The ability to easily share information has led to rapidly advancing knowledge in many fields.  At the same time the average person now has available what seems like an infinite amount of information at their fingertips.  The ability to discover and take advantage of all this information may be the key to thriving in 21st century.

Take health as one example.  One can find endless amounts of information on the Internet about diseases, symptoms, drugs, traditional solutions, alternative therapies, nutrition, exercise, and supplements.  You can dive into anyone one specific topic in very deep detail and get every opinion and idea imaginable.

The problem with all the information available is that much of it is worthless and some of it may be seriously harmful.  While we do have some high quality reliable information fed to us through the mainstream and while there is an enormous amount of good information available at our fingertips, most of what we consume is false or simply trivial junk. Unless we practice some good habits of mind in dealing with that information we are liable to be misled; high quality information is buried under a mountain of crap.

Who we are at what we do ultimately comes down to how we process what we take in. There is a computer term called GIGO which stands for Garbage In = Garbage Out.  It’s becoming more important every day that we develop the skills needed to filter out the garbage; to learn critical thinking skills that help sort through what is important and what can be trusted to have a reasonable probability of being true.

This article serves as an introduction to a series of articles that will provide some ideas on critical thinking skills to help you sort through all this information.

A Skeptical Attitude

I think the best approach to take is the skeptical approach.  Being a skeptic doesn’t mean you aren’t open to new ideas; quite the contrary.  I consider myself a strong skeptic and yet I’m fascinated by new ideas and hold quite a number of them that would not be considered mainstream.  I’m always on the lookout for the new and unusual in the hopes that I can learn something and thereby grow.  I don’t mind being on the leading edge, but I want to be on the correct leading edge.  Truth as best we can determine it is very important to me.

A skeptic doesn’t accept received wisdom on the basis of authority or tradition.  We don’t accept things because our parents, our teachers, a minister, or a guru says so.  A skeptical attitude is a “show me” or “prove it” attitude.  It is one that depends on the methods, not the authority of reason, logic, and science.  A skeptic can be very inquisitive and curious (I am), but he simply cannot be credulous towards the unproven claims made by others.  We are swimming in a modern sea of information and a credulous person is going to be a sucker for those peddling nonsense.  Life is too short to waste your time on nonsense.

cred·u·lous (krj-ls)

• Disposed to believe too readily; gullible.
• Tending to believe something on little evidence

If you make a claim that I find interesting and relevant to my life, I might choose to consider it, but I’ll usually remain uncommitted unless and until you provide some good reasons, in other words evidence, for me to believe it.  The burden is on you to prove your claim, it is not mine to disprove.

More to come…

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One of the most fascinating, and to me unnerving, results to come out of a lot of recent psychological research is just how much of our behavior is subject to unconscious influence.  I for one and I think most people like to believe we are acting deliberately when in fact we often are not.  This article will focus on a phenomenon referred to in research as priming.

Consider the following sometimes very large effects:

• Subjects exposed to words about elderly people walked more slowly and amazingly had worse recall (!) of the experiment than the control subjects.
• Subject exposed to words related to rudeness were much more likely to interrupt a discussion than those exposed to words related to politeness.
• Subjects primed with Albert Einstein performed better on trivia tests than those primed with Claudia Schiffer, but performed worse on general knowledge tests.  This is known as the contrast effect.
• People exposed to stories about moral indiscretion are twice as likely to choose cleaning products as gifts as those exposed to stories of moral virtue.  Its seems they feel the need to “clean up”.
• Subjects holding a cold drink rated others’ personalities much colder than subjects holding a warm drink.
• Students exposed to a faint odor of a cleaning product are 3 times more likely to clean up after eating a snack than those not exposed.
• African American students primed with racial stereotypes will perform worse on intellectual tests than those primed with examples of black achievement.
• Subjects given a word puzzle containing words like “strive”, “succeed”, “achieve”, etc., are more than twice as likely to continue working on other puzzles past the time they are instructed to stop.
• Reading stories about people seeking sex will make you much more likely to help attractive people.
• Reading stories about money making will actually improve your performance on tasks where you can earn money.
• People invested much more conservatively in a room with a briefcase than in a room with a backpack.
• You will eat a lot more week old crappy tasting popcorn in a big container than you will eat fresh popcorn from a smaller container, even though both of them are too large for you to finish.
• People primed with arbitrary numbers will anchor on that number when making subsequent decisions.  For example being primed with a low number will cause subjects to be willing to pay much less for an item than those primed with higher numbers.
• People ate 69% more jelly beans when all the colors were mixed together than when they were separated by colors.  Along the same lines, presenting 10 colors of M&Ms instead of 7, increased consumption 43%.

All of these effects are unconscious and subjects will often deny they’ve been influenced when told about them.  They will come up with ad hoc rationalizations rather than admit they have been so mindlessly influenced.

This small sample show wide ranging and hard-to-believe effects.  Thinking about old people causes my memory to be worse?!  See a someone behaving rudely will make me more likely to be rude?  If I meet someone new and they are holding a cold drink I’m doomed?

Whether we admit it or not we are heavily influenced by our environment and we are mostly ignorant of these influences.  The obvious conclusion is that the more you can control your environment the more control you will have over these influences. You can’t just assume you are in control and independent of such influences.

Another important point to make in this regard is that the priming trigger may be even more hidden than you imagine.  As an example, I could decide not to watch TV news because I don’t want to be influenced by all the negativity and trumped up scare stories.  However, what if the TV news is on but my attention is elsewhere and I’m not paying any attention to it?  What if I’m completely oblivious to the fact it is even turned on?

Our conscious attention capacity is very limited and what we can hold in working memory is very small compared to the amount of data entering our brains through our senses.  Research has proven that are brains are taking in information that we are consciously unaware of.  That means we are likely being influenced by the TV news that is on even when we are not watching or paying attention.  Our unconscious mind is still hearing it.

We are not simply automatons programmed by our environments, but neither are we the independent decision makers we like to believe.  For me, that’s a tough pill to swallow, but I accept the evidence wherever it may lead.

I find this kind of research fascinating from a purely intellectual standpoint.  From an emotional standpoint, I found it quite disturbing.  I think the takeaway is that the people we hang around with and the environments we expose ourselves to have a much more significant influence upon our behavior than some of us we would hope.  We can’t help that; it’s simply the way we are made.  Now what are you going to do about it?

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If you like this article you may also want to check out my previous list: Myths That Need Busting.

Here are more myths that need busting based upon current research or my opinion.

You Can Get Non-Genetically Modified Food

Even Europeans who ban genetically modified food are eating exactly that.  Very little food is natural and its genes have been manipulated by humans for thousands of years.  Wheat is a hybrid of three varieties of plant.  Corn started out as a grass.  Many crops are hybrids that are sterile.  Some food varieties have been created by chemical or radiation bombardment to create genetic mutations that are then artificially selected by man.  To say that humans hybridizing or artificially selecting mutations created by nature is natural and that new forms of gene manipulation that are less intrusive is somehow less natural is silly.   My 8 pound poodles are closer to a natural wolf than much of the food we eat is natural.

Disease Does Not Discriminate Based on Race

Yes it does and besides the obvious environmental or socio-economic reasons, there is clear evidence of genetic causes for both the rate and the way different races sometimes respond to various treatments of some disease.  And yet this is such a political hot potato that some people are willing to ignore the science and let people die rather than allow that there could be any such differences.

Criminal Profiling Works

Regardless of it’s popularity on TV shows or in the news media, the evidence is that profilers aren’t any better than a typical college student in coming up with a profile of a criminal.  What they produce is either too vague to help or simply baseline statistics available to anyone such as the fact that most serial killers are male.

JFK Was Murdered by a Conspiracy

The quality of evidence for Oswald acting alone is 1,000 times better than any conspiracy theory.  Read “Reclaiming History” by Vincent Bugliosi for the most exhaustive treatment.

Venting Works

It seems like it helps, but a large amount of research shows venting makes you feel worse not better.  I wrote an article on this: To Vent or Not To Vent.

Athletes Don’t Get “Hot”

Basketball players don’t get on shooting streaks because they get “hot”.  The streaks that occur in basketball and sports generally are clusters that do not exceed what is expected by pure chance (like coin flipping).  There may possibly be some streak somewhere in some sport, but if it exists it has been extremely hard to demonstrate.  It certainly isn’t the widespread phenomena that we think.  As a sports fan I find this hard to accept, but the evidence is pretty clear: Basketball Players and The Hot Hand.

Government Drug Wars Are Effective

Ok, this may not exactly be a myth too many people believe, but since so many people support it for whatever reason, it is important to say it anyway.  Whatever you believe about the use of drugs, whatever impact they may have had on you and your loved ones, the question remains has the war on drugs worked?  The only reasonable answer is “no” and even the drug czar admits it.  Another trillion down the drain.

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread….

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”…

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There are experiments that show people who are being paid will not continue a challenging task, during breaks in the experiment for example, while people who are not being paid will continue to work on it.  In other words being paid somehow destroys motivation; it turns something you enjoy into work.  Being paid makes people spend less creative time on the task.

I encourage you to watch this video by Dan Pink about what motivates people.  I think it is fascinating and shows that what we commonly believe about rewards may not be correct.

Link to video for email readers

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This is the first article in a two-part series.  The second article can be found here:

Should You Trust Your Intuition? – Part II

I’m a strong believer in the power of human intuition, but at the same time I want to understand it from a scientific point of view.  I want to know when and if I can trust my intuitive sense.  I don’t want to just intuitively accept intuition as a reliable form of knowledge.  In this article and the next, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about intuition and under what circumstances science has found it to serve us well or not serve us so well.  A lot of credit for this material goes to David G. Myers and his excellent book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils.

What is Intuition

In short it is the acquisition or access to knowledge without the use of reason.  It’s direct knowledge without the conscious rational processes we normally call “thinking”.  For example, when you first meet someone you instantly and unconsciously make all kinds of intuitive judgments about them.  This sizing up of a person is happening in your non-conscious mind.  Your non-conscious mind processes vast amounts of information that you are not aware of at a conscious level.  We really are of two minds and the science behind it all is amazing, but that is another topic.

When Intuition Doesn’t Work Well

Confidence in our abilities

We are intuitively overconfident of our own abilities in all kinds of areas.  To cite just one extreme example:  In a study of 800,000 students, 100% of them rated themselves at or above average in their ability in dealing with other  people.  60% put themselves in the top 10% and 25% of them put themselves in the top 1%.  They intuitively felt they were socially talented.  Here is a humbling summary of research on overconfidence:

“People think they will be able to solve problems when they wont; they are highly confident that they are on the verge of producing the correct answer when they are, in fact, about to produce a mistake; they think they have solved problems when they haven’t; they think they know the answers to information questions when they don’t; they think they have the answer on the tip of their tongue when there is no answer; they think they produced the correct answer when they didn’t, and furthermore, they say they knew it all along; they believe they have mastered learning material when they haven’t; they think they have understood, even though demonstrably they are still in the dark.” – Janet Metcalfe

Knowing why we do things

Study after study has shown that we are very poor at knowing why we do things.  Our intuitions in this regard are very unreliable.  Sometimes we just make something up.  It seems that once we act we have to have reasons for those actions.  When the influences are either hidden or subtle, our intuitions about why we acted can be radically mistaken.

Predicting our Feelings

Studies clearly show that we are not good at predicting how we are going to react emotionally to various situations.  We are particularly bad at our intuition of the intensity and duration of those emotions.

Predicting our behavior

Just like predicting our feelings, we aren’t that great at predicting what we are going to do.  However, there is an interesting twist to this one.  We are fairly good at predicting how others will behave.  Our actual behavior matches more closely our predictions for others than it does our predictions for ourselves.

Illusory Correlations

We are pattern seeking animals and we intuitively find find patterns in the random.  Arthritis sufferers believe their pain is worse under certain weather conditions, but those same patients’ actual pain reports are uncorrelated with any particular weather condition.  We perceive relations where none exist.

Risk

Our intuitions of risk stink.  We are afraid of spectacular or uncommon risks, but downplay the common risks.  People will stay out of the water because they are afraid of sharks, but they will readily swim when they are far more likely to drown than be attacked by a Great White.  People are afraid of new risks, but comfortable with the familiar.  Whose afraid of West Nile virus now?  On the other hand the whole country is freaking out over a new flu strain that so far hasn’t even approached the death rate of the seasonal flu.

Probability

We are decent with small numbers, but once they get larger than a few we don’t do well at all.  We give much more weight to a probability of 2,000 in 10,000 than 2 in 10 even though they are they are the same.  What’s even worse, we think 1 in 7 is less likely than 10 in 100.  It seems the numerator is what counts.  10 seems intuitively more likely than 1, regardless of the denominator.  The following is my favorite all time lottery statistic.  If you buy a lottery ticket on Monday, you are 2,500 times more likely to die before the lottery drawing on Saturday than you are to win the jackpot.

Interviews

Whether it is therapists or doctors interviewing patients or employers interviewing prospective employees, we don’t do well with informal interviews.  If you are an employer, use an aptitude test.  If you are a clinician, use a computerized analysis of question answers.  In both cases your results will improve.

Sports

I love this one.  There has been a lot of research on the “hot hand” phenomenon.  Everyone just knows that a basketball player, for example, goes through hot and cold shooting streaks right?  Well, yes and no.  His shots are streaky, but it turns out that they are no more streaky than would be expected from a random distribution of his overall shooting percentage.  Counter-intuitive maybe, but it is hard to argue with the research.  The same thing applies to hot and cold winning or losing streaks by sports teams.  In this regard, imagine two people; one who actually flips a coin 100 times and another who makes up a fake series of 100 coin flips.  An expert can easily determine which one is the fake series just by looking at the results.  The one which looks more “random” will be the fake series.  The true coin flip series will have longer streaks of heads and tails than people intuitively believe would occur by chance.  The faker doesn’t include enough streaks.

To be continued…

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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This is the classic nature vs. nurture debate.  It is a topic that fascinates me and one in which I have now reached my third major, and I hope, final position.  I was spurred to write this because of something Glen said over at PluginID with his latest post: Personality Development: Be Who You Want to Be.

He said:

“I don’t think I like the idea that our personality and specifically our behaviors are largely proven to be based around our genetic make-up.”

Way back in the 70’s I was nurture all the way.  I believed we were born tabula rasa (blank slate) and that we were built by our environment and our choices.  Back in those days nurture ruled the debate.  There really wasn’t much of a debate at all.  That’s what everyone thought.

By the end of the 90’s, nature had slam dunked nurture into the waste bin of history.  The evidence was overwhelming.  Even though I didn’t like it, I was resigned to the fact that we were largely a product of our genes and the interaction between those genes and the environment.  I’m very scientific and the evidence was powerfully convincing.  I chose to believe the evidence and not my wishes that it not be so.

Now as we draw to the end of the 00’s (boy that sounds weird to say), I have a new position.  It is not simply 50/50 nature/nurture.  I have decided, and I didn’t read this anywhere – it just slowly dawned on me, that there are two questions.  The answer to the first is nature, and the answer to the second is neither nature nor nurture.

Question 1: Are humans as a population largely the product of their genes?

In many ways, I am sad to report, the answer to this question is yes.  I’m not going to argue the point here, but there are many resources on the Internet as well as a wealth of books that argue that fact persuasively.  This is one case where statistics do indeed prove the fact.  One of my favorites is now a classic of sorts even thought it was published only seven years ago: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Studies show that identical twins adopted at birth, raised apart, and never knowing each other are extremely similar.  Biological siblings adopted at birth, raised apart, and never knowing each other are about as similar as biological siblings raised together in the same family, but they are less similar than identical twins.  Unrelated siblings adopted at birth and raised in the same family are not much more similar than people randomly chosen from the street.  Children adopted at birth and raised apart from their biological parents are about as similar to those parents as are children raised by their biological parents.

This was all shocking to me and difficult to accept when I first read about it.  It seemed to slam the door shut to much of our free-will.

This is just one small area and it goes on and on.  The evidence converges from many different directions and is almost irrefutable, at least with our present knowledge.  But this is all missing my main point, which is the answer to question 2.

Question 2: Are individuals a slave to their particular genes?

Here I believe we get an entirely different answer.  My answer is an emphatic NO.  You can’t prove this statistically and it is a much more subtle argument, but it is a position that has allowed me to reconcile my personal experience and observation to the powerful scientific evidence referred to in question 1.

You may think this answer contradicts the first answer, but it does not so let me explain.  It may be indeed true that with large populations genes rule.  But that is a statistical fact about the whole and does not take into account individual variations.

For example, you may study 1,000 pairs of identical twins adopted at birth and raised apart.  You may come up with a personality correlation coefficient of .70  (I don’t know what it is, that’s just a number I threw out).  But within that set of 1,000 pairs, you could have a number of twin pairs that in fact are dramatically different from their identically genetic sibling.  Even with that, the average correlation coefficient remains very high.  So as a rule, identical twins may be very close, but that does not mean they have to be.  And this my friends is the crux of the matter.

It is my opinion that we tend to follow our genes.  The overwhelming majority of individuals just go with the flow of their natural tendencies. I think that is a fact which has been clearly demonstrated.  Let’s face it, people are lazy.  But that does not mean we are slaves to our genes.  That does not mean we cannot overcome them.  Here is  just one example that I think most people will readily understand.

Weight – this is an area where opinions run high, but it is clearly something under the control of our behavior.  There are individuals who can eat like a horse and never put on excess weight.  There are others who without doubt have to be very careful or they balloon up rapidly.

I tend to the slim side genetically and thus it is much easier for me to lose weight than most other people.  In fact, I had to abuse my body horribly to get fat.  Had I spent those 30 years eating normally and being normally active, I would have been a fairly slim person.  Instead I had to lose over 70 pounds to get back into shape about 10 years ago.  I immediately started the abuse again and went back up slowly, and it took a long time to overcome my genetic tendency to be slim both times.

I know other people who tend to be heavy and pack on the weight.  And yet, through consistent effort they have gotten themselves into decent shape.  A couple of them have achieved superior fitness.  There are literally millions of example of both directions.

Still, if you study the genetic tendencies of the population as a whole, you will find that, as a whole, the population is ruled by its genes for weight.  Within that whole, there are millions of example of people overcoming their genetic tendencies.  The same thing would apply to all genetic tendencies to greater or lesser degrees depending on the trait.

The conclusion here is that you are not a slave to your genes.  You are responsible.  Just because most people don’t bother to overcome their genes, doesn’t mean that they or you are a slave to them.  Yes, it may be easier for me to lose weight and keep it off than it is for you, but we both can do it.  Just because nature dealt you a different hand does not mean it is not within your power to change, nor does it absolve you of your responsibilities.  There is without doubt many genetic traits that make it easier for you to do something than it is for me.  I can’t even draw decent stick people and my wife draws naturally and easily.  However, if I put my mind to it and tried, I could learn to draw like her.

You can do whatever you want so get off your butt and do it.  Stop blaming your genes for your problems because that is not the whole picture.  You can do it, you have just chosen not to because it is hard.  This may take away your convenient excuse, but I choose to look at it the other way.  To me, the fact that we can overcome our genetic tendencies opens up a world of boundless possibility.

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