You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany. He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood’s Law.

  More often than not, apophenia is the result of the most dependable of all delusions—the confirmation bias. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest. When what you want to see is something meaningful, you ignore all the things in the story of your life that are meaningless. Apophenia isn’t just seeing order in chaos, it is believing you were destined to see it. It is believing miracles are so rare you should stand up and take notice when they occur, so you can decode their meaning. Mathematically speaking, though, there is a miracle happening every time you turn a page of this book.

  13

  Brand Loyalty

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them.

  THE TRUTH: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.

  The Internet changed the way people argue.

  Check any comment system, forum, or message board and you will find people going at it, debating why their chosen product is better than the other guy’s.

  Mac vs. PC, PS3 vs. Xbox 360, iPhone vs. Android—it goes on and on.

  Usually, these arguments are between men, because men will defend their ego no matter how slight the insult. These are also usually about geeky things that cost lots of money, because these battles take place on the Internet, where tech-savvy people get rowdy, and the more expensive a purchase, the greater the loyalty to it.

  In the world of Web site comment sections, rabid fans are often called fanboys. It is Internet slang for obsessive fandom. The term originated at a comic book convention in 1973 as the title of a fan-made magazine about Marvel comics, but in recent years it mutated into a soft insult that can be applied to anyone who goes out of his way to tell others about his love for . . . stuff. When someone writes a dozen paragraphs online defending his favorite thing or slandering a competitor, he is quickly branded as a fanboy. Fanboyism isn’t anything new, it’s just a component of branding, which is something marketers and advertisers have known about since Quaker Oats created a friendly logo to go on their burlap sacks.

  There was, of course, no friendly Quaker family making the oats back in 1877. The company wanted people to associate the trustworthiness and honesty of Quakers with their product. It worked.

  This was one of the first attempts to create brand loyalty—that nebulous emotional connection people have with certain companies, which turns them into defenders and advocates for corporations who don’t give a shit.

  In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.

  They lied, but in their subjective experience of the situation, they didn’t. They really did feel like they preferred Coke after it was all over, and they altered their memories to match their emotions. They had been branded somewhere in the past and were loyal to Coke. Even if they actually enjoyed Pepsi more, huge mental constructs prevented them from admitting it, even to themselves.

  Add this sort of loyalty to something expensive, or a hobby that demands a large investment of time and money, and you get a fanboy. Fanboys defend their favorite stuff and ridicule the competition, ignoring facts if they contradict their emotional connection.

  So what creates this emotional connection to stuff and the companies who make doodads?

  Choice.

  Those people who have no choice but to buy certain products, like toilet paper and gasoline, are called “hostages” by marketers and advertising agencies. Since they can’t choose to own or not to own the product, they are far less likely to care if one version of toilet paper is better than another, or one gas station’s fuel is made by Shell or Chevron.

  On the other hand, if the product is unnecessary, like an iPad, there is a great chance the customer will become a fanboy because he had to choose to spend a big chunk of money on it. It’s the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.

  Branding builds on this by giving you the option to create the person you think you are through choosing to align yourself with the mystique of certain products.

  Apple advertising, for instance, doesn’t mention how good their computers are. Instead, they give you examples of the sort of people who purchase those computers. The idea is to encourage you to say, Yeah, I’m not some stuffy, conservative nerd. I have taste and talent and took art classes in college.

  Are Apple computers better than Microsoft-based computers? Is one better than the other when looked at empirically, based on data and analysis and testing and objective comparisons?

  It doesn’t matter, because those considerations come after a person has begun to see him- or herself as the sort of person who would own one. If you see yourself as the kind of person who owns Apple computers, or who drives hybrids, or who smokes Camels, you’ve been branded. And once a person is branded, that person will defend the brand by finding flaws in the alternative choice and pointing out benefits in his or her own.

  There are a number of cognitive biases that converge to create this behavior.

  The endowment effect pops up when you feel like the things you own are superior to the things you do not.

  Psychologists demonstrate this by asking a group of people how much they think a water bottle is worth. The group will agree to an amount around $5, and then someone in the group will be given the bottle for free.

  Then, after an hour, they ask the person how much they would be willing to sell the bottle back to the experimenter for. They usually ask for more money, like $8. Ownership adds special emotional value to things, even if those things were free.

  Another bias is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you’ve spent money on something you don’t want to own or don’t want to do and can’t get it back. For instance, you might pay too much for some take-out food that really sucks, but you eat it anyway, or you sit through a movie even after you realize it’s terrible.

  Sunk cost can creep up on you too. Maybe you’ve been a subscriber to something for a long time and you realize it costs too much, but you don’t end your subscription because of all the money you’ve invested in the service so far. Is Blockbuster better than Netflix, or TiVo better than a generic DVR? If you’ve spent a lot of money on subscription fees, you might be unwilling to switch to alternatives because you feel invested in the brand.

  These biases feed into the big daddy of behaviors that are responsible for branding, fanboyism, and Internet arguments about why the thing you own is better than the thing the other guy owns—choice supportive bias.

  It works like this: You have several options for, say, a new television. Before you make a choice, you tend to compare and contrast all the different qualities of all the televisions on the market. Which is better, Samsung or Sony, plasma or LCD, 1080p or 1080i—ugh, so many variables! You eventually settle on one option, and after you make your decision you then look back and rationalize your actions by believing your television was the best of all the televisions you could have picked.

  In retail, this is a well-understood phenomenon, and to prevent buyer’s remor
se they try not to overwhelm you with choice. Studies show that if you have only a handful of options at the point of purchase, you will be less likely to fret about your decision afterward.

  It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.

  To combat post-decisional dissonance, the feeling you have committed to one option when the other option may have been better, you make yourself feel justified in what you selected to lower the anxiety brought on by questioning yourself.

  All of this forms a giant neurological cluster of associations, emotions, details of self-image, and biases around the things you own.

  So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind—you’re trying to prop up your own.

  14

  The Argument from Authority

  THE MISCONCEPTION: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it.

  THE TRUTH: The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.

  It would be hard not to feel somewhat intimidated while sitting across from a professor with all his or her degrees and certificates staring back at you. Behind that huge desk, surrounded by books and ancient statues, inside an aging, hallowed building, the professor seems to channel the might and weight of all of academia.

  When he or she opines on the history of civilization, you might be inclined to see the professor’s point of view as more correct, more thoroughly meditated upon than that of your cousin who collects ketchup packets. You would be right. Indeed, it is more likely that a professor of history will know why the Roman Empire fell and what can be learned from it than your condiment-obsessed relative will know these things. Those who devote their lives to the study or practice of a given idea are worth listening to when it comes to the areas of their expertise, but this doesn’t mean all their opinions are golden.

  If the professor tells you how much he or she wishes the Spice Girls would reunite and play on campus, you would be committing logical fallacy if you decided you should maybe rethink your musical taste. When you see the opinions of some people as better than others on the merit of their status or training alone, you are arguing from authority.

  Should you listen to a highly trained scuba diver’s advice before plunging into the depths of the ocean? Yes. Should you believe that person when the diver talks about seeing a mermaid making love to a dolphin? No.

  This book often brings up the consensus of scientists on certain behaviors as a way to prove how deluded you are. It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies. Science focuses on the facts, not the people who unearth them, but that doesn’t mean large groups of people can’t agree on something that is totally wrong.

  Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would. It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself. Freeman was criticized by many in his heyday, but for two decades his work continued, and it earned him the highest accolade possible. Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized. Today, the ice-pick lobotomy is condemned by medicine as a barbaric and naive approach to dealing with mental illness.

  The rise and fall of the ice-pick lobotomy had a lot to do with the argument from authority. Freeman and others had jumped the gun on the scientific evidence. Without all the facts in place, they used psychosurgery because it gave them the results they were looking for. Hospitals welcomed Dr. Freeman; his authority went unquestioned as, one after another, he pulled aside patients who needed help and turned them into zombies. Just two decades later, the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one. His license to practice was revoked, and he died an outcast. The same community who lauded him in one era rejected him in another.

  This sort of turnover in science is common, although it happens less today than in years past when so little was understood about these sorts of influences. Like most modern professions, science guards against the argument from authority by working against it, questioning every nugget of new info so as to avoid what happened in neurology throughout the 1940s. Still, the argument does play a role. Whether in churches or legislatures, botany or business, those who are held in high regard can cause a lot of damage when no one is willing to question their authority.

  You naturally look to those in power as having something special you lack, a spark of something you would like to see inside yourself. This is why people sometimes subscribe to the beliefs of celebrities who endorse exotic religions or denounce sound medicines.

  If you feel more inclined to believe something is true because it comes from a person with prestige, you are letting the argument from authority spin your head. If something is controversial, it usually means there are many experts who disagree. You would be wise to come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, not the people delivering it. On the other hand, if there is widespread consensus, you can relax your skepticism. Just don’t relax it completely.

  If a celebrity basketball player tells you to buy a particular brand of batteries, ask yourself if the basketball player seems like an expert on electrochemical energy storage units before you take the player’s word.

  15

  The Argument from Ignorance

  THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove.

  THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.

  There is a pleasant sense of wonder that can fill your heart when you take in the natural world and realize how much you don’t know.

  How does the mighty oak spring from a lowly acorn? How does a river carve out a vast canyon? How could the universe begin from a microscopic dot and explode into all the matter and energy you see today? How can you be thinking about calling someone right as they dial your number and tell you they were thinking of you too?

  It is easy to succumb to mystical thinking when you compare what you know for sure to the vast expanse of things yet unsolved. If you aren’t up-to-date on the latest scientific research, you may put concepts like tiny seeds becoming giant plants in the realm of the unknown. You’ve probably met people like this, who see things like magnets and Stonehenge as unsolvable mysteries. People in awe of such things see them as magical and miraculous, or perhaps believe the explanation is beyond modern human comprehension. The emotions roused when you are humbled by the splendor of nature and the ingenuity of ancient people are nice. It feels good to ponder the mysterious.

  The only problem with these emotions is science has explained much of the world both outside and inside your head. This is a bummer for fans of Unsolved Mysteries or Ripley’s Believe it or Not or In Search Of. More recently, Ghost Hu
nters and The Unexplained have earned big ratings by showcasing the spooky stuff science has ruined.

  Outside of science, mystical New Age props like crystals and dowsing rods play on your tendency toward pattern recognition. You look for cause and effect, but when the cause is unclear you commit a logical fallacy by thinking all the possible causes are equal.

  That strange feeling you get when you walk into an old house—could it be a haunting? Are those strange creaks and bumps attempts at communication from the spirit realm? The strange lights in the sky, are they aliens preparing to probe unsuspecting farm families? Did those tracks in the forest come from a friendly, misunderstood Sasquatch?

  Most of what gets filed under the realm of the paranormal is the result of people committing the argument-from-ignorance fallacy, or argumentum ad ignorantiam if you prefer the Latin logic terminology. Put simply, this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary. You don’t know what the truth is, so you assume any explanation is as good as another. Maybe those lights were alien spacecraft, maybe not. You don’t know, so you think the likelihood they were intergalactic visitors is roughly the same as those lights being from a helicopter far away.

  You can’t disprove something you don’t know anything about, and the argument-from-ignorance fallacy can make you feel as though something is possible because you can’t prove otherwise. You know this book is in your hands right now, but when you leave the room you can’t be sure it does not come to life and eat your dust bunnies for sustenance. Despite this, you don’t feel inclined to lock away this book at night just in case it builds up enough strength to devour your face. You not being able to disprove this book secretly hungers for flesh does not improve the odds it does. The same holds true for leprechauns and unicorns, chupacabra and the Loch Ness Monster. These things aren’t more likely just because you can’t prove they don’t exist.