You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  Lack of proof neither confirms nor denies a proposition. Is there life on other planets? We can’t say yes or no just because it hasn’t been discovered yet. No matter how you feel about the question, you would be incorrect to assume the lack of evidence proves your assumption. At the same time, you can’t just live your life so open-minded you never accept proof. Was Michael Jackson a time traveler sent from the future to teach the world to moonwalk? You can’t exactly prove this is false, but there is enough evidence to the contrary to assume he was a singer born in 1958, not a time lord from 3022.

  Some people think the Holocaust didn’t happen, or human beings never walked on the moon, but there is plenty of evidence for both. People who refuse to believe such things claim they need more evidence before they can change their minds, but no amount of evidence will satisfy them. Any shred of doubt allows them to argue from ignorance.

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  The Straw Man Fallacy

  THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts.

  THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.

  When you are losing an argument, you often use a variety of deceptive techniques to bolster your opinion. You aren’t trying to be sneaky, but the human mind tends to follow predictable patterns when you get angry with other people and do battle with words.

  One of the most reliable and sturdy logical fallacies is the straw man, and even though its probability of appearing is high, you often don’t notice when you are using it or being beat over the head with it.

  It works like this: When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.

  It happens so often, professional debaters and science advocates are trained to look for the straw man fallacy both in themselves and opponents when asserting their opinions or shooting down the claims of others. The straw man fallacy takes the facts and assertions of your opponent and replaces them with an artificial argument you feel more comfortable dealing with.

  The straw man fallacy follows a familiar pattern. You first build the straw man, then you attack it, then you point out how easy it was to defeat it, and then you come to a conclusion.

  For instance, say you are arguing about whether or not people should be allowed to own pet chickens. You think chickens are hideous creatures, thanks to an unfortunate incident in childhood when you were attacked by a bloodthirsty hen at a petting zoo, and since then you have made it your life’s mission to keep poultry away from children. Your opponent wants the city ordinances to be changed so he can breed fancy varieties of chickens who look like sea anemones and sell them to pet stores.

  You say, “If we allow people to breed chickens in their backyards, soon they’ll be in the streets and on the subway. Eventually, people will be taking their chickens to work with them and including them in Christmas cards with the rest of the family. In a world like that, what will happen to the poultry industry? No one will want to eat something that could be their pet. I don’t think I want to live in a world like that, would you? So, no, we shouldn’t allow this ordinance to pass.”

  In creating a fantasy scenario where the world goes mad if the other person’s argument were to win, you have constructed a straw man. It is easy to see the downsides of and hard to defend, but it also isn’t what the other person was suggesting. Now the other person has to clarify his or her argument by assuring everyone he or she has no desire to see restaurant chains close because of this proposal. The other person now must argue against the feathery doomsday you’ve invented instead of just pointing out the reasonable ways people could be allowed to raise a few domesticated fowl.

  Within any debate over a controversial topic, you will see straw men tossed out by both sides. Sometimes people morph the straw man into a warning about a slippery slope where allowing one side to win would put humanity on a course of destruction. Any time someone begins an attack with “So you’re saying we should all just . . .” or “Everyone knows . . . ,” you can bet a straw man is coming. When you start or someone else starts to imagine a future hellscape thanks to the ideas of the opposition becoming reality, there is a straw man in the room. Straw men can also be born out of ignorance. If someone says, “Scientists tell us we all come from monkeys, and that’s why I homeschool,” this person is using a straw man, because science doesn’t say we all come from monkeys.

  Pay attention the next time you disagree with someone, and see if you start or the other person starts to construct a man out of straw. Keep in mind whoever does it is using a logical fallacy, and even if that person succeeds, he or she didn’t really win.

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  The Ad Hominem Fallacy

  THE MISCONCEPTION: If you can’t trust someone, you should ignore that person’s claims.

  THE TRUTH: What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.

  Sometimes an argument can get so heated you start calling the other person names. You attack the other person instead of the position that person has taken. It is easier to disagree with someone you see as nasty or ignorant. Calling someone a bigot, or an idiot, or an asshole feels good, but it does not prove you right or that person wrong.

  This makes sense, but you don’t always notice when you are doing it. When you assume someone is incorrect based on who that person is or what group he or she belongs to, you have committed the ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem is Latin for “to the person,” which is where you sometimes take the argument when things get out of hand.

  Imagine you are part of jury in the case of a man who is accused of stealing a car. The prosecutor might bring up the past of the defendant to show he’s committed crimes before, or have people from his past claim he is a liar. Once the seed is planted—this guy is a liar and a thief—it might sway your opinion of the argument at hand. No matter what the man says, somewhere in your head you will doubt it because you don’t trust liars. If the guy on trial told you the sky was blue and bread was edible, you would have no problem believing it. The fallacy disappears. Only his argument about something you are still unsure of is affected. If he tells you he didn’t steal the car, the lawyer’s ad hominem attack may cause you to ignore the evidence and commit a logical fallacy.

  What if a prominent scientist is caught falsifying his research? Do you now see everything that scientist has ever discovered as bunk? What if all the research leading up to the unethical act was properly peer-reviewed and scrutinized? The tendency to label the scientist as a shifty and unprincipled person is hard to shake. The logical misstep is to assume all the scientist’s work is false because of who he or she is, the label you have placed on this person. You might do the same with a journalist who gets too many facts wrong. You think if this journalist made up one story, then all the writer’s other stories are probably made up too. You would be right to feel skeptical, but jumping to a conclusion based on how you feel about the journalist as an individual would be a mistake.

  Perhaps someone criticizes your driving and you respond with “You have no room to talk. You are the worst driver in the world.” There it is again. You are dismissing the other person’s argument by attacking the person instead of the claim.

  Just calling someone a name is not a fallacy. You must discount the person’s position based on your impression of his or her character before you get into trouble. If you refuse to listen to the financial advice of a drug addict because the addict wastes money on pills, now you’re cooking with fallacies. If a smoker tells you he or she thinks it should be legal to smoke in restaurants, you can’t wave your hand in the air and dismiss that opinion just because the person offering it has a personal stake in the matter. Maybe the smoker has a point, maybe not, but the fact that he or she is a smoker shouldn’t confuse your thinking.

  A political
attack ad might say something like “Don’t vote for Susan Smith because she practiced voodoo in college.” Just because someone is a practicing voodoo priestess doesn’t mean she can’t balance a budget. Political opponents also hope you will commit the ad hominem fallacy when they point out who their opponent hangs out with or who they have done business with in the past. Guilt by association is often the ad hominem fallacy at work. If someone hangs out with crooks or crazies, maybe that person is a criminal or a lunatic. A politician’s policies and the people he or she barbecues with are separate issues.

  However, this is not to say that if you see a man in a banana suit playing a flute and carrying a sign that reads THE END IS NEAR! you should race home to kiss your family good-bye. Avoiding the ad hominem fallacy does not mean you have to trust everything you hear equally. Still, you can’t be logically certain the banana man is wrong. Maybe the end is near, but you should make up your mind based on the evidence he can bring to the table. If his opinion is based on the chatter of pigeons, you can probably ignore it.

  The ad hominem fallacy can also work in reverse. You might assume someone is trustworthy because they speak well, or have a respectable job. It is hard to believe an astronaut would put on a diaper and drive across the country to kill the wife of her lover, but it did happen once. The inverse ad hominem fallacy would steer you into delusion if you were on the jury in the astronaut’s trial and refused to believe the evidence because of your respect for space explorers.

  You tend to see people as characters and look for consistency in their behavior. This is usually a good thing, as it helps you sort out whom you can trust. Wondering whether or not someone can be trusted and wondering whether or not someone is telling the truth are two different things. Judging character has been such a useful tool for so long in the evolutionary history of human beings it can overshadow your logic. You might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.

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  The Just-World Fallacy

  THE MISCONCEPTION: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.

  THE TRUTH: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.

  A woman goes out to a club wearing stilettos and a miniskirt with no underwear. She gets pretty drunk and stumbles home in the wrong direction. She ends up lost in a bad neighborhood. She gets raped.

  Is she to blame in some way? Was this her fault? Was she asking for it?

  People often say yes to all three in studies asking similar questions after presenting similar scenarios. When you hear about a situation you hope never happens to you, you tend to blame the victim, not because you are a terrible person but because you want to believe you are smart enough to avoid the same fate. You inflate whatever amount of responsibility the victim may bear into something bigger, something you would never do. The truth, though, is rape is rarely something predicated on bad behavior on the part of the victim. Usually, the rapist is someone familiar, and it doesn’t matter what the victim was wearing or doing beforehand. The rapist is always to blame, but most awareness campaigns are targeted at women, not men. The message boils downs to “Don’t do something that might get you raped.”

  It is common in fiction for the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win. This is how you would like to see the world—just and fair. In psychology, the tendency to believe that this is how the real world works is called the just-world fallacy.

  More specifically, this is the tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in these situations must have done something to deserve it. The key word there is “deserve.” This is not an observation that bad choices may lead to bad outcomes. The just-world fallacy helps you to build a false sense of security. You want to feel in control, so you assume as long as you avoid bad behavior, you won’t be harmed. You feel safer when you believe those who engage in bad behavior end up on the street, or pregnant, or addicted, or raped.

  In a 1966 study by Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons, seventy-two women watched a woman solve problems and get electric shocks when she messed up. The woman was actually pretending, but the women watching didn’t know this. When asked to describe the woman getting shocked, many of the observers devalued her. They berated her character and her appearance. They said she deserved it.

  Lerner also taught a class on society and medicine, and he noticed many students thought the poor were just lazy people who wanted a handout. So he conducted another study where he had two men solve puzzles. At the end, one of them was randomly awarded a large sum of money. The observers were told the reward was completely random. Still, when asked later to evaluate the two men, people said the one who got the award was smarter, more talented, better at solving puzzles, and more productive. A giant amount of research has been done since Lerner’s studies, and most psychologists have come to the same conclusion: You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.

  The just-world fallacy is probably built into the human mind. No matter how liberal or conservative you are, some notion of it pulls on your emotional reaction to hearing about the suffering of others. In a study published in 2010 by Robert Thornberg and Sven Knutsen at Linkoping University in Sweden, researchers asked teenagers to explain what causes bullying in school. While most students said the bullies were power-hungry and cruel, 42 percent blamed the victim for being an easy target. Ask yourself: When you saw people bullying others in school, did you think the victims should stand up for themselves? Did you think the ones being harassed and teased should learn how to dress, how to act more confident, how to hide their nerdishness? In movies about bullies, the main character always has to learn how to stand up and fight back. The bullies get theirs only when the victim takes responsibility. The research says that while you know bullies are the bad guys, you accept it as unchangeable. The world is full of bad guys. The victims, however, have the power to end their own torment. In the same study, 21 percent of the students blamed themselves—the audience. Fewer still said the culprit was society or human nature. The world, most thought, was just and fair, only the people in it—victims and bullies—were to blame when bad things happened.

  You’ve heard that what goes around comes around, or maybe you’ve seen a person get what was coming to them and thought, “That’s karma for you.” These are shades of the just-world fallacy. It sucks to think the world isn’t fair. A world with the righteous on one side of the scale and evil on the other—that seems to make sense. You want to believe those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors. Accepting this does not mean those born poor should just give up. After all, not taking action guarantees not getting results. In a just world, this would be the only rule, no matter what the initial conditions of your struggle were. The real world is more complicated. People can and do escape, but this doesn’t mean those who haven’t aren’t trying their damnedest to claw out of bad situations. If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can’t pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.

  It is infuriating when cheats and con artists get ahead in the world while firemen and policemen put in long hours for little pay. Deep down, you want to believe hard work and virtue will lead to success, and evil and manipulation will lead to ruin, so you go ahead and edit the world to match those expectations. Yet, in reality, evil often prospers and never pays the price.

  The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says many people who don’t consciously believe in karma still believe deep down in some version of it, calling it whatever seems appropriate in their o
wn culture. They see systems like welfare or affirmative action as disrupting the balance of the natural world. Slackers, they think, would get what they deserve if the government kept their noses out of it. Their bad karma would come around to crush them, but unnatural forces prevent it. Meanwhile, since these people play by the rules, pay taxes, and sacrifice hours of life for overtime pay, they assume it has to be for a reason. Their pursuit of the good life can’t be futile. The rich, they think, must deserve what they have. One day all the good karma they are generating will lift them even higher up in the social hierarchy to join the others who have what they deserve. The just-world fallacy tells them fairness is built into the system, and so they rage when the system artificially unbalances karmic justice.

  Why do we think this way?

  Psychologists are unsure. Some say it is a need to be able to predict the outcome of your own behavior, or to feel secure in your past decisions. More research is needed. To be sure, you would like to live in a world where people in white hats bring people in black hats to justice, but you don’t.

  Don’t let this discourage you, though. You can accept that life is unfair and still relish it. You aren’t in total control of your life, but there is a nice big chunk of your life over which you have complete authority—beat that part to a pulp. Just remember the unfair nature of the world, the randomness of birthright, means people often suffer adversity and enjoy opulence through no effort of their own. If you think the world is just and fair, people who need help may never get it. Realize that even though we are all responsible for our actions, the blame for evil acts rests on the perpetrator and never the victim. No one deserves to be raped or bullied, robbed or murdered. To make the world more just and fair, you have to make it harder for evil to thrive, and you can’t do this just by reducing the number of its potential targets.