"Perception versus fact". Why do people generally cling to factoids? On simulation bias, conformity and dysrationalia

Ipsos shows that people are generally unable to make accurate judgments about demographics. Rosling suggest that we use constructed memories when assessing the present. And although research shows: that the Sun is the center of our solar system, that our species is related to other animals, that relativity matters, that it is important to problematize the phenomenon of climate, that we live in the most peaceful of times, a father-effect on children's emotional adjustment and cognitive development and that women more often than men are perpetrators of intimate partner violence, Copernicus, Gallilei, Darwin and Wallas, Dr. Piejke Jr. Dr Pinker, and Dr. Österberg/Mr. Bergkvist suffered harsh criticism including personal attacks for their discoveries and opinions. Research in psychology shows we rely on on information that is prototypical, often mentioned, and easy to access, and that memory is for simulating the future and that we during that process tend to suffer from simulation bias and dysrationalia. And when we are convinced, then conformism keeps us in the delusion. The solution is spells disjunctive reasoning. The article has been updated. 10 pages.

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What is your perception of the outside world and how do you build your mental image of it?

Do you start from the facts and then use disjunctive reasoning (Pinker, 2011; Stanovich, 1993), or are you someone who easily conform and thus uses dysrationalia arguments (Stanovich, 1993) or cherry picking (Nickerson, 1998) and then use defensive argumentation to defend your standpoint?

The company Ipsos has conducted a survey on the topic “perception versus facts”: The Perils of Perception: Americans Fail on All Measures of ‘Perceptions versus Facts’ in Unique Socio-demographic Knowledge Test:

Link to source:

A new Ipsos global survey highlights how wrong the public across 14 countries are about the scale of the basic make-up of their populations– and how the United States scores against the other 13, finishing in second-to-last place

Ipsos has tested the agreement/difference between people's beliefs about socio-demographic aspects and facts about the same. The survey covers 14 countries, including Sweden. The following themes have been touched upon:

• if the country has a young or aging population.
  
  
• religious outreach.
  
  
• how many are unemployed.
  
  
• number of murders.
  
  
• teenage pregnancies.
  
  
• immigration.
  
  
• proportion voting.
  
  
• life expectancy.

There is a variation between the countries, but what is serious is that people generally have a factoid idea of reality. And it seems that the conviction is so strong that no one hesitates to explain why their belief is correct.

David Finkelhor, who is professor of sociology and director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, raises another aspect:

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Hans Rosling, a professor of international health, has made similar observations, but then calls the phenomenon the Ignorance - problem. The test shows that people generally think that things are worse than they are. And the answer to why seems to be that they refer to memories that go back as far back as 30 years (read more about the Ignorance Test, BBC, 2013).

There are also historical anecdotes about how dogma suppressed new findings or just viewpoint diversity.

When Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1523) in his treatise De revolutionibus orbium coelestium showed that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the then known universe, he shook the prevailing values of his community.

The prevailing academic and social work climate meant that Copernicus did not dare to publish the treatise, which became known only after his death. It was Professor Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who shouldered the academic mantle to spread the message. Galileo challenged the powers that relied on maintaining a dogmatic perspective. It all ended with Professor Galilei having to choose between drinking poison or house arrest for the rest of his life. He chose the latter.

When Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) introduced the theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection in 1859, they received harsh criticism, including personal attacks, from their colleagues.

Although the idea of evolution was not new, it had been discussed for a couple of generations and Alexander Bain (1818-1903) had proposed something he calls “blind variation and selective retention”, which in many ways overlapped with the theory of evolution, Darwin was mocked.

“This is a caricature of Charles Darwin that appeared in newspapers around 1871. It was mocking both his theory of evolution and  serving as a personal attack. Victorian Age England could not accept the theory of evolution seeing as the society was highly religious. Darwin’s works such as Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man  radically changed the fields of zoology, biology, natural history, and  life science” (link to source).

Another scientist who suffered from the questioning of the academic community was Albert Einstein (1879-1955) after he published the theory of relativity. In 1931, the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in which 121 scientists objected to the theory, calling for retraction.

As recently as 2009, Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at Boulder University in Colorado, attacked because of his research on the climate. One was a columnist, Michael Roddy:

“Misdeeds: It’s telling that Pielke thinks his poli sci degree entitles him to have an opinion about all aspects of climate science. Specifically, it’s telling us that he thinks we’re idiots”.

In his bio, Roddy describes himself as follows:

“Michael Roddy graduated with honors from Berkeley, and has written numerous magazine articles and Congressional testimonies on environmental and construction issues. He currently owns and operates a small hotel energy management company, with offices in Seattle, Napa, and Yucca Valley, California”.

Contrary to Roddy's claim, Dr. Pielke Jr. had a solid academic background including about the climate, partly through implicit learning (Seger, 1994), being inspired at home at the kitchen table by his father, the atmospheric scientist Roger Pielke Sr., partly through education and academic training. Adding to that: employment at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) (Pielke Jr, 2010).

Dr. Pielke Jr. had also done what all scientists are trained to do: he problematized concepts, in the current case the climate. Roddy's attack stunted Dr. Pielke's career and he later experienced condescending treatment by the administration of the faculty that promoted him to professor (Laframboise, 2021).

In 2011, the psychologist Steven Pinker published the book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, which shows that contrary to our beliefs and doomsday prophecies, the world has become significantly less violent in the last six hundred years. Pinkers begins lectures on the study with:

“Believe it or not and I know that most people do not”.

Criticism came from various quarters, but a key criticism came from Noam Chomsky, professor of linguist at MIT and political activist:

“There’s something to that, but the story that he presents is pretty shaky. I mean, ninety-five percent, roughly, of human history is in hunter-gatherer societies. He claims that they were very violent and brutal, but the specialists on the topic don’t agree with him. There’s work by some of the leading people who work on indigenous societies—Brian Ferguson, Douglas Fry, Stephen Cory—they just claim [that Pinker’s notion about hunter-gatherers is] completely false” (Chomsky, 2017)

About 15 years ago, I started two studies, and supervised a bachelor thesis in law. One was about children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development as a function of emotional relationships with the respective parent. The Inspiration was Diana Baumrind's research about parents' influence on children's mental development (Baumrind, 1966). The results from the first showed that:

1. children who grow up with both parents or with their father have better emotional and social adjustment compared to children who grow up with a mother:

   “A compilation of 28 studies on the effects of father absence on children's cognitive ability (Shinn, 1978), indicates that father absence as a function of divorce is negatively related to children's intellectual competence; which has also been demonstrated in previous studies (Blanchard & Biller, 1971; Crescimbeni, 1965; Ferri, 1976; Hetherington et al., 1978, 1982; Radin, 1976; Radin et al., 1994; Santrock, 1972; Sutton–Smith et al ., 1978). Shinn (1978) argues that the results of the compilation study are consistent with the hypothesis that children's interaction with parents forms a platform for cognitive development, and that a reduction in this interaction inhibits cognitive development” (s. 2).

2. The second study was a mapping of outcomes from court personnel (judges) decisions in custody disputes. (1990-2001; n~1400). The result showed that court personnel discriminate against children's father-relationships in 75% of cases (Österberg, 2004).
   
   
3. In parallel with this, I tutored a friend's thesis in law (I was the main but informal supervisor and was not paid by the department of law at Uppsala University). The thesis had two-part structure:
   
   
   1. a compilation data of how the staff at the Svea Court of Appeal in Sweden assessed female and male perpetrators of violence,
      
      
   2. a survey/review of research on Domestic violence. The results showed the following:
   
   
   1. physical domestic violence, women are the perpetrators in at least 50% of the cases.
      
      
   2. lethal domestic violence, will equally unlikely (0.000005) affect children, men and women,
      
      
   3. psychological domestic violence (relational aggressiveness) is typically a female phenomenon (Bergkvist, 2002; Crick och Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005).

Most of the people Mr. Bergkvist and I spoke to in the following years seemed to live with the belief that there is a uniquely positive effect of mothers on children's adjustment and development, and that men are more often perpetrators of intimate partner violence compared to women. Most people also seem to believe that in cases of custody disputes, court personnel typically divide custody/residence equally between the parents (the normal distribution curve would be symmetrical). The implication: Mr. Bergkvist and I were met with harsh personal criticism (ad hominem), i.e., opposite of the expected academic tradition.

Why are these events, where groups of people attack individuals who go against the current dogma?

Psychological science offers a plethora of studies on decision-making showing that our species sometimes suffers from “natural stupidity” - tending to believe information that is prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972), often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973) or is just easy to access (1977). This can also be called dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (this includes instrumental and epistemic rationality) (Stanovich, 1993).

Once you have committed to a factoid, it is difficult to break free. During the 1950s, Festinger, Riecken and Schachters made a study of a sect - When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (Festinger et al. 1956). On page three reads: 

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away, Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point”.

It seems that our species' outlook is influenced by memories.

How do these  memories form?

Research on the mind is complex. But there are a few things that are assumed to be fundamental:

• Memory is not about forming associations but for simulating scenarios about the future we don't know much about (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014), and is divided into several instances.
  
  
• Declarative and non-declarative respectively (Graf and Schacter, 1985; Squire and Zola, 1996).
  
  
• Declarative memory is divided into semantic, episodic and personal semantic (autobiographical) memory.
  
  
• Semantic memory relates to facts - 2+2=4, Paris is the capital of France etc. and is stable over time (ScienceDirect).
  
  
• Autobiographical memory is formed around the age of 5-6 and is sensitive for memory hacking (Nelson and Fivush, 2004; Fivush and Graci, 2017; Shaw, 2016).
  
  
• Episodic memory concerns events we have been part of. When we have to remember an event, a copy of the event is not retrieved from memory. Instead, a construction of the sequence of events takes place that is adapted to the current situation (Schacter and Addis, 2007), and is sensitive for memory hacking (Shaw, 2016).

All together, it may explain the lack of acceptance of Copernicus' rediscovery that the Sun is the center of the then-known universe, Darwin's/Walla's thesis - that we are related to other animals, Einstein's theory of relativity, Pielkes Jr. approach - to problematize the climate issue, Pinker's conclusion that we live in the most peaceful of times, that the father-relationship is of decisive importance for children's emotional and social adjustment and cognitive development, and that women are the typical perpetrator of domestic violence.

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