Authors, activists, consultants, and futurologists are constantly warning us about threats so spectacular and exotic they make scenarios of nuclear Armageddon look quaint. – Daniel Gardner
It is a tired book review cliché to declare a book “important”, but I’m going to do it anyway: The Science of Fear is an important book. Its author is a journalist (with a law degree) rather than a scientist, but the book is extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted, and has been praised by many psychologists and other scientists. In twelve clear and readable chapters over about 300 pages, Gardner does what so many skeptic writers fail to do in book after book: he explains not just how people immerse themselves in fearful folly, but explains why we do so. In other words, he doesn’t merely debunk hysteria by throwing statistics at it; instead, he looks at how the instincts which served us well on the African savannah betray us in the modern world.
As Gardner explains, humans actually have two different kinds of thinking going on simultaneously and more or less independently of each other. “System One is the more ancient. It is intuitive, quick and emotional. System Two is calculating, slow and rational.” He refers to the two systems as “gut” and “head”, and convincingly demonstrates how gut – which worked beautifully for keeping pre-verbal humans out of trouble in a natural environment – leads to lots of serious problems in the complex, artificial world we’ve built. In early chapters he explains the various “rules” hard-wired into our brains which are the source of the problem:
The Law of Similarity tells our brains that things are what they look like. In nature, a new creature which looks like a lion is probably best avoided, while one that looks like an antelope is probably edible. But this principle is also the basis for sympathetic magic (the idea that harming the image of a thing also hurts the original), which in the modern age has given us censorship, draconian “child porn” laws, and neofeminists’ belief that what other women do in private magically affects them.
The Anchoring Rule means that when humans are exposed to a number, any numerical estimates which closely follow exposure are adjusted from the first number rather than calculated independently, even if the numbers have nothing to do with one another. In other words, if I took a group of people and asked them for an estimate of the number of “child sex slaves” in the US, but told them that the oft-repeated claim of 300,000 is wildly incorrect, their guesses will still be much closer to 300,000 on average than those of another group who was given no information, or who was given another, lower false estimate. In other words, once a ridiculously-high number is thrown out in propaganda, it’s in people’s heads whether they want it there or not, and only careful consideration of factual evidence can negate that.
The Rule of Typical Things directs the brain to grab ahold of single characteristics that seem to fit a stereotype, and to ignore the unlikelihood of other factors. For example, because people believe the “most whores are streetwalkers” and “all whores have pimps” stereotypes, they will tend to believe any narrative in which those two factors are embedded, no matter how ridiculous the other claims (50 clients a night, $300,000 a year, recruited within 48 hours of running away from home, etc) in the story may be.
The Example Rule can be simply stated as “the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must be.” In nature, that makes perfect sense; if you can think of lots of examples of brightly-colored snakes that are poisonous and few or none that aren’t, it makes sense to conclude that most brightly-colored snakes are poisonous. But when people are shown image after staged image of pathetic child prostitutes, and told over and over about how horrible sex workers’ lives are, and exposed to a new “survivor” narrative every week, their guts tell them that those things are common despite the fact that they are nothing of the kind.
The Good-Bad Rule means that people judge things that make them feel good as less dangerous than those which make them feel bad; when people’s minds are full of images of pimps, drug abuse, used condoms, and other “icky” things, they will be more likely to conclude that sex work is harmful and dangerous than those shown neutral or positive images (which is why prohibitionists hate “happy hooker” stories so very much).
I used prohibitionist examples in the above descriptions not because Gardner uses them, but because I want to demonstrate why a book about the psychology of fear is important to this blog. One of the examples he does use is the “child sex predator” panic (which is especially fed by the anchoring rule and the example rule), but the majority of the examples are not sex hysteria-related; he discusses things like cancer, nuclear power, breast implants, crime, chemicals and terrorism and shows how thanks to the rules described above, people imagine them to be much more dangerous than they actually are. He also discusses other fear-promoting psychological functions such as confirmation bias, the tendency for groups to follow the lead of their most extreme members, and the formation of false memories; this section was very helpful to me in writing my paper “Mind-witness Testimony”, which will be published in the Albany Government Law Review this spring (and which I will share with you at that time). Finally, he looks at those who profit from the encouragement of fear – businesses, the media, special-interest groups and governments – and shows how they exploit the irrational part of the human mind for their own purposes. Even if you don’t generally like books on psychology, I think most of my readers will like this one; it will help you to understand more about many of the things I discuss every week.
Very interesting – I had not heard of this book but I will read it. Right now one of the books I’m reading is “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse” by Pascal Bruckner which explores the “catastrophism” of the Global Warming hoax. I keep bringing it up … and I keep getting shit on by commenters but the Global Warming Hoax HAS EVERY HALLMARK of fanaticism and religious zealotry that the human trafficking hoax has. They are carbon copies – one to the other.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fanaticism-Apocalypse-Pascal-Bruckner/dp/074566976X
Also – I found this to be very interesting too – although a bit off topic …
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
A similar topic in last week’s New Scientist, about the limits of fNMR in brain scanning; you might need a subscription to see it all:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029390.600-hidden-depths-brain-science-is-drowning-in-uncertainty.html?
I do have one thing to say about the “global Warming hoax”
While the eminent danger may be exaggerated, the fall out from being more energy efficient and putting out less pollution and leaving more land undeveloped and not over using resources (like over fishing, which is, in my somewhat informed opinion, terrifyingly more problematic than “carbon foot prints”) is better technology that is cheaper and more sustainable and resources than don’t run out. Also better smelling air.
The fall out from trafficking hysteria is a more oppressive police state and rampart violations of personal freedoms.
Actually you’re wrong – the fallout is not so “rosey”.
The cleanest form of energy that is practical right now is NUCLEAR – it produces no “greenhouse” gas and yet the Global Warming crowd won’t let us develop it.
They want us to jump RIGHT NOW to lame solutions like Solar and Wind – and then, even then, they want to dictate where Wind farms are set up.
The real fallout of the Gloabal Warming hoax is destroyed economies all across Western Civilizaion. And that’s the only place it’s going to occur – because India, China, and Russia aren’t going to follow us down the path of economic suicide.
And by the way – destroying the Western economies will have the EXACT same effect that you describe …
When economies tank hard – the government steps in and siezes more power from the people. Pre-WWII Germany, The Russian Revolution, The Chinese Revolution, et al.
That’s what happens when economies tank for the long term.
Or it’s an example of something that, whilst based in science, has been seized upon by certain groups for their own agenda, groups who claim to be based on science but have demonstrated that they are only interested in science when it is useful to their cause, especially as they seem only interested in the highest, most catastrophic end of the predictions, and attack anybody even those that predict lesser consequences or even simply alternate solutions that don’t serve their purposes.
Based on their antics alone, I’d certainly be convinced it was a religion, but the example of asshole anarchists (who are about the only examples of anarchists represented in the media) have taught me not to judge an idea solely on the basis of it’s proponents.
I’m curious just which elements of Global Warming you think are hoaxes.
The agenda of the global warming deniers is a lot more obvious than the agenda of the overwhelming majority of scientists who now believe than global warming is actually happening and man made. The cool headed rationalists are on this side. The conspiracy theorists and the usual suspects are clearly on the other side. Surprised than a seasoned Maggie’s fan is blind to this. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong but you’re not in good company!
What I can’t figure out is how the GW hoaxers got the butterflies to go along with it. Probably the same way they got the Soviet Union to not reveal that the messages from Niel, Buzz, and Mike weren’t really coming from the Moon.
@_@
Might be worth creating a reading list Maggie.
Though I haven’t read it yet, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow covers the ‘gut’ and ‘head’ thinking, and how we make mistakes in reasoning:
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382456208&sr=1-1&keywords=thinking+fast+and+slow
Read it. Excellent. Covers the head /gut thing which is of course a bit more subtle than that. It is also meant for the lay reader but probably more scholarly and thus more rigourous. Not that it makes a lot of difference when you know nothing on the topic like me. The nice thing is that the end of it, there are a couple of actual articles published in whatever psychology journals and you realize that they are perfectly understantable by the non specialist. Of course a lot less entertaining that the corresponding chapters in the book but still very accessible. For a change, you have the feeling that you had a taste of the real thing.,.
You got a paper accepted? Congratulations!
On the subject of fear, there is also the thing that fear is not only faster to act, it reduces or prevents use of rational capabilities. So if you trigger fear first (“terrorism”, etc.), you may not even need transparent “rational” arguments to sell successfully people anything you like. That is probably why moral panics never go out of fashion with governments.
The Anchoring Rule = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
The Example Rule = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
No need to make up new names.
Does he give any examples of thing people should be afraid of?