Why do I want to believe this story is true?
There are many people who claim to value their health. They exercise regularly and eat foods found in “health foods” sections at grocery stores. But this doesn’t mean they really care about their health. For example: a man might claim a concern for his health and do healthy things, but it could be that what he really values is his appearance. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good, or with seeing healthy things as a means to that end. But in such a case, the man is either confused or deluding himself about the ultimate motivation for his action.
To learn which of two factors really motivates someone, it’s useful to see what he picks when the two come into conflict. Does he exercise to the point of injuring himself unnecessarily? Does he avoid food to the point of becoming anorexic? When he continues some normally healthy behavior to the point where it threatens his real health, it’s clear that a concern for health is not what motivates him, it’s something else (something which might itself be psychologically healthy, or not).
A similar test can apply to those who claim to value the truth. Just like there are insincere health nuts, there are those who avow a love for the truth and even do what lovers of the truth would do — without really caring about the truth. They read the news, they follow the latest science, they seek an education, and they express contempt for others who reach their conclusions out of “ignorance.” And yet, when push comes to shove, and the value of the truth comes into conflict with some other motive, the other motive wins out.
Just like there are insincere health nuts, there are those who avow a love for the truth and even do what lovers of the truth would do — without really caring about the truth.
In my final post of the “Sniff Test” series, I’d like to discuss the fact that not everyone is motivated by the truth, not in what they do and not in what they believe. This motivates the final question: why do I want to believe this story is true? It’s important to ask that question because it’s possible to not really care about whether what goes through our brain has any relationship to reality. You can see how this is possible from the way some people manage their thinking.
Some data is nearly impossible to ignore. If I see a man bleeding from a gun shot wound I’ve seen inflicted, I would have to be psychotically detached from reality or a philosophical skeptic (or both) to avoid believing that the man has been shot. The concepts “man” and “blood” and “gun” are so closely connected to my direct perceptual observations that I would form the belief nearly automatically and without much room for error.
But if, instead of seeing it for myself, I hear another person say they saw, not simply a man bleeding from a gunshot wound, but an innocent civilian who has been unjustifiably killed by a police officer, I now have some choices about how to process this report. Whether to believe the report is a decision based on an inference about the other person’s reliability, not my own direct observation. Do I consider whether the witness was in a position to observe what happened or to know about the situation leading up to the shooting? Do I ask them what they mean by “innocent” or what they mean by “justifiable”? Do I think about whether their meaning makes any sense? Do I think about whether they could have any reasons to lie about what they saw? Do I seek out the police officer’s side of the story? Or do I simply accept the report as is, and proceed to spread the story around?
Whether I bother to ask or answer these questions is a choice, and in making one choice or another I indicate whether I care about the truth. Even though I am a regular news reader and highly educated, if I choose to simply accept and spread the story rather than asking and answering these questions, I don’t really care about what’s true. Being news-savvy and educated, I ought to know that not everyone’s testimony is face-value reliable. If I really care about knowing the truth, I would care about what makes knowing it possible. So if I accept and spread the story without caring to check what’s necessary to know that it’s true, I don’t really care about the truth.
Whether I bother to ask or answer these questions is a choice, and in making one choice or another I indicate whether I care about the truth.
So the final “Sniff test” question is: why do I want to believe this is true? If the answer is, because I want to know what’s true and I’ve checked the most obvious indications of whether or not it is (say, by asking the other sniff test questions), it’s worth taking the claim seriously. But if the answer is (at the end of the day), because the truth of this story would fit my political ideology, or some other form of wishful thinking, it’s better to investigate the claim much more extensively before taking it seriously.
Case in point: how did you react to Trump’s victory over Clinton in the 2016 election? If you expected Clinton to win, and then on election day, the news was that she didn’t, how did you process this? Were you pretty quick to accept the results, or did you look for ways to dismiss the results?
I was surprised by the number of people I knew who took seriously the possibility that the election was somehow rigged. The same sorts of people who would have criticized Trump for saying the election would be rigged against him turned around very quickly to suggest that it had been rigged in his favor. And their evidence for this was not much better than what Trump had presented for his case. One story I saw going around pointed to a series of alleged anomalies in the returns in various Midwestern battleground states:
THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN WISCONSIN PRELIMINARY REPORT Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. excerpts (sorry no link to this report yet).
WI Voter turnout, according to the latest unofficial figures, was highest in Sauk County, at 92.28% countywide (34,323 ballots cast, 37,195 registered voters). Upon closer examination, these numbers are not credible.
In the City of Baraboo, Sauk County, according to the latest numbers posted on official government websites, there were 8,390 ballots cast, and 6,923 registered voters, which equates to a voter turnout of 121.19%.
In the Village of Stockholm, Pepin County, voter turnout was 105.56% (57 ballots cast, 54 registered voters). . . .
Look, I also expected Hillary Clinton to win. Trump’s victory was improbable, and I challenged a number of people who predicted his win based on mere anecdotes (like the size of the crowds at Trump’s vs. Clinton’s rallies). The polls really did give Clinton better odds of winning, and there weren’t many reasons at the time to think they were systematically biased. But even though Trump’s victory was improbable, a conspiracy of Russian hackers or a coalition of right-wing county clerks was even more improbable. And when someone has, say, a 71.4% chance of winning, that does mean that 28.6% of the time a similar prediction will be wrong. And so as shocking as the results were, it would have taken some pretty convincing evidence to call the results into question.
These alleged electoral anomalies weren’t up to that task. It would be odd to learn that a county had more than 100% turnout. But what would this show? I wanted to know where the report got its numbers. Could they have been working with old data about the number of registered voters, perhaps? The fact that story wasn’t even willing to link to Richard Hayes Phillips’ “report” or indicate any of their other sources was enough of a red flag to make me want to dig a little further.
At the time this was posted, I was able to dig up the source for the number of Baraboo votes cast. The page I found is no longer online or archived. What I found there, which was only listed as “unofficial results,” did (when you added up all of the columns) reveal 8,390 ballots cast for President. It didn’t say how many registered voters there were in Baraboo and I couldn’t find that number anywhere. But what I did notice was that in Baraboo the majority of people had voted for Clinton. So if the turnout numbers were evidence for some kind of pro-Trump rigging, the riggers really didn’t do a very good job. Surely the person who assembled that data would have been in a position to notice this, so when they presented it as evidence of a pro-Trump conspiracy, I could see this wasn’t worth pursuing any further. The author of the so-called report was pretty clearly grasping at straws to rationalize some wishful thinking. As we know, of course, subsequent recounts didn’t turn up anything better than straws.
The same sorts of people who would have criticized Trump for saying the election would be rigged against him turned around very quickly to suggest that it had been rigged in his favor.
There are of course many who were shocked and even dismayed by Trump’s election who were still willing to accept that he had won fair and square. But even that didn’t stop many of them from concocting fanciful explanations for why he won. Of course explaining why some massive historical event took place is about as difficult as predicting what massive historical events will take place, and so I don’t myself claim to know why people voted the way they did. But I can tell the difference between a careful and considered attempt to explain a historical event, and a kneejerk-reactionary attempt motivated by a political ideology.
In this case the kneejerk reaction was to blame Americans for their bigotry. It is hard to deny that Trump counted bigots among his supporters, and even harder to deny the undercurrent of bigotry in his own campaign rhetoric, but the numbers we have so far just don’t support the bigotry explanation. As one pundit recently observed in the New York Times, large numbers of the people who voted for Trump still thought he lacked a sense of decency, opposed his stance on immigration, and hoped he would implement more “progressive” policies. They appear to have voted him not because they shared his bigotry, but because they disliked him less than they disliked Hillary Clinton.
So before you go around claiming that it’s mostly the conservatives in your life who believe “fake news” and crackpot conspiracy theories, take a look to how well your liberal friends do at avoiding motivated reasoning about current events. Even if they have a slightly better track record, is this due to their own efforts, or to the good luck of who they happen to associate with, friends who happen to be better at fact-checking sources and running sniff tests? As I’ve suggested, it’s when the chips are down that our choices reveal our real motivations. What did you choose to believe this election season — and why did you want to believe it?
There’s been a lot of commentary lately on the “bubble” effect some say is a product of social media. We can all customize the news sources we rely on by following only friends and sources who share our ideological commitments, and so we’re perhaps more likely to ignore stories from the other end of the spectrum that we might have heard back when everyone watched the same network newscast. The Wall Street Journal even created a useful “Red Feed, Blue Feed” page that shows the differences between what typical liberals and typical conservatives share on social media.
A common piece of advice I’ve seen for how to escape the bubble effect is to be sure to expose yourself to a mixture of news sources. Try to find a good balance between left- and right-wing sources. One of the most important “Sniff test” questions I’ve outlined depends on assessing the prior probability of a story we hear, but that question only helps if one has rational assessments of prior probability. Being trapped in one ideology’s news bubble isn’t a great way to cultivate those rational assessments, so I agree in principle with the advice about seeking out a “balanced” news diet.
But I want to go out on a limb and recommend an even more radical news diet proposal. As radical as it may sound, the recommendation is inspired by some ancient wisdom, from Book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle famously thinks that moral virtue requires a kind of psychological state that is found on a “mean” between an excess and a deficiency. So, for example, one has the virtue of temperance when one doesn’t want to pursue too much pleasure, but also not too little. But Aristotle thinks it is difficult to find that mean in one’s own particular case, and he recommends a strategy for finding and sustaining it:
[W]e must consider the things towards which we ourselves also are easily carried away; for some of us tend to one thing, some to another; and this will be recognizable from the pleasure and the pain we feel. We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme; for we shall get into the intermediate state by drawing well away from error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent.
Aristotle is saying that different people gravitate toward different vices. Regarding the pursuit of pleasure, some might have personalities more inclined toward hedonism while others tend toward asceticism. So he suggests that if you know your inclination, you reach more in the opposite direction to counter it. If you’re inclined toward hedonism, then in cases of uncertainty, err on the side of asceticism, and vice-versa for those inclined toward asceticism.
Although Aristotle didn’t see it this way, I think there can be similar advice for those seeking to develop cognitive virtues. Being objective about how one processes one’s observations is one such cognitive virtue — arguably the most important one. Someone who governs his or her thinking objectively seeks to govern their conclusions by the facts, not by their feelings. They seek to be realistic and avoid wishful thinking and confirmation bias. Confirmation bias — the tendency to interpret data in ways that easily fit our preconceptions about the world — is a real temptation that is difficult to avoid. When it comes to interpreting news about current events, it is especially tempting to do this in ways that easily fit our political ideologies. So Aristotle’s advice applies here too: we need to find a way of “dragging ourselves away” from what we are most tempted to believe by erring on the side of the opposite tendency.
The straightforward implication for cultivating a media diet is not only to seek a balance of right- and left-wing sources, but to expose oneself more to sources on the opposite side of one’s political persuasions. Think about it: if, for example, you are left-liberal, politically, you interpret the world in these terms and you probably tend to surround yourself with more people who do the same thing. To counteract the temptations associated with that lifestyle, it is better to make a concerted effort to expose yourself more to conservative media than you do to the kind that favors your perspective. And monitor the best conservative media, not the kind that’s easy to criticize. The same advice goes for right-conservatives with respect to the left-liberal media. Whichever side you’re on, you’re not likely to be taken in by the bias you encounter in the other side’s media: the other side’s ideological assumptions aren’t transparent to you like they are to them. So what are you afraid of? Let’s hope it’s not discovering the truth.
[We should] not only seek a balance of right- and left-wing sources, but to expose oneself more to sources on the opposite side of one’s political persuasions
I’ve ended each of my essays in this series with a passage from a prominent philosopher. In all of the other essays, I tried to find a passage that fit the theme of the essay I had already constructed for myself. In this case, it’s really the other way around: there was a passage I had in mind that helped shape my theme in the first place, a passage from John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689):
He that would seriously set upon the search of truth ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth’s sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth’s sake, but for some other bye-end. For the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in the proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplusage of assurance is owing to some other affection, and not to the love of truth.
I hope that readers of my essays have found a few useful tips for preparing their minds for a love of the truth.
Revisit the whole “Sniff Test” series.
