Why Smart People Believe Weird Things

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater." - Albert Einstein

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Why Smart People Believe Weird Things
Michael Shermer

" When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service! - John Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , 1852

... Most theologians, for example, recognize that God's existence cannot be proven in any scientific sense, and thus I consider William Dembski's Intelligent Design Theory, Hugh Ross's “Reasons to Believe,” and Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory—all of which purportedly use science to prove God—as not only unacceptable to most members of their knowledge community but as uncorroborated because such proof is logically impossible...

It is a given assumption in the skeptical movement—elevated to a maxim really—that intelligence and education serve as an impenetrable prophylactic against the flim flam that we assume the unintelligent and uneducated masses swallow with credulity. Indeed, at the Skeptics Society we invest considerable resources in educational materials distributed to schools and the media under the assumption that this will make a difference in our struggle against pseudoscience and superstition. These efforts do make a difference, particularly for those who are aware of the phenomena we study but have not heard a scientific explanation for them. But are the cognitive elite protected against the nonsense that passes for sense in our culture? Is flapdoodle the fodder for only fools? The answer is no. The question is why?

For those of us in the business of debunking bunk and explaining the unexplained, this is what I call the Hard Question: why do smart people believe weird things? My Easy Answer will seem somewhat paradoxical at first:

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

That is to say, most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning... Rather, such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices... We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming...

1. Intelligence and Belief

In his review of the literature in one of the best books on this subject ( Believing in Magic ), psychologist Stuart Vyse concludes that while the relationship between intelligence and belief holds for some populations, it can be just the opposite in others. He notes that the New Age movement in particular “has led to the increased popularity of these ideas among groups previously thought to be immune to superstition: those with higher intelligence, higher socioeconomic status, and higher educational levels. As a result, the time-honored view of believers as less intelligent than nonbelievers may only hold for certain ideas or particular social groups.”

For the most part intelligence is orthogonal to and independent of belief... once you are at a certain level among the population of practitioners (and that level appears to be an I.Q. score of about 125), there is no difference in intelligence between the most successful and the average in that profession. At that point other variables take over, such as creativity, or achievement motivation and the drive to succeed, which are independent of intelligence...

Almost a fifth of all classical music performed in modern times was written by just three composers: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.”...

Another problem is that smart people might be smart in only one field. We say that their intelligence is domain specific...

What happens when smart people are smart in one field (domain specificity) but are not smart in an entirely different field, especially if the new field is a fertile breeding ground for weird beliefs? When Harvard marine biologist Barry Fell jumped fields into archaeology and wrote a best-selling book about all the people who discovered America before Columbus ( America B.C. ), he was woefully unprepared and obviously unaware that archaeologists had already considered his hypotheses of who first discovered America (Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, etc.) but rejected them for lack of credible evidence. This is a splendid example of the social aspects of science, and why being smart in one field does not make one smart in another...

2. Gender and Belief

In many ways the orthogonal relationship of intelligence and beliefs is not unlike that of gender and beliefs. With the surge of popularity of psychic mediums like John Edward, James Van Praagh, and Sylvia Browne, it has become obvious to observers, particularly among journalists assigned to cover them, that at any given gathering (usually at large hotel conference rooms holding several hundred people, each of whom paid several hundred dollars to be there), that the vast majority (at least 75%) are women. Understandably, journalists inquire whether women, therefore, are more superstitious or less rational than men, who typically disdain such mediums and scoff at the notion of talking to the dead. Indeed, a number of studies have found that women hold more superstitious beliefs and accept more paranormal phenomena as real than men. In one study of 132 men and women in New York City, for example, scientists found that more women than men believed in knocking on wood or that walking under a ladder brought bad luck. Another study showed that more college women than men professed belief in precognition.

Although the general conclusion from such studies seems compelling, it is wrong. The problem here is with limited sampling. If you attend any meeting of creationists, Holocaust “revisionists,” or UFOlogists, for instance, you will find almost no women at all (the few that I see at such conferences are the spouses of attending members and, for the most part, they look bored out of their skulls). For a variety of reasons related to the subject matter and style of reasoning, creationism, revisionism, and UFOlogy are guy beliefs. So, while gender is related to the target of one’s beliefs, it appears to be unrelated to the process of believing. In fact, in the same study that found more women than men believed in precognition, it turns out that more men than women believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Seeing into the future is a woman’s thing, tracking down chimerical monsters is a man’s thing. There are no differences between men and women in the power of belief, only in what they choose to believe...

4. Education and Belief

Psychologist Chris Brand, for example, discovered a powerful inverse correlation of -.50 between I.Q. and authoritarianism (as I.Q. increases authoritarianism decreases). Brand concluded that authoritarians are characterized not by affection for authority, but by some simple-minded way in which the world has been divided up for them. In this case, authoritarianism was being expressed through prejudice by dividing the world up by race, gender, and age...

Psychologists S. H. and L. H. Blum found a negative correlation between education and superstition (as education increased, superstitious beliefs decreased). Laura Otis and James Alcock showed that college professors are more skeptical than either college students or the general public (with the latter two groups showing no difference in belief), but that within college professors there was variation in the types of beliefs held, with English professors more likely to believe in ghosts, ESP, and fortune telling. Another study found, not surprisingly, that natural and social scientists were more skeptical than their colleagues in the arts and humanities; most appropriately, in this context, psychologists were the most skeptical of all (perhaps because they best understand the psychology of belief and how easy it is to be fooled).

Finally, Richard Walker, Steven Hoekstra, and Rodney Vogl discovered that there was no relationship between science education and belief in the paranormal among three groups of science students at three different colleges. That is, having a strong scientific knowledge base is not enough to insulate a person against irrational beliefs. Students who scored well on these tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students who scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think.

6. Locus of Control and Belief

The environment also mitigates the effect of locus of control on belief, where there is a relationship between the uncertainty of an environment and the level of superstitious belief (as uncertainty goes up so too do superstitions). The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, discovered that among the Trobriand Islanders (off the coast of New Guinea), the further out to sea they went to fish the more they developed superstitious rituals. In the calm waters of the inner lagoon, there were very few rituals. By the time they reached the dangerous waters of deep-sea fishing, the Trobrianders were also deep into magic. Malinowski concluded that magical thinking derived from environmental conditions, not inherent stupidities: We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous. Think of the superstitions of baseball players. Hitting a baseball is exceedingly difficult, with the best succeeding barely more than three out of every ten times at bat. And hitters are known for their extensive reliance on rituals and superstitions that they believe will bring them good luck. These same superstitious players, however, drop the superstitions when they take the field, since most of them succeed in fielding the ball over 90 percent of the time. Thus, as with the other variables that go into shaping belief that are themselves orthogonal to intelligence, the context of the person and the belief system are important."