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Wednesday
Two weeks ago I puzzled over why certain college-educated people, including economics professor Peter Navarro, fall for Donald Trump’s con. I speculated that the thrill of acting with complete impunity, like H.G. Wells’s invisible man, was such a drug that it overrode the brain’s capacity for reason.
But while this may explain some of the behavior of the Trump cult, it doesn’t explain all of it. After all, I’ve met other supposedly intelligent people who, with no power payoff, embrace wild theories about about vaccines, JFK’s assassination, 9-11, and other things. Therefore, I took notice when the novel I reported on yesterday—Richard Powers’s The Overstory—has a character studying why smart people believe stupid stuff. And that in turn was bolstered by a blog essay that also took the subject up, posted by legal expert Jay Kuo at Status Kuo.
Adam Appich, a psychology grad student in an Affect and Cognition class, is intrigued when a professor explains why teaching psychology is “a waste of time.” He points out that, despite all the students have learned about hidden biases, they are just as susceptible to hidden biases as other people:
Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cuing—all the biases you’ve learned bout in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.”
Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision, and independent thought.
The professor than lists a number of myths that his students believe:
Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightning, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.
The fault lies not in the stars but, he says, in our psyche:
The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.
We then see the teacher’s point made dramatically. Suddenly he staggers, flails, and rushes out of the room. No one moves, even though it turns out that he’s having a heart attack and dies in the hallway.
Adam thinks the professor is acting to make a point about the famous Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” where no one acts because no one else is acting. In this case, however, his death is actual.
To further study group behavior, Adam decides to write his thesis about climate activists trying to protect the redwoods. Perhaps, through psychological science, he can understand the forces that drive them. They proceed to turn the tables on him, however. It is everyone else, they say, who is in the grip of bystander effect, doing nothing as the world is destroyed around them:
“It’s so simple,” [Maidenhair] says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity….”Is the house on fire?”
A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”
“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”
Adam at this point mentions his professor and the bystander effect, saying, “The larger the group…,” to which Maidenhair responds,
“…the harder it is to cry, Fire?”
“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”
“—lots of people would already have—”
“—with six billion other—”
“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”
At this point, Adam starts rethinking his dissertation, which begins to seem like a distraction. “He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize,” he concludes.
Now to Jay Kuo’s thoughts on the Trump cult and their belief in conspiracies. Citing a Duke cognitive psychologist and a Harvard cognitive scientist (Elizabeth Marsh and Nadia Brashier), he says that our brains judge the truth or falsity of a piece of information in multiple ways. In addition to relying on what we see with our own eyes, we also
develop strong emotional attachments to certain narratives because they help shape our identities. Social emotions, such as anger, gratitude, and grief, guide how we view our own personal welfare versus that of others. We defend these constructed identities vigorously, even when wrong, because our self-worth is tied up with being members of a group.
Along with emotional attachment, we
tend to judge the truth of something by its consistency, meaning that the more our brains encounter the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. Repetition within modern informational echo chambers has increased the power of conspiracies manyfold as we hear the same stories repeated by “trusted” members of our social networks. And media propaganda such as we see on the Fox network works so effectively precisely because it is drilled into viewers again and again, and the messaging is consistent across multiple outlets and channels.
Kuo is particularly interested in the three big conspiracies driving the MAGA right at the moment: that the election was stolen, that President Biden presides over a crime family, and that federal and state prosecutors are coordinating their efforts to interfere with the 2024 election. For our purposes today, we could add fourth: That human-caused climate change is a hoax, perpetuated by Democrats and the entire scientific community. “Once our brains are ready to accept a false idea as true,” Kuo says, “we are primed to accept a bigger falsehood.”
And how do we get people believing such immense conspiracies? Kuo cites Robert Brotherton of Barnard College, author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories, who says that the bigger an idea is, the bigger an explanation we expect to hear. In other words, the bigger the falsehood, the bigger the conspiracy. Once the falsehood is planted, we obsessively look for other things that will prop it up, including unseen others.
Adam leaves us with one other insight. Asked, as a psychologist, “How do we convince people that we’re right,” he responds, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Conspiracy theories are, in the minds of some, good stories, although ultimately they’re one dimensional, repetitive and fairly boring. By contrast trees, as Richard Power convinces us through his compelling novel, have a much more interesting story to tell. As his tree scientist Patricia Westerford says in the passage I quoted yesterday,
Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.
If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored.
Art, including novels like Overstory, has a major role to play in getting us to hear and pass on these stories. Our existence as a species is at stake.
