanded version of this theory in which I present abundant historical and anthropological evidence, but here I will allow the "weird things" written about in this book to serve as examples of such ancestral magical t
hinking in fully modern humans. Believers in UFOs, alien abductions, ESP, and psychic phenomena have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking: they are believing a falsehood. Creationists and Holocaust deniers have made a Type 2 Error in thinking: they are rejecting a truth. It is not that these folks are ignorant or uninformed; they are intelligent but misinformed. Their thinking has gone wrong. Type 1 and 2 Errors are squelching Type 1 and 2 Hits. Fortunately there is an abundance of evidence that the Belief Engine is malleable. Critical thinking can be taught. Skepticism is learnable. Type 1 and 2 Errors are tractable. I know. I became a skeptic after being a sucker for a lot of these beliefs (recounted in detail in this book). I am a born-again skeptic, as it were.

  Having offered this deeper answer to the "why" question, allow me to close with the final exchange in an interview I had with Georgea Kovanis, in the Detroit Free Press (May 2, 1997), who understood the bigger skeptical picture when she printed my two-word answer to her final question: "Why should we believe anything you say?" My response: "You shouldn't."

  Cogita tute—think for yourself.

  A Note on the Revised and Expanded Edition

  For years skeptics have been asked by detractors and the media: "What's the harm in believing in UFOs, ESP, astrology, and pseudoscience in general? Aren't you skeptics just taking the fun out of people's lives?" A striking answer by way of example was provided by the Heaven's Gate UFO cult on March 27, 1997, when the mass suicide story broke and a media feeding frenzy lasting two full days flooded the Skeptics Society office. One week later the first edition of Why People Believe Weird Things was released, so the publicity tour for the book was heavily slanted toward explaining how such intelligent and educated people as the members of this group could come to believe in something so strongly that they would give up their lives.

  The question has renewed relevance, in light of the recent wave of suicidal terrorism on our shores and around the world, and of the sometimes incendiary responses to those attacks. Understanding the psychology of belief systems is the primary focus of this book, and the new chapter that appears at the end of this revised and expanded edition, "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things," addresses this question head on, bringing to light the latest research on belief systems, particularly considering how it is that educated and intelligent people also believe that which is apparently irrational. My answer is deceptively simple: Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

  Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, in search of deep meaning behind the seemingly random events of day-to-day life. I hope that this book in some small way helps you navigate a path through the often confusing array of claims and beliefs presented to us as meaningful stories and patterns.

  —Altadena, California December 2001

  WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS

  Prologue

  Next on Oprah

  On Monday, October 2, 1995, for the first time in its ten-year history, the Oprah Winfrey Show offered a psychic as the featured guest. She was Rosemary Altea (a nom de plume), who claims to communicate with the dead. Her book about this extraordinary assertion— The Eagle and the Rose: A Remarkable True Story——had been on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists for several weeks. ("The eagle" is a Native American Indian—Altea's spirit guide—and Altea is "the rose.") Oprah began with the disclaimer that she was doing this show only because several trusted friends had described Altea as the class act of the psychic world. Next, the producers rolled several minutes of video, taped the previous day, that showed Altea working a small audience in a Chicago flat, asking countless questions, making numerous generalizations, and providing occasional specifics about their dearly departed. Altea then began working the audience in the studio. "Did someone here lose a loved one in a drowning accident?" "I see a man standing behind you." "Was there a boat involved?" And so on.

  Unlike most psychics I have seen, Altea was bombing. The audience was not feeding her the cues she needed to "divine" her information. Finally, well into the program, she struck pay dirt. Calling out to a middle-aged woman partially hidden behind a studio camera, Altea said the woman had lost her mother to cancer. The woman screamed and started crying. Furthermore, Altea noted, the young man next to the woman was her son, who was troubled by school and career decisions. He acknowledged the observation and recounted his tale of woe. The audience was stunned. Oprah was silenced. Altea pumped out more details and predictions. After the taping, one woman stood up and announced that she had come to the studio to debunk Altea but was now a believer.

  Enter the skeptic. Three days before the taping of the show, one of Oprah's producers called me. Shocked that the publisher of Skeptic magazine had never heard of Rosemary Altea, the producer was preparing to call someone else to do the show when I told her, sight unseen, exactly how Altea operated. The producer mailed me an airline ticket. In my allotted few minutes, I explained that what the audience had just witnessed could be seen at the Magic Castle in Hollywood on any night that a mentalist who knows how to work a crowd is appearing. By "work," I mean the time-proven technique of cold-reading, where the mentalist asks general questions until he or she finds someone who gives generous doses of feedback. Continued questioning eventually finds targets. "Was it lung cancer? Because I'm getting a pain here in the chest." Subject says, "It was a heart attack." "Heart attack? Yes, that explains the chest pains." Or, "I'm sensing a drowning. Was there a boat involved? I'm seeing a boat of some kind on a body of water, maybe a lake or river." And so on. In an audience of two hundred fifty people; every major cause of death will be represented.

  The principles of cold-reading are simple: start general (car accidents, drownings, heart attacks, cancer), keep it positive ("He wants you to know he loves you very much," "She says to tell you that she is no longer suffering," "His pain is gone now"), and know that your audience will remember the hits and forget the misses ("How did she know it was cancer?" "How did he get her name?"). But how did Rosemary Altea, without asking, know that the woman's mother had died of cancer and that her son was having doubts about his career? For Oprah, two hundred fifty studio eyewitnesses, and millions of television viewers, Altea appeared to have a direct line to the spirit world.

  The explanation is very much of this world, however. Mentalists call this a hot reading where you actually obtain information on your subject ahead of time. Earlier that day, I had shared a limousine from the hotel to the studio with several guests on the show, two of whom were this woman and her son. During the drive, they mentioned that they had met with Altea before and had been invited by Oprah's producers to share their experience with the television audience. Since almost no one knew this little fact, Altea could use her prior knowledge of the woman and her son to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Naturally I pointed out this fact but, incredibly, the woman denied having previously met with Altea and the exchange was simply edited out of the show.

  I doubt that Altea deliberately deceives her audiences by consciously using cold-reading techniques. Rather, I believe she innocently developed a belief in her own "psychic powers" and innocently learned cold-reading by trial and error. She says it all began in November 1981, when "I woke early one morning to find him standing by the bed, looking down at me. Although I was still half asleep, I knew he was no apparition, no specter in the night" (1995, p. 56). From there, as her book reveals, it was a long process of becoming open to the possibility of a spirit world through what psychologists call hypnopompic hallucinations—visions of ghosts, aliens, or loved ones that occur as one emerges from deep sleep—and mystical interpretations of unusual experiences.

  But whether we are talking about rats pressing a bar to get food or humans playing a Las Vegas slot machine, it only takes an occasional hit to keep them coming back for more. Altea's belief and behavior were shaped by operant conditioning on a variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement—lots of misses but just enough hits to
shape and maintain the behavior. Positive feedback in the form of happy customers paying up to $200 per session was a mechanism sufficient to reinforce her own belief in her powers and to encourage her to hone her mentalist skills.

  The same explanation probably holds for the master of cold-reading in the psychic world—James Van Praagh—who wowed audiences for months on NBC's New Age talk show The Other Side, until he was debunked on Unsolved Mysteries. Here's how. I was asked to sit in a room with nine other people. Van Praagh was asked to do a reading on each of us, all of whom had lost a loved one. I worked closely with the producers to ensure that Van Praagh would have no prior knowledge of any of us. (In addition to subscribing to demographic marketing journals so that they can make statistically educated guesses about subjects based on age, gender, race, and residence, mentalists have been known to go as far as running a name through a detective agency.) His readings would have to be "cold" indeed. The session lasted eleven hours and included several snack breaks, an extended lunch break, and numerous pauses in the filming while technicians reloaded the cameras. Van Praagh opened with a half-hour of New Age music and astrological mumbo jumbo to "prepare" us for our journey to the other side. His mannerisms were somewhat effeminate, and he came off as quite empathic, as if he could "feel our pain."

  With most of us, Van Praagh figured out the cause of death through a technique I had not seen before. He would rub either his chest or his head and say "I'm getting a pain here," watching the subject's face for feedback. After the third time, it suddenly struck me why: most people die from heart, lung, or brain failure, regardless of the specific cause (such as, heart attack, stroke, lung cancer, drowning, falling, or automobile accident). With several subjects, he got nothing and said so. "I'm not getting anything. I'm sorry. If it's not there, it's not there." For most of us, however, he got many details as well as the specific cause of death—but not without lots and lots of misses. For the first two hours, I kept track of the number of "no's" and negative head shakes. There were well over a hundred misses for only a dozen or so hits. Given time and enough questions, anyone with a little training could become sensitive enough to do exactly what Van Praagh does.