The most famous illustration of this phenomenon is the story of Kitty Genovese. According to a newspaper article in 1964, she was stabbed by an attacker at 3 A.M. in a parking lot in front of her New York City apartment complex. The attacker ran away when she screamed for help, but not one of the thirty-eight witnesses came to her rescue. The story goes on to say the attacker returned over and over for thirty minutes while people watched on from surrounding apartment windows as he stabbed her. The story has since been thoroughly debunked, a case of sensational reporting, but at the time it was written it led to intense interest in the phenomenon from psychologists. Social psychologists started studying the bystander effect soon after the story went viral, and they determined that the more people present when a person needs emergency help, the less likely it is any one of them will lend a hand.
In 1970, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley created an experiment in which they would drop pencils or coins. Sometimes they would be in a group, sometimes with one other person. They did this six thousand times. The results? They got help 20 percent of the time in a group, 40 percent of the time with one other person. They decided to up the stakes, and in their next experiment they had someone fill out a questionnaire. After a few minutes, smoke would start to fill the room, billowing in from a wall vent. They ran two versions of the experiment. In one, the person was alone; in the other, two other people were also filling out the questionnaire. When alone, people took about five seconds to get up and freak out. Within groups people took an average of 20 seconds to notice. When alone, the subject would go inspect the smoke and then leave the room to tell the experimenter he or she thought something was wrong. When in a group, people just sat there looking at one another until the smoke was so thick they couldn’t see the questionnaire. Only three people in eight runs of the group experiment left the room, and they took an average of six minutes to get up.
The findings suggest the fear of embarrassment plays into group dynamics. You see the smoke, but you don’t want to look like a fool, so you glance over at the other person to see what they are doing. The other person is thinking the same thing. Neither of you react, so neither of you becomes alarmed. The third person sees two people acting like everything is OK, so that third person is even less likely to freak out. Everyone is influencing every other person’s perception of reality thanks to another behavior called the illusion of transparency. You tend to think other people can tell what you are thinking and feeling just by looking at you. You think the other people can tell you are really worried about the smoke, but they can’t. They think the same thing. No one freaks out. This leads to pluralistic ignorance—a situation where everyone is thinking the same thing but believes he or she is the only person who thinks it. After the smoke-filled room experiment, all the participants reported they were freaking out on the inside, but since no one else seemed alarmed, they assumed it must just be their own anxiety.
The researchers decided to up the ante once more. This time, they had people fill out a questionnaire while the experimenter, a woman, shouted in the other room about how she had injured her leg. When alone, 70 percent of people left the room to check on her. When in a group, 40 percent checked. If you were to walk along a bridge and see someone in the water screaming for help, you would feel a much greater urge to leap in and pull them to safety than you would if you were part of a crowd. When it’s just you, all the responsibility to help is yours. The bystander effect gets stronger when you think the person who needs help is being harmed by someone that person knows. Lance Shotland and Margaret Straw showed in a 1978 experiment when people saw two actors, a man and a woman, pretending to physically fight, they often wouldn’t intervene if the woman shouted, “I don’t know why I ever married you!” People helped 65 percent of the time if she instead shouted, “I don’t know you!” Many other studies have shown it takes only one person to help for others to join in. Whether it is to donate blood, assist someone in changing a tire, drop money into a performer’s coffers, or stop a fight—people rush to help once they see another person leading by example.
One final, awesome example is the Good Samaritan experiment. Darley and Batson in 1973 got a group of Princeton Theological Seminary students together and told them to prepare a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. The point of the parable is to stop and help people in need. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his disciples about a traveler who is beaten and robbed then left to die along a road. A priest and another man walk past him, but a Samaritan stops to help even though the man is Jewish and Samaritans weren’t in the habit of helping out Jews. After filling out some questionnaires, with the story fresh in their minds, some groups were told they were late to give the speech in a nearby building. In other groups the subjects were told they had plenty of time. Along their path to the other building an actor was slumped over and groaning, pretending to be sick and in need of help. Of the seminary students who had plenty of time, about 60 percent stopped and helped. The ones in a rush? Ten percent helped, and some even stepped over the actor on their way.
So the takeaway here is to remember you are not so smart when it comes to helping people. In a crowded room, or a public street, you can expect people to freeze up and look around at one another.
Knowing that, you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help—or attempt escape—because you can be certain no one else will.
11
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.
THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
Imagine you are very good at a particular game. Pick anything—chess, Street Fighter, poker—doesn’t matter. You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament. You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round. It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature.
Think of all the You Tube stars over the last few years—the people poorly twirling weapons and singing off-key. These performances are terrible, and not in a self-aware, ironic way. No, they are genuinely awful, and you wonder why someone would put themselves on a worldwide stage in such an embarrassing way. The thing is, they don’t imagine the worldwide audience as being more sophisticated than the small audience of friends, family, and peers they usually stand before. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
The Dunning-Kruger effect is what makes America’s Got Talent and American Idol possible. At the local karaoke bar you might be the best singer in the room. Up against the entire country? Not so much.
Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution? The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.
Of course, these are generalities. The economist Robin Hanson noted in 2008 that the Dunning-Kruger effect becomes a popular catchphrase near election time because it helps to paint opponents as being morons.
The actual research that coined the term was performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in experiments at Cornell around 1999. They had students take humor and logic tests and then report how well they thought they had scored. Some people accurately predicted their own skill levels. Some knew they sucked at humor, and they were right. Others had a hunch they were better at telling jokes than most and had this belief confirmed. So sometimes people who are really good at something are well aware and can accurately predi
ct their scores, but not always. Overall, the study showed you are not very good at estimating your own competence.
More recent studies have attempted to refute the absolute black-and-white predictions of Dunning-Kruger—that the unskilled are the least aware of it. A study by Burson, Larrick, and Klayman in 2006 showed that “on easy tasks, where there is a positive bias, the best performers are also the most accurate in estimating their standing, but on difficult tasks, where there is a negative bias, the worst performers are the most accurate.”
So the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t always influencing you to think that you are awesome when you are actually mediocre. It breaks down like this: The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity and nuance; you discover masters of your craft and compare yourself to them and see where you are lacking. On the other hand, the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in, and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks. Your peers don’t call you out because they know as little as you do, or they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Your narrow advantage over novices leads you to think you are the shit. Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are. Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.
The recent explosion of reality programming is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A whole industry of assholes is making a living off of making attractive yet untalented people believe they are actually genius auteurs. The bubble around reality stars is so thick, they may never escape it. At some point, the audience is in on the joke—yet the people in the center of the tragedy are often completely unaware.
As someone moves from novice to amateur to expert to master, the lines between each stage are difficult to recognize. The farther ahead you get, the longer it takes to progress. Yet the time it takes to go from novice to amateur feels rapid, and that’s where the Dunning-Kruger effect strikes. You think the same amount of practice will move you from amateur to expert, but it won’t.
Everyone experiences the Dunning-Kruger effect from time to time. Being honest with yourself and recognizing all your faults and weaknesses is not a pleasant way to live. Feeling inadequate or incompetent is paralyzing—you have to plow through those emotions to get out of bed. Seen along a spectrum, Dunning-Kruger is on the opposite end from depression with its crippling insecurity.
Don’t let the Dunning-Kruger effect cast its shadow over you. If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives. Compare and contrast and eat some humble pie.
12
Apophenia
THE MISCONCEPTION: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning.
THE TRUTH: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.
Screenwriters and novelists have discovered over the years a number of tropes that you tend to understand without much explanation, plots that satisfy the mind of every viewer or reader.
Every story needs a strong protagonist with whom you can identify. If they are down on their luck or recently fell from grace, you see them as being approachable. If they are plucky and face great odds, again, you root for them without having to think about it. Early on, the protagonist will save someone without having to, and you start to like him or her. On the other side, you need a dastardly antagonist who harms someone for no reason, a person who ignores the rules and wants only to satisfy him- or herself no matter the cost. The hero or heroine leaves his or her normal world and enters into a new life full of adventure. Just when it seems as though the protagonist will fail, he or she overcomes whatever has been in the way, in order to defeat the antagonist, sometimes even saving the world in the process. When the hero or heroine returns to home, he or she has been changed for the better. If the story is a tragedy, the protagonist ends up worse off than when the story began.
Joseph Campbell made it his life’s work to identify the common mythology in all humans, the stories you and everyone else know in your hearts. He called the outline above the hero’s journey, and if you think about all the movies and books you’ve digested over the years, you will recognize almost every story is some variation of this tale. From folklore and theater, to modern cinema and video games, the hero’s journey is a monomyth that plugs into your mind like a key into a lock.
You love to watch highly paid actors play professional make-believe because you naturally think in images and stories, in narratives that unfold with characters who fill up your world. Math, science, and logic are much harder to contemplate than social situations. You are keenly aware of what role you play and who is on the stage, the story of your life. Just as with television and film, your memory tends to delete the boring parts and focus on the highlights—the plot points.
A certain kind of story, a mystery, plays on a type of narrative you often believe to be unfolding in the real world. In a mystery like The Da Vinci Code, or in a television series like Lost, where mysterious happenings are at the center of the plot, clues pop up that turn out to be connected in some strange way. You can’t help but be intrigued by the patterns slowly coalescing. It drives you crazy. You find yourself compelled to keep turning the page or popping in the next disc to see what happens, to see how everything connects in the end.
When you do this in the real world, it is called apophenia. Apophenia is an umbrella term that encompasses other phenomena, like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and pareidolia. When you commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you draw a circle around a series of random events and decide there is some meaning in the chaos that isn’t really there. In pareidolia, you see shapes like clouds or tree limbs as people or faces. Apophenia is refusing to believe in clutter and noise, in coincidence and chance.
Apophenia most often appears in your life when you experience synchronicity. Small moments of synchronicity seem meaningful even when you know they can’t be. If the date lines up in an interesting way, like say 8/9/10, people talk about it. You can’t just ignore it when something that should be random sorts itself out and becomes orderly. The clock reads 11:11 P.M. The next time you look, it reads 12:12 A.M. A brief sense of wonder turns your head askew, and then you move on. Synchronicity may show up in bigger ways as well. If you had a dream about a terrible flood and then turned on the morning news to see a flood had washed away the homes of hundreds of people in a distant place, it would be hard not to feel a chill run down your spine.
Apophenia becomes an issue only when you decide coincidences and random sorting are more than the occasional signal rising from the noise. You might think deaths always come in threes when deaths are a constant part of life. You might find it amazing you share the same birthday as a dozen of your favorite celebrities, even though at any given time you share your birthday with about 16 million people. You might think the number 23 has some special power because it appears so often, when it doesn’t appear any more than other numbers. Maybe you gamble all night, convinced you are seeing patterns in the cards or meaning in the wheels of the slot machine, yet the odds never change. You might see a person who wins the lottery three times in a row as having an extra helping of magical luck, but multiple lottery winners are actually rather common.
When you connect the dots in your life in a way that tells a story, and then you interpret the story to have a special meaning, this is true apophenia. Say you are crossing the street when a homeless man grabs your shirt and pulls you out of traffic just as a motorcycle goes screaming by. You offer to give him mo
ney in appreciation for saving your life, and he refuses. The next day you read in the newspaper about the rise in homelessness in your city. A week later, you are searching online for a new job and see a position is open for a social worker in a city you’ve always wanted to live in. You might think, in the story of your life, these are all scenes leading up to your destiny as a champion of the downtrodden. You quit your job, move far away, and pay it forward. In this way, you can see apophenia isn’t always a bad thing. You need a sense of meaning to get out of bed, to push forward against the grain. Just remember that meaning comes only from within.
Your mind is preorganized to notice order, even when the order is defined by your culture and not your synapses. The ancient Greeks and Babylonians believed numbers held special sacred meanings, and they attached numerical values to all aspects of humanity. The early Christians were fond of doing the same, especially (cf. the number three and the Trinity). In all religions and cultures, certain numbers are occasionally promoted above the others as having special significance. Once this happens, apophenia causes people to notice them more than usual. In general, you prefer nice round numbers that correspond to the decimal system you’ve grown accustomed to using. When you have a choice, apophenia influences you to sort items into groups that have meaning, like ten, fifty, one hundred, and so on. As a society, currency notes are influenced by the same affection for pleasing numerals.
The law of truly large numbers is something skeptics like to point out when apophenia strikes. The law says in a large sample of occurrences, many coincidences will emerge. On a planet with close to 7 billion people, there is a lot of opportunity for flukes. When people notice coincidences, they remember them and tell others. Sometimes they make their way into the news. When coincidences don’t happen, no one cares. You end up with an echo chamber of tales where stories of coincidence have no competition.
You Are Not So Smart Page 8