Bobby Duffy, “Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A
Theory of Human Misunderstanding,” Basic Books, 2018, 241 pp.
Bobby Duffy, a leading public policy researcher, ran a
study of how people’s beliefs match reality.
His study spanned a decade and more than 40 countries, concluding that we have no idea what we’re
talking about when it comes to our most important social issues. For instance, American women are sexually harassed at
nearly twice the rate American men think, the English overestimate Great
Britain’s immigrant population by 54 percent, Mexicans believe unemployment
rates are 10 times higher than they are in reality. Those misunderstandings shape the cultures we
live in and policies we live by. Duffy offers insights into the
stubborn problem of human delusions and how those delusions shape bad decisions. (
My Notes:
Pg. 3ff: Across
all the studies in the 40 countries Duffy studied, people get a lot wrong on
nearly every subject, including immigration levels, teen pregnancy, crime
rates, obesity, trends in global poverty, and how many of us are on
Facebook; half the people
surveyed thought the Great Wall of China is visible from space. And, we may smirk at the one in ten French
people who still believe the earth may be flat; the quarter of Australians who
think that cavemen and dinosaurs existed at the same time; the one in nine
Brits who think the 9/11 attacks were a US government conspiracy; or the 15
percent of Americans who believe that the media or government adds secret
mind-controlling signals to television transmissions. Additionally, Duffy found that we have no
idea what we’re talking about when it comes to our most important social
issues. American women are sexually
harassed at nearly twice the rate American men think, the English overestimate
Great Britain’s immigrant population by 54 percent, Mexicans believe
unemployment rates are 10 times higher than they are in reality. Those
misunderstandings shape the cultures and policies we live by. Duffy offers a new way of understanding the
stubborn problem of human delusions and how they shape bad decisions.
The public in the countries studied when asked what
proportion of their country was over 65 years old, almost universally
overestimated by a factor of two: in the US the guess was 36 percent vs. actual
14 percent; In Italy, the guess was 48 percent vs actual 21 actual, and so on.
Pg. 8f: In
practice, rather than a neat delineation, there
is a spectrum of false belief from ignorance to delusion. The distinction shows us how difficult it is
to change people’s delusions simply by giving them more information (which may work with ignorance but unlikely to change delusions). This raises the vital question of why we
believe what we do—this is the real value in understanding the perils of
perception. Our delusions can provide
clues to what we’re most worried about—and when we’re not as worried as we
should be. Attention-grabbing stories of
teenage pregnancies or terrorist attacks make us think these phenomena are more
common than they really are, whereas our own self-denial leads us to
underestimate obesity levels in the populace as a whole.
Pg. 11f: Studies
have explored our bias towards information that confirms what we already
believe, our focus on negative information, our susceptibility to stereotyping,
and how we like to imitate the majority.
Our judgments and preferences are typically the result of so-called fast
thinking, unless or until fast-thinking is modified or overridden by slow, deliberate
reasoning (System 1 and System 2).
Emotional
innumeracy: a
theory which proposes that when we’re wrong about a social reality, cause and
effect may very well run in both directions: our concern means we overestimate
the prevalence of an issue as much as the prevalence causing our concern. For example, say that people over-estimate
the level of crime in their country. Do
they overestimate crime because they are concerned about it, or are they
concerned about it because they overestimate it? There are good reasons to believe it is both.
Pg. 14: In 2018
it was discovered that Facebook supplied data of 87 million of its users to
Cambridge Analytica which used it to target communications during the 2016 US
presidential election and the EU Referendum vote in Britain.
Pg. 20: Five
points the author asks readers to keep in mind when reading this book as he explores
our delusions and the reasons behind them:
Many of us get a lot of basic social and
political facts very wrong.
2. What
we get wrong is as much about how we think as what we’re told—which means, as
much as we’d like to, we can’t merely blame the media, social media, or
politicians for our mistaken beliefs; we need to look at the whole system,
including our own faulty thinking.
3. Our
delusions are often based in particular directions because our emotional responses influence our
perceptions of reality. Our
delusions, therefore, provide valuable clues that we shouldn’t just laugh at or
ignore.
4. More
than this, our delusions can, in turn, shape social and political realities. Delusions have serious consequences for so many
aspects of our lives, from political outcomes, social cohesion, to our own
health and finances.
5. Acknowledging
the complexity and scale of the problem is our only real chance to deal with
our delusions, individually and collectively.
According to Isaiah Berlin’s famous (1953) essay on the
distinction between philosophers who think like hedgehogs and those who think like foxes, hedgehogs know one big
thing that they stick to as an explanation for everything. In contrast, foxes know lots of things and
constantly update their view, realizing that a full understanding of this world
is beyond them. This book is for foxes.
Pg. 23: As
recently as 2005, US dietary guidelines were almost exclusively focused on
reducing total fat consumption, with no distinction made between saturated and
unsaturated fats. Additionally, in the current dietary guidelines, Americans are warned for the first
time that they are ‘eating and drinking too much sugar.’ (See my book report “The Case Against Sugar” 8/8/18)
Surveys show that our misperceptions paint a picture
of denial and self-delusion, combined with a dangerous focus on eye-catching
scare stories.
Pg. 25: In the
US 66 percent of the population is overweight or obese (50 percent is the
figure people believe); in the UK, the figure is 62 percent are overweight or obese. Even France and the Netherlands, the best in
the Western world, the figure is 49 percent.
BMI (body mass index) was developed in the mid-1800s and is calculated
by dividing our weight in kilograms by our height in meters squared. (E.g.: 173lbs = 78.47148 kg; 5’8” = 1.768
meters. so BMI for this individual = 25.10).
Pg. 37: Andrew Wakefield in the UK is responsible
for the now totally discredited claims that the MMR vaccine caused leaks in the gut
that went through the bloodstream to the brain.
In the US fear of vaccines is now more often linked to concerns about the levels of
ethylmercury in vaccines and the supposed link from this to autism. Scientific testing cannot and should not be
compelled to prove a negative. It can
only identify that no link can be found, and in the case of the vaccine-autism
link it has done exactly that using data from more than 1 million children and finding no link—but it cannot guarantee that none exists, and it’s in
that space that misinformation takes hold.
Just how many still believe this link is valid?: 44 percent in India and Montenegro, down to 8
percent in Spain. In the US it is 19
percent and the UK is at 20 percent.
Pg. 40: Herd immunity is a threshold where if
vaccination rates drop below a certain level, infection spreads quickly among
the unprotected. This threshold differs for
different diseases and vaccines, but with measles, for example, it’s 90
percent.
Pg. 42: Daniel
Kahneman makes a distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the
‘remembering self.’ The experiencing
self lives in the moment, whereas the remembering self tells a narrative of our
lives to ourselves. We easily mix up these two selves, with the remembering
self rewriting the behavior and opinions of the experiencing self. A story is most important to us in how it
ends, and thus the ending affects how we remember it and the lessons we derive
from it for future decisions.
Pg. 45:
Experiments have shown that we rate our personal relationship to happiness,
leadership skills, IQ, and popularity significantly higher than we rate those
of our peers. Eight in ten of us deem
our driving ability to be better than average, we rate our own happiness at 90%
vs our peers at 49%. However, there is a
social desirability bias and we must be particularly cautious with questions
that involve self-image (we all want to look good in others estimation.).
Pg. 51: There
are some egregious examples of misinformation.
For example, a study of Texas
schools’ sex education programs found that some didn’t contain a single fact at all, and instead covered pro-abstinence
messages such as ‘touching another person’s genitals can cause pregnancy’ and
half of gay male teenagers tested positive for HIV.’ [Source: Poundstone, W (2016). Head in the Cloud: The Power of Knowledge in
the Age of Google, London: oneworld Publications].
Pg. 57: In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan
Gottschall traced the evolutionary roots of our storytelling and story-making
mind. We create narratives, linking
causes to effects, in order to learn how to respond to events in the
future. We create make-believe worlds in
our heads to prepare ourselves for complex problems.
Pg. 61f: Chip
and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why
Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck, point to six success factors
that sticky ideas have: they’re simple, unexpected, concrete, credible,
emotional, and tell a story. Teen
pregnancy anecdotes have most of these in spades. We can also be very resistant to changing our
opinions once they’ve stuck. Our strong
attachment to an idea, once formed, has been the subject of many studies. The field was spurred by the seminal work of
a social psychologist Leon Festinger, who developed the theory of ‘cognitive
dissonance’ (the feeling of discomfort experienced by someone who has
inconsistent or challenging thoughts, beliefs, or values). Academics now talk more about our
‘directionally motivated reasoning’, which leads us to seek out information
that reinforces our preferences (confirmation bias) and view pro-attitudinal
information as more convincing than counter-attitudinal information.
Pg. 66: The
importance of understanding what other people in your community think the norm is determines the acceptability of behavior in all sorts of spheres of life. For instance, in the legal sphere, the Roth v. United States (1957) Supreme Court decision declared that something is considered obscene if ‘the
average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would disapprove of
the content.
Pg. 75: The
average cost to raise a child from birth to adulthood in the US is
$235,000. For whatever reason, the US
figure only covers the first 17 years of life for the child.
Pg. 82: Before
“The Save More For Tomorrow” program
in the UK, the average saving rate for workers was 3.5 percent, but after four
years this had increased to 13.6 percent.
The program takes advantage of our tendency to inertia by auto-enrolling
workers who have to opt-out. Inertia
keeps them sticking with the plan, particularly when changing seems difficult
or complicated.
Pg. 85: As of
2017, the top 1 percent wealthiest people in the world own more than the rest
of the population put together which is the first time we have seen this, at
least since the Industrial Revolution.
Some people reading this may be lucky enough to be in the top 1 percent
of the wealthiest people globally, which has a cut-off at around $744,000 of net
assets. (Note, this is IN THE World).
The chances of that will depend a lot on exactly where you’re from. For example, 7 percent of the world’s top 1
percent live in the UK and 5 percent in Germany—but this is entirely dwarfed by
the 37 percent who live in the US. Note:
to be in the top 1% of just the citizens in the US you need $7,000,000.
Pg. 91: Immigration and religion are two of the
most divisive issues in the world today.
Emotions are high, and our delusions, not just about the scale but the
nature of immigrant and minority religious populations, are frightening. Immigration
concerns were one of the key drivers of the Leave vote for Brexit. Nativism,
the sense that your own people, those born in the country, should come first,
drove Trump’s support more than any other factor.
Pg. 111: In the media we get the vivid anecdotes we
want, and negative information draws and
holds our attention more than positive information. This is a result of our evolutionary past,
when negative information was often more urgent, even life-threatening, so
we had to act on it; if we were warned by our fellow cavepeople about a lurking
saber-toothed tiger, we had to listen or get edited out of the gene pool.
Our brains handle negative information differently and
store it more readily and accessible.
Losing money, being abandoned by friends, and receiving criticism all
have a greater emotional impact on us than winning money, making friends, or
receiving praise.
Pg. 113: Psychophysics originated in the
research of Gustav Fechner in the 1800s. Subsequent research continues to this
day. For instance, the relationship
between our estimates and the reality depends on the type of stimulus we’re
exposed to. For example, we perceive increases in electric shocks much more
readily, exaggerating the scale of change when compared with increases in
brightness, again in a predictable way.
We tend to overestimate small values and underestimate large values in a
predictable way. We tend to hedge our
bets towards the middle of the available options.
Pg. 124f: Trump
addressed the National Sheriffs’ Association in February 2017 and stated “The
murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years…and the press doesn’t tell
it like it is. It wasn’t to their
advantage to say that.”
In fact,
reported murders peaked at around 24,5000 in the US in 1993, and had declined
steeply to around 14,000 by 2014. When
we hear something for the third or fourth time our brains respond faster to it,
and we attribute this ‘fluency’ as a sign that it is true.
Pg. 145: Kathy
Cramer, professor of political science at UW interviewed rural Wisconsinites and identified three key dimensions
to political resentment in the US, which can be equally applied to segments of
the population in many countries A significant proportion of people in these
economically precarious communities don’t think they get their fair share of
decision-making power, of resources, or of respect (in the sense that the
challenges they face and the contributions they make are not sufficiently
recognized).
Pg. 152:
Twenty-five percent of the British public as a whole think the UK pays more into the EU budget than most other EU countries. In fact, Germany contributes twice what the
UK pays.; the UK is last on
the list, with France and Italy also contributing more than the UK.
Pg. 168: Only
Russia, Serbia, and China predicted a Trump presidential victory. Only 6% of Mexicans predicted his presidency.
Pg. 172: Google searches can bring up vastly different
results depending on the history of the user:
when two people searched for British Petroleum, one saw news related to
investing in the company, whereas the other received information about a recent
oil spill. Look up a word like
‘depression’ on dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking
beacons on your device so that other websites can send you adds for
antidepressants. At its core,
surveillance is the business model that supports our largely free-of-charge
Internet.
Pg. 175f: The strategy of Russian propaganda across the
EU is to send so as many conflicting messages as possible, to convince people
that there are too many versions of events to find the truth. The Russian minister of defense described
information as ‘another type of armed forces’.
Hannah Arendt’s classic 1951 The
Origins of Totatalitarinism foresaw this: “the ideal subject of
totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but
people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false no
longer exists.’
Pg. 182: In
India a survey found that 64 percent of the population was estimated to have
access to Facebook when in fact only 8 percent did. This was one of the largest gaps in
perception in all the measurements made.
The US estimated 76 percent vs the reality of 87 percent.
Pg. 190: We
need early training in critical thinking to minimize the evolutionary biases we
are all born with. For example, Italy
has introduced ‘detecting fake news’ as an addition to the national curriculum
in a pilot of 8,000 schools. The UK has
the BBC working with 1,000 schools to guide and mentor children in news
literacy. Of course we can’t all be fact-checkers. We need to follow credible media outlets and
support them.
Pg. 194: In the
US the public thinks that foreign aid spending takes up 31 percent of the federal budget, when it’s well under 1 percent; and in the UK, 26 percent of
people thought that spending on overseas aid was one of the three largest areas
of the government’s budget, when it was, in fact, one of the smallest.
Pg. 194f: In
twelve countries people were asked whether the percentage of people living in
extreme poverty over the last twenty years has almost doubled, remained the
same or almost halved. Only 9 percent
chose the correct answer, i.e., it halved.
In the US the public think that foreign aid spending takes up 31 percent
of the federal budget, when it’s well under 1 percent.
Pg. 200f: There
is a lot more to be cheerful about now than we might immediately think. Deaths from terrorist attacks are lower in
recent years than at the end of the twentieth century in the vast majority of
countries. It’s the same for murder
rates. The proportion of the world’s
population living in extreme poverty fell below 10 percent for the first time
in the last couple of years. Global
carbon emissions from fossil fuels have failed to rise for the third year
running. The death penalty has been removed from more than half of the countries. Child mortality is roughly half what it had
been as recently as 1990. Worldwide life
expectancy has gone from thirty-one in 1900 to seventy-one today. Three hundred thousand people are gaining
access to electricity each day. Of
course in 2018 when people in thirty-seven countries were asked how many of the
last eighteen years have seen the hottest global temperatures since records
began in 1961, they answered ‘nine’ when in fact the answer is seventeen.
Pg. 215f:
Surprisingly only three questions asked in the US show any significant
relationship to political allegiance:
1. 68%
of all violent deaths in the US were caused by guns: 80% of Democrats chose guns as the answer, but only 27% of
Republicans felt guns were the main cause of all violent deaths in the US.
2. Republican
supporters guessed that 39% of the US prison population were immigrants, whereas Democrats guessed
28% (the actual figure is 5%).
3. In
the US, 47% of viewers of Fox News (incorrectly) thought that deaths from terrorism had increased in the last
fifteen years compared with the fifteen before that, whereas those who watched
other news sources guessed 34%.
Some Items We Get
Very Wrong In the US
Category in US
|
Average Guess
|
Reality
|
Adults Overweight or Obese
|
50 percent
|
66 percent
|
How many in US over 65 years old
|
36 percent
|
14 percent
|
How many have diabetes
|
34 percent
|
11 percent
|
Happy with their lives
|
49 percent
|
90 percent
|
% of girls 15-19 that give birth each
year.
|
24 percent
|
2.1 percent
|
Cost to raise a child to age 17*
|
$150,000*
|
$235,000
|
In your country, the wealthiest 1% of
total household wealth own
|
57%
|
37%
|
What is the proportion of Immigrants in
the US
|
33 percent
|
14 percent
|
Out of every 100 people in your country,
how many are Muslim?
|
17 percent
|
1 percent
|
What percentage of your country will be
Muslim in four years.
|
23 percent
|
1.1 percent
|
What percentage of working age people
are unemployed and looking for work?
|
32 percent
|
6 percent
|
What percentage of people have access to
a computer or mobile device?
|
76 percent
|
87 percent
|
*author has no idea why The US Dept. of Agriculture
only goes to age 17.
Addenda:
I read this book because it was recommended by Steven
Pinker, an author I follow.
This landmark book—informed by more than 10 exclusive
major polling studies by IPSOS across 40 countries—asks why in the age of the
internet, where information should be more accessible than ever, we remain so
poorly informed. Using the latest research into the media, decision science,
heuristics, and emotional reasoning, Bobby Duffy examines why the populations
of some countries seem better informed than others, and how we can address our
ignorance of key public data and trends.
People are more interested in the lives of Kim
Kardashian and Kanye West than bothering to learn who painted the Mona Lisa,
and millennials use acronyms such as BTDTGTTAWIO (been there, done that, got
the t-shirt and wore it out), but are unable to recall the single word uttered
by the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s famed poem (“Nevermore”)
No comments:
Post a Comment