麻豆传媒

HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.

Steven Pinker doesn鈥檛 buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, , why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens as a species stuck in the past, with an ancient brain fuelled by biases, fallacies and illusions, incapable of understanding the complexities of the modern world.

History, he argues, refutes that. After all, humans have built civilisations, discovered the laws of nature, vanquished diseases and identified the building blocks of rationality itself. Ours isn鈥檛 an innately irrational species, says Pinker. However, we don鈥檛 embrace our rational side as much as we might. With more insight into the human mind, we can learn to change that 鈥� and master an underused resource that will help us tackle the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.

麻豆传媒: What do you mean by rationality?

Steven Pinker: I define it as the use of knowledge to attain goals. There is not one single tool of rationality 鈥� it depends what you鈥檙e after. If you鈥檙e seeking to derive new true statements from existing ones, then logic is your tool. If you want to assess your degree of belief in a hypothesis based on evidence, then Bayesian reasoning. If you want to figure out what鈥檚 the rational thing to do when the outcome depends on what other rational people do, game theory.

Those tools don鈥檛 seem to come naturally to people, yet you reject the idea that human cognition is a heffalump trap of biases and delusions that are a legacy of our evolution. Why?

Yeah, I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 quite right. Although there鈥檚 no question we do have outbursts of irrationality 鈥� and they are all too plentiful 鈥� I鈥檓 not ready to write off our species as irrational. We can all be rational when it comes to our immediate surroundings and outcomes that affect our lives. And if you鈥檙e upset about some outbursts of irrationality, don鈥檛 blame hunter-gatherers. I begin the book with a description of how the San people of the Kalahari desert deploy rationality to engage in pursuit hunting, where they鈥檝e got to figure out where the antelope may have run based on some fragmentary tracks on the ground. They engage in some pretty sophisticated inference. They wouldn鈥檛 survive if they didn鈥檛.

All of us command some aspect of rationality. In our everyday lives we package it with subject-matter knowledge in particular areas 鈥� bringing up the kids, holding down a job, getting food in the fridge. What we don鈥檛 wield are tools that can be applied to any subject matter: calculating probability, distinguishing correlation from causation, Bayesian reasoning, statistical decision theory. Those come less naturally to us. And when it comes to issues that are larger than our day-to-day physical existence, people don鈥檛 necessarily hew to the mindset that ideas should be evaluated as to whether they鈥檙e true or false.

You also claim that some seeming irrationality can be understood as the rational pursuit of goals. How so?

Rationality always has to be defined with respect to a goal. What are you deploying your thought processes to attain? The goals sometimes can be dubious, but you can be extremely methodical at attaining them. I cite the defenders of Donald Trump against accusations of irrationality, who will say: Well, he got to be president, didn鈥檛 he? If the goal is glorifying Donald Trump, rallying his supporters and gaining the levers of power, he was quite a genius at it. From the point of view of his own rationality, there was a certain cunning.

But surely the current 鈥減andemic of poppycock鈥�, as you call it, is something new?

Conspiracy theories are probably as old as human groups. Paranormal woo isn鈥檛 new. Neither is fake news. These are maybe the default mode of our species. For most of human history, it was hard to tell what was true or false. What is the origin of fortune and misfortune? What is the origin of the universe? What actually happens behind closed doors in palaces and halls of power? You can鈥檛 find out. But there are some beliefs that will rally your coalition together 鈥� that are uplifting, that are morally edifying, that are entertaining 鈥� and those stories for most of our history were as close as we could get to the truth, and they served as a substitute for the truth.

What鈥檚 unusual now is that we have a lot of means to answer questions that formerly were just cosmic mysteries. Before that, it was a matter of conjecture. And a good story was the best we could do. We carry over that mindset when it comes to the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical, the highly politicised.

You describe key mechanisms through which people form irrational beliefs 鈥� the three M鈥檚 of motivated reasoning, myside bias and mythological belief. Can you unpack them one at a time?

Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon where we direct our reasoning toward something that we want to believe in the first place. that it鈥檚 very hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it. In the lab, we see this manifested when you give people a logical syllogism [two statements with a logical conclusion] and ask them if the conclusion follows from the premises. If the conclusion is something that they want to be true, they are apt to ratify an invalid syllogism 鈥� and vice versa if it is a conclusion that they don鈥檛 want to be true.

And myside bias?

Motivated reasoning can be in the service not just of a goal that favours the individual, but often the larger coalition that he or she belongs to, in which case it鈥檚 called the myside bias. Namely, you direct your reasoning to end up with a conclusion that is already a belief in your team, your coalition, your party. It鈥檚 among the most powerful of the many cognitive biases that have been documented by cognitive psychology. It afflicts the [political] left and the right. Being smart does not make you immune to it. And it鈥檚 rather hard to unlearn.

There is a variety of ways in which we comfort ourselves in thinking that beliefs of our side are valid and wise. We muster our ingenuity, we take advantage of ambiguities in the evidence, we feed ourselves evidence that supports our position and try to ignore sources that might contradict our preferred beliefs. We think more like lawyers than scientists.

What are some real-world manifestations of myside bias?

With politicised issues in science such as anthropogenic climate change, scientists are often surprised that there is so much denial. They sometimes attribute it to scientific ignorance or illiteracy. But that is a less-than-rational belief because it鈥檚 not based on empirical studies of why people deny climate change. What those studies show is that the deniers are actually no more ignorant of science than the believers. In fact, a lot of people who endorse the scientific consensus are really out to lunch when it comes to the science of climate change. They think it has something to do with the ozone hole, toxic waste dumps, plastic straws in the ocean. What does predict people鈥檚 belief in climate change is their politics. The farther you are to the right, the more denial there is.

That鈥檚 a case in which the scientifically respectable conclusion is aligned with the left. But there are also cases where the left is out of touch with the scientific facts.

My claim that left and right are equally biased is not just an attempt to be even-handed. Research on the myside bias shows that both the left and the right are susceptible. A given set of 鈥� will be seen to support or not support a position depending on whether the reasoner belongs to a side that believes it in the first place.

And then we get to the third and most potent M, which is mythological belief.

I think this a powerful explanation for why people apparently believe so much nonsense. There are real beliefs like 鈥淚 believe there is a beer in the fridge鈥�. But then there鈥檚 a whole family of beliefs that are more like stories that capture a deeper truth: what our enemies are capable of and how dreadful they are; how noble our side is, how wise and pure and good. Whether these things are true is almost beside the point. These are mythological beliefs.

Some of our national founding myths may fall into that category. Some religious beliefs too, and believers are sometimes offended by the idea that they should be subject to empirical scrutiny. For them, belief in God is a kind of belief you hold for its moral benefits, not for its factual accuracy. It鈥檚 a different kind of belief.

I quote Bertrand Russell, who said it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for believing it is true. And what I note is that this is at odds with the way that most people think. It鈥檚 a product of the Enlightenment that we think that every question ought to be put in the realm of reality and tested for its literal veracity.

That seems to imply that some beliefs are beyond criticism and impervious to evidence. Is that right?

There is a tendency to protect these beliefs or at least to take them out of the realm of evidence, but the boundary between the real and the mythical can be changed. The origin of fortune and misfortune may once have been attributed to fate, but we now consider it an empirical question. We want to know what gives you Alzheimer鈥檚. It鈥檚 not divine retribution.

I think the general tendency since the Enlightenment has been to try to bite off chunks of the mythology zone for the reality zone. I say the more the better, and in particular areas, we can try to persuade people that, no, you can鈥檛 just believe anything you want. There really is a fact of the matter.

Can that boundary between reality and mythology shift in real time, say with something like covid-19 that starts as an abstract threat, but then becomes horribly real?

You would think that vaccine hesitancy would crumble in the face of covid. It has not, although it has declined. What I suspect happens is that with any mythological belief, there are the true believers who will go to their graves believing, no matter how high the evidence piles up. But there are always some who are more open to the evidence.

Yet it seems that the mythological zone is expanding right now, at least in Western democracies. Is it?

It鈥檚 all too easy to come to a conclusion based on our own availability biases, and on an understanding of the world from anecdotes, which is basically what journalism consists of. Unfortunately, we don鈥檛 have the good evidence over an extended period that would settle it. I cite of major American newspapers over a span of more than a century and found no increase. The data I found on belief in paranormal phenomena among Americans 鈥� astrology, crystal power, haunted houses 鈥� is pretty much flat over 50 years, too.

鈥淐onspiracy theories, paranormal views and fake news are not new 鈥� they may be the default mode of our species鈥�

So humanity isn鈥檛 losing its mind today any more than it has in the past?

No. But we are squandering some of the tools that could make us more rational if they were more widely applied. It鈥檚 not that people are saying more unfounded or outlandish things, but we鈥檙e more cognisant of the higher standards that we ought to apply, and so the lapses are all the more salient to us. In terms of the moral statement of what we ought to do, it鈥檚 now accepted that we ought to prioritise rationality.

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