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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Dance With Dissonance

By John Pieret

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Massimo Pigliucci has an interesting post at his blog, Rationally Speaking, about the differences between "skepticism," "cynicism," "gullibility" and (although Professor Pigliucci doesn't mention the term) "personal incredulity" of the sort so often appealed to by creationists.

Essentially, he maintains that:

Whenever confronted with a new claim, it's reasonable to think that the null hypothesis is that the claim is not true. That is, the default position is one of skepticism.

The question then is what are the risks of such a position, which turn on:

... the difference between type I and type II error. A type I error is the one you make if you reject a null hypothesis when it is in fact true. In medicine this is called a false positive: for instance, you are tested for HIV and your doctor, based on the results of the test, rejects the default (null) hypothesis that you are healthy; if you are in fact healthy, the good doctor has committed a type I error. It happens (and you will spend many sleepless nights as a consequence).
A type II error is the converse: it takes place when one accepts a null hypothesis which is in fact not true. In our example above, the doctor concludes that you are healthy, but in reality you do have the disease. You can imagine the dire consequences of making a type II error, also known as a false negative, in that sort of situation. (The smart asses among us usually add that there is also a type III error: not remembering which one is type I and which type II...)

As Pigliucci notes:

Human beings are thus bound to navigate the treacherous waters between Scylla and Charybdis, between being too skeptical and too gullible. And yet, the two monsters are not of equal strength: if we accept the assumption that there is only one reality out there, then the number of false hypotheses must be inordinately higher than the number of correct ones. In other words, there must be many more ways of being wrong than right.

Pigliucci points out (but does not delve into) the fact that there are problems with the very concept of a "null hypothesis" (which is discussed at some length in Elliot Sober's Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science). Not least of the problems is how you frame the hypothesis and the level of the proposition. For example, what would a skeptic deem the proper null hypothesis to the proposition "science can accurately describe 'reality'"? Maintaining that science has delivered sufficient evidence that it accurately describes 'reality' to overcome the null hypothesis that it can't do so suffers from the same circularity as Hume's Problem of Induction.

Still, for questions that are clearly answerable by science (such as whether vaccines cause autism), Pigliucci's formulation of a proper skepticism (with its acknowledged dangers) works well enough.

And speaking of the anti-vaccination crowd, Orac at Respectful Insolence has a very interesting post about a study into the reasons why people hold so tenaciously to beliefs that are clearly and unequivocally not supported by evidence. Rather than using "Bayesian updating," where a decision maker incrementally and rationally changes his or her opinions in accordance with new information, a large majority of the people studied used "motivated reasoning," where the decision maker responded to information "defensively, accepting and seeking out confirming information, while ignoring, discrediting the source of, or arguing against the substance of contrary information." This phenomena has long been known. As Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said: "The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other." The motivation of such reasoning is believed to be an attempt to reduce "cognitive dissonance."

As the authors of the study (Prasad, M., Perrin, A., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., & Powers, A. (2009). "There Must Be a Reason": Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification" Sociological Inquiry, 79 (2), 142-162 DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.2009.00280.x) describe it:

[O]ur interviews revealed an interesting and creative reasoning style that we call inferred justification: recursively inventing the causal links necessary to justify a favored politician's action. Inferred justification operates as a backward chain of reasoning that justifies the favored opinion by assuming the causal evidence that would support it. As with the situational heuristics described above, respondents begin with the situation and then ask themselves what must be true about the world for the situation to hold.

The term "cognitive dissonance" is overused, in that not everyone whose reasoning someone else finds inexplicable or fallacious (as, say, "New Atheists" find the reasoning of "theistic evolutionists") is suffering from internal dissonance. But it could easily apply to those who maintain, in the face of all contrary evidence, that vaccines cause autism, given the highly emotional setting of a parent, perhaps subconsciously feeling guilt, observing the progression of a child's illness. Indeed, the authors of the study conclude: "... motivated reasoning may be strongest when the stakes are highest."

Therefore, Orac cautions:

I'm just as human as any of the participants in this study. Indeed, any skeptic who thinks he or she is not just as prone to such errors in thinking is not a skeptic but suffering from self-delusion. The only difference between skeptics and non-skeptics, scientists and nonscientists, in this regard is that skeptics try to make themselves aware of how human thinking can go wrong and then act preemptively to try to keep those normal human cognitive quirks from leading them astray. Indeed, guarding against these normal human failings when it comes to making conclusions about the natural world is the very reason we need science and why we need to base our medicine on science.

I'd just add that, if you have a deep emotional attachment to science and think it's use in determining the facts of the natural world is very important, you will have something of a built-in defense against motivated reasoning. The collective nature of science guarantees that not everyone engaged in it will share your own foibles and motivations. As the philosopher of science, David L. Hull, put it: "Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses ... but that's all right. Their fellow scientists will be happy to ..." Thus, what you find most motivating will simultaneously tend to negate your own biases.

At least then your cognitive dissonance will be with science itself and you may be more likely to notice it.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 05, 2009 (boomark / email).