Bunch of Amateurs
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Experiments confirm this tendency in every human endeavor. According to Tom Gilovich, the author of How We Know What Isn’t So, 25 percent of “college students believe they are in the top 1% in terms of their ability to get along with others.” It’s everybody else who’s the asshole. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 85 percent of medical students believe politicians are behaving unethically when they accept gifts from lobbyists. But only about half as many medical students—46 percent—think it’s unacceptable for doctors to receive similar goodies from drug companies. We can trust our kind, sort of, but definitely not the other kind. There are hundreds of studies yielding the same type of statistic (another medical study found that young doctors believe that 84 percent of their colleagues might be corrupted by pharmaceutical companies’ freebies, but only 16 percent thought they personally were vulnerable).
We can excuse ourselves, literally, because we see so many legitimate excuses in front of us. Other people? Liars, baby killers, thieves. So are the Native Americans politically correct tools of the federal government? Are the scientists opportunistic liars relying on hokum to make an end run around the law? If you’re on the other side, absolutely.
We naturally and easily create a world of order out of events that if examined more closely have other causes or, often, no discernible causes at all. Our ability to craft meaning out of non-meaning is impressive and no doubt has been fairly useful these last two hundred thousand years. But our view of reality, like everything, is not necessarily the best possible view, or even the “real” view—just the one that got us through to right now. The fact is that we see the world from inside this distortion field, and the more researchers study it, the more we learn just how twisted and tenacious it is.
These perceptual flaws now have many names, are being studied continuously, and have generated mountains of papers. The taxonomy of our flawed selves is an explosive and growing field and beginning to penetrate the world outside the lab. Many people have heard of the confirmation bias—the tendency to sort through evidence to confirm what we already know. That one has practically entered the common culture. Most days, it would appear that the Internet is little more than an exhausting orgy of confirmation bias.
There is a kingdom of graduate students and their notable mentors devising experiments to further understand dozens of fabulously named quirks: the Von Restorff Effect, the Status Quo Bias, Loss Aversion, the Semmelweis Reflex, the Déformation professionnelle, the Clustering Illusion, the Hawthorne Effect, the Ludic Fallacy, the Ostrich Effect, the Reminiscence Bump, Subjective Validation, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the Barnum Effect, Illusory Superiority, the Just-World Phenomenon, the Lake Wobegon Effect, the Out-group Homogeneity Bias, the Availability Heuristic or the Informational Cascade.
One of the most important biases is called anchoring, the cognitive bias that tends to make most of us always lean toward the first notion we were exposed to. Scientists have discovered that we “anchor and adjust” our beliefs. In other words, we can never really cut off our relationship to that first big impression.
The most famous experiment is simple yet mind-boggling. Say I get people to spin a wheel imprinted with two numbers—15 and 65—and it lands on 15. Then I ask a completely unrelated question—How many African nations are members of the United Nations? Most will cluster their answers around the number in the spin. Crazy, but true. That line you heard from your mom about “always make a good first impression” is not only true but a kind of classic heuristic—i.e., a short nuggetlike axiom that long ago worked well for us but nowadays can lead us into a forest of nonsense. The anchoring tendency is so strong that business schools teach it as a fundamental exercise in negotiation theory. Always be the first to state a number in a salary negotiation. Why? Because the final number will, more often than not, cluster around the first number uttered.
With Kennewick, the anchor was that first racial utterance, a work of periphrastic art: “Caucasoid-like.” We can discuss Kennewick all day long, but every conversation veers back to some aspect of this issue—whether he is or is not Caucasoid-like.
Humans are wired to see things even when they aren’t there. This accounts for so many routine sightings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and even Michael Jackson on toast, in the bark of trees, or in a photo of spaghetti. These sightings might sound ridiculous, but they are great examples of how the brain fills in the story we want to tell (or picture we want to see). Brain scientists will tell you that the medium for such appearances must always be grainy—like toast, tree bark, or a photo of smeared spaghetti sauce. A blurred medium will activate the portion of the brain that fills out a pattern into whatever the brain wants to see confirmed. In fact, often if you can’t see the image, then squinting helps. Depriving the eye of the true specifics of the image allows the brain to fill in the image with its preconceptions, and there it is (like the blurry images of Bigfoot and the ivory-billed woodpecker). Has anyone ever wondered why, in a world where my local ice-cream parlor can print a high-pixel resolution image of my daughter’s face into the icing of a chocolate cake, the Creator hasn’t updated his tree bark appearances past the daguerreotype phase?
In the Kennewick controversy, this tendency to see Jesus in toast, technically known as pareidolia, is what explains the Solutrean Hypothesis. Only the theory’s most devoted zealots see similarities between the Solutrean laurel leaf arrowhead and the Clovis point. Only those who most desire it can see in these few bits of stone an entire land-based culture that could have turned into sailors without any evidence; maritime Homo sapiens who left the countryside of Europe and managed to adapt overnight to Inuit-style living, camping on ice and fishing along the kelp highway. Even though the Solutreans disappeared some four thousand years before the appearance of Clovis, and even though they left no redundant evidence behind, if you look at these dissimilar stone tools, you can see their entire voyage right there in the flutes of the Clovis points.
But only if you squint.
The language used to describe Kennewick is thoroughly infected with many of these biases. One of the most powerful is called the self-esteem bias. That is, we more eagerly see things that flatter us than those that don’t. Putting together a skull and nudging it a few millimeters here and there to make it more possible to see a “European” shape is a perfect example of the self-esteem bias on the part of white researchers.
Since there were a number of different ways to assemble the skull and one of them trended closer toward confirming what these researchers deeply wanted to see in the skull, the skilled scientist would certainly set up an experiment to work around this obvious tendency. If Chatters had sent precise molds of the skull to five different anthropologists and asked them to “assemble” it without telling them the age or the location of the finding and then asked them to explain what one might surmise from the skull—then you would have had an experiment and possibly a clear-eyed view of the skull. Instead putting it together yourself and then declaring that it just so happens to confirm what it is you so deeply long to see would make any cognitive scientist throw up her hands in despair.
The Kennewick court case itself is a classic example of another bias known as the Endowment Effect. Our ability to unconsciously create value for an object we are holding (or wish to hold) is impressive. A famous experiment demonstrating this effect involved giving free coffee mugs to people and selling them to other people. Later, when asked to sell them, people who had paid money for the mugs insisted on higher prices. People who were given the mugs didn’t care so much.
Because everyone was struggling to retain control of the skull and bones, they not only had to be valuable, but that also tended to make people believe they had to be valuable in other ways. Of course the skeleton had to be unique proof of a European presence prior to paleo-Indians. Why else were the Indians fighting so hard to take possession of it?
Priming is the other cognitive bias that overwhelmed the popular media in this story fr
om the beginning. For instance, if I asked you to think about your grandfather’s death and then asked you to categorize words as “negative” or “positive” as I read off “happy,” “singing,” and “crying,” you would more quickly categorize the word “crying” as negative because I had already primed your mind to be on the alert for negative things. This happens in all kinds of ways. But few of them are as textbook perfect as handing a reconstruction artist a skull with the explicit observation that you think the skull bears an uncanny resemblance to Patrick Stewart of Star Trek.
Two other errors make the case for Kennewick look absolutely solid. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy takes its name from someone shooting up the side of a barn before drawing a circle around the most clustered shots and then bragging about his bull’s-eye aim. For Kennewick, it’s roughly like finding a bone needle leagues away from the skeleton and concluding that the “explorer/trapper” must have worn “tailored” pants.
Most people believe that we are born into a world of illusion but grow out of it as adults. When we are kids, sure, we might believe the explanations of the Just So Stories, or that little men live in TV sets, or that tiny fairies dwell in a realm beneath the toadstools. But then a time comes when we matriculate to a view of the world that’s more sophisticated. Culturally, we mark this coming of age in certain ways—the revelation of Santa Claus or the outing of the tooth fairy.
And then we are welcomed into the Cartesian world of adulthood, where we foolishly think we have entered a realm of logic and rational choice, a place where individuals make reasoned judgments about the world around them. What scientists are showing us is that while the common adult view of reality might be more empirically precise than a five-year-old’s—it’s not as precise as we want to believe. Academics have a name for the sloppy habits most adults have in their way of knowing the world, their epistemology. They call it a “makes sense epistemology.” That is, most of us, once we determine a cause for something that “makes sense,” rarely take the next step of a scientist—expose that idea to a test of some kind to see if we’re off.
Academics have numerous ways of trying to look around our flawed biases. Regression analysis is a form of statistics that uses large collections of data regarding many individuals’ actions to reveal the true movement of our hive, rather than relying on the august sentiments of elders. Now the Internet has organically developed several ways that group dynamics are performing a similar function.
The wiki—a technological platform that allows for a collective narrative to be written—has revealed all kinds of new or faster truths. It, too, has been derided as an assault on the very book of elder wisdom (Encyclopedia Britannica). Another more recent invention is the betting market. It turns out that creating a place where people with inside knowledge about events can win money by betting on that knowledge (think of the Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, NewsFutures) is another brilliant way to see past our prejudices and reveal the kinds of knowledge typically kept out of view. The attempt by the Bush administration to create a terrorism market—where terrorists could make money by revealing the most likely next targets—was canceled when people were offended by the possibility of rewarding terrorists in any way, even though the end result might be advance warning of another hit.
The oldest method to shake us out of our conceived universe is laughter. Needless to say, this has been studied! Solemnity and gravitas, while looking great on the face of an ancient professor, turn out to be a form of intellectual prison. Let’s go to the experiment: Give someone a corkboard on a wall, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle—then tell them to fasten the candle to the board. Overwhelmingly, most people will try to tack the candle to the board or light the candle and use hot wax to affix it. But neither works. Now show a similar group a Laurel and Hardy movie before the assignment, and creativity increases. Many of them will empty the tack box, pin the box to the board, and put the candle in it.
Other studies have confirmed just how solemnity (and its partner, overconfidence) in one’s knowledge is deeply related to being correct in one’s views. But it’s an inverse relationship. The more confident one is in one’s views, the more likely one is to be flat wrong. An in-depth survey of pundits on television charted two elements of their presentation—their accuracy in prediction and the display of confidence in their opinions. Perhaps it will come as no surprise that survival in the pundit mosh pit on television is linked directly to the pundit’s level of blowhardiness. The more absolutely certain a pundit was in couching a view, however, the more likely that opinion was found to be wrong. All pundits, in this way, bear a strong resemblance to Michael Gary Scott of The Office. Yet, all that said, the bubble of television information thrives on the “confidence bias”—our own flawed preference for blustery self-assurance in the present tense rather than spot-on accuracy down the road.
All these cognitive biases, from the fundamental attribution error to the confidence bias, come together at the end of this story in what’s known as an informational cascade. Typically the term describes how the same choice repeated by others just bandwagons without anyone pausing to make an independent judgment. In the Kennewick cascade, though, there were tiny tweaks all along the way—from the assembly of the skull to the detonation of the word-esque substance “Caucasoid-like” to the numerous stories about Kennewick’s “family” fleeing the savage “hordes.” The accumulation of errors gathered and increased, forming a cascade of faux evidence that for many, many people constituted a perfect proof.
Despite all the distortion involved in trying to see the world for what it is and in creating new ideas that are real enough to be repeated by others, there do emerge a set of rules from the best amateur pursuits. First, start at the beginning. All the assumptions of even the best experts are infected with their own prejudices and biases. If you are Steven Jobs in a garage in Cupertino in 1976, then you don’t need to know or listen to the wisdom of, say, IBM chief Watson, who once cockily said: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”
Second, enter your literal or metaphorical garage in a sense of play. It almost doesn’t bear saying: The garage is a place of play, both when we are kids and as middle-aged grown-ups desperate to escape the bills and solemnity and tedium of “the house.” The garage is an outpost of joy, love, and freedom, which is why it long ago achieved mythic status as the fountainhead of amateur American creativity. But it’s that playful, supple state of mind that’s key. Why else do corporations spend so much time putting their executives on six-person bicycles or sending them off on retreats to smash the tedium of familiar thinking? Getting people into a state of playfulness is almost impossible. Amateurs enjoy the luxury of starting there.
Finally, there has to be an outside world of peers that you connect to who can keep you from getting sidetracked by your own or your culture’s biases. Scientists operating at the professional level do this through peer review. Amateurs can accomplish the same by joining weekend hobbyist groups, like the old robot clubs, where folks show off their latest creations and get critiques from friendly peers who want to make it better. Or perhaps you join a newsletter or subscribe to Make magazine or sign on with a DIY group or contribute along with others to a wiki devoted to your pursuit.
However one gets all the way back to the beginning of an idea, banishes crushing solemnity, and creates a small-scale community to keep it honest, you have to get there. Otherwise, you may find yourself looking at the Rashomon shape of a skull and seeing an itinerant European wandering the estuaries of the Pacific Northwest.
XI. A Caucasian Homecoming
The question of just when we became human gets answered in our popular press all the time. Was it when we assembled the first rudimentary tool kit or grunted out the few phonemes of complex language? Was it when we made those paintings in Altamira and Lascaux, or when we left off being knuckle-dragging ape-like critters and stood up? Was the aquatic ape somehow involved? It’s one of those lines that doesn’t exist as a m
oment in time, but as an idea it does exist, and various scientists routinely make claims. Not long ago, a British scholar named Jonathan Kingdon laid out a new theory—about why we stood up—in his book Lowly Origin.
“Standing up” has been a particularly fertile field for this kind of musing, with theories ranging from cooling off to intimidating other species or freeing the hands. I’d always heard that we abandoned squatting because we wanted to see over the top of the grass on the African savannahs. One early 1980s theory was that standing evolved for “phallic display directed at females.” (Were this the case, every creature in nature, down to the ameoba, would stand, and the great outdoors would be a very animated place.)
Kingdon plods through a different argument. It’s dense and slow. Standing up, he says, probably had a lot to do with getting food and happened in undramatic stages, first by straightening the back while squatting and later extending the legs—all of this happening over vast swaths of time in tiny incremental stages. As theories go, that’s not nearly as fun as “seeing over the grass,” but it has the ring of truth to it, a ring that, let’s face it, never will endear such an idea to writers of newsweekly cover lines or green-lighters of movies of the week. Which is also why you’ve never heard of Jonathan Kingdon.
Scientists like to invoke Occam’s Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is often the most truthful. The principle was born during the Age of Reason when logical thought was trying to cut through the intellectual encrustation accrued after millennia of seeing nature through both Holy Scripture and the blowhardiness of intellectuals trying to impress one another with their sesquipedalianismo.