Robyn Dawes - Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo- Scientists, Lunatics, And The Rest Of Us Systematically Fail To Think Rationally

How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally

Robyn M. Dawes , Ph.D.

First published 2001 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2001 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A Cataloging-in-Publication data record is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 13:978-0-8133-4026-5 (pbk)
ISBN 13:978-0-8133-6552-7 (hbk)

"Upon examination, the 'primitive' or 'savage' mind studied a century ago by Tylor and Frazer has become theoretically transformed onto the 'intuitive' or 'everyday' mind of normal adults in all cultures. What contemporary researchers have discovered is that most of us have a 'primitive' mentality much of the time."

Richard A. Shweder,
"Rethinking Culture and Personality Theory,
Part III." Ethos, 1980, 8, 61-62

People treat reason as if it were the most minor and harmful aspect of a whole human being. It is as if a soldier standing guard were to say to himself: "What good would my rifle be if I were now to be attacked by a dozen enemies? I shall therefore lay it aside and smoke opium cigarettes until I doze off."

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness:
A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941

In my very limited clinical experience in my first two years of graduate school, I preferred working with psychotic individuals to working with neurotic ones. We neurotics tend to whine, to feel unappreciated, to be "passive aggressive," andworst of allto expect our therapists to alleviate our problems. In contrast, psychotics tend to be up front about their views and beliefs and expectations, and though they might wish to be as manipulative as neurotics, they generally can't pull it off as well.

At that time I became interested in "schizophrenic reasoning/' which was believed to be different from ordinary types of thought. For example, a widely quoted type of distortion was illustrated by the case of a schizophrenic woman who believed that she was the Virgin Mary because she was a virgin. This conclusion was thought to be "reasoning according to the Von Domarus principle" (Von Domarus, 1944), by which schizophrenic individuals often inferred identity from common predicates. The problem I noted, however, was that reasoning according to the Von Domarus principle did not seem specific to schizophrenics. For example, during the waning days of McCarthy ism, I used to listen religiously to a rabid right-wing news commentatorjust to find out what "they" were up to. One evening he noted that somebody had criticized him for inferring that because a particular individual supported a world peace organization also supported by the Communists, the person was a Communist (or at the least a Communist dupe or fellow traveler). The commentator proclaimed, "Well, this conclusion makes perfect sense to me!"

It was not just schizophrenics and right-wing commentators (and some left-wing ones) who seemed to be reasoning according to the Von Domarus principle. My supervisor in my second year of graduate work apparently believed that if someone made a response to the Rorschach inkblot test that was "typical" of a schizophrenic individual, then that person must be schizophrenic. Again, we had the equating of the respondent with a type of individual on the basis of a common action or characteristic. Of course, purely ordinal inference on the basis of such commonality is correct: The probability of a category A given B will be greater than the probability of A if and only if the probability of B given A is greater than the probability of Bas will be precisely demonstrated later in this book. But identity (which makes one of these two probabilities equal to one), or equating the probability of A given B with that of B given A (which the schizophrenic woman, the right-wing newscaster, and my supervisor all tended to do), made no sense. This observation led to my hypothesis that so-called schizophrenic reasoning could be found among many people in ordinary life. My doctoral dissertation demonstrated that people would distort newspaper-like stories in ways consistent with the alleged principles of psychotic reasoning.

Now, what exactly was the basis of such reasoning? One way of analyzing it appeared to be equating A given B with B given A. When A and B are categories, psychotic reasoning makes them identical (like the virginal woman with the Virgin Mary). There were, however, related types of distortion that didn't quite follow that principle. For example: "I associate the growth of the welfare state with socialism and socialism with communism, and I'm therefore guilty of what President Kennedy accuses the 'extremists' of" (Dan Smoot, quoted in Knebel, 1962, p. 21). One can reinterpret what Smoot says as reasoning according to the Von Domarus principle, but there is a simpler interpretation. He sees only two alternatives: the welfare statewhich is equivalent to socialism and communismand the nonwelfare state. The previous examples can also be analyzed in terms of reaching a conclusion by considering a deficient number of alternatives. For example, the woman who thinks that she is the Virgin Mary does not consider the alternative that it is possible to be virginal without being the Virgin Mary; in fact, there are four possibilities, given that the Virgin Mary herself never claimed to be virginal when she gave birth to Christ's younger siblings. Again, in the Smoot example, possibilities are ignored. Although perhaps all Communists favor the welfare state, there are certainly people in favor of the welfare state who are not Communists, as well as people who support world peace but who are not Communists. And my supervisor seemed to ignore the fact that many perfectly normal people occasionally make responses to Rorschach inkblots that are "typical" of schizophrenic people. The backward inference is particularly dubious because there are generally many more non-schizophrenic people who might see something "typical" of schizophrenics than there are schizophrenics who see something typical of schizophrenia.

Finally, it is important to note that this type of reasoning is not limited to psychotics, right-wingers, or psychologists. Consider, for example, the following anecdote that appeared in Time magazine to describe Brown University's admissions process in the late 1970s:

The next morning, the admissions committee scans applications from a small rural high school in the Southwest. It is searching for prized specimens known as neat small-town kids. Amy is near the top of her class, with mid-500 verbals, high-600 math and science. She is also poor, white and geoshe would add to the geographic and economic diversity that saves Brown from becoming a postgraduate New England prep school. While just over 20% of the New York State applicants will get in, almost 40% will be admitted from Region 7Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Amy's high school loves her, and she wants to study engineering. Brown needs engineering students; unfortunately, Amy spells engineering wrong. "Dyslexia," says Jimmy Wrenn, a linguistics professor. After some debate, the committee puts her on the waiting list. (Thomas, 1979, p. 73)