E is for E.S.P.

[the_siobhan]

I used to date somebody who was really big on the concept of taking a stand. He believed very strongly that most people are apathetic or cowardly when it came to confronting anything wrong or unjust, that the world would be a better place if more people were willing to call out bad behaviour when they saw it.

I had the experience of growing up in the era when cops wouldn't press charges in cases of "domestics" and when teachers and doctors refused to get involved even when I flat-out told them what was going on in my house. So this kind of commitment to getting involved pushes a great big button for me. But after a while I started to come to the conclusion that in his eagerness to take some kind of decisive action, he didn't appear to be all that interested in making sure he knew what the best action was to take. He just wanted to be doing something, and once he had made his mind up any new information was deemed to be making excuses. I was frequently confused by his conviction that he could pick out the guilty parties in a dispute where (in my mind) he really didn't seem to be in a position to know what had really happened. When he started making pronouncements about events that I had witnessed and he hadn't I finally decided he was full of shit, and that was the end of my emotional investment in his desire to take a stand on the side of righteousness.

I bring him up because he was an extreme example, and because, well, extreme or not he's an example of something that I see all the time. People seem to want a conclusion, any conclusion. When the OJ trial was going on people would occasionally ask me whether or not I thought he was guilty. I would respond that I didn't know, I hadn't been following the case. "But what do you think?" they would persist. They seemed baffled at the idea that I could honestly have no opinion. I, for my part, was baffled that seemed to want me to have an opinion based on... air or something.

I am probably especially conscious of this kind of thing. One of the ways in which I carry around my damage is that I am extremely over-sensitive to feeling like I have been convicted without benefit of trial. I can't count the number of relationships (friendships and otherwise) that have ended because somebody decided they already knew What I Did - and for bonus points Why I Did It - without deigning to ask me about it first. As soon as I feel like I'm being called upon to justify somebody else's versions of my actions, I pretty much immediately lose all interest in having the discussion at all and that's not really conducive to working things out.

So when I see people taking sides on a issue - any issue - the first thing I want to know is what they are basing their conclusions on. And a lot of the times the answer is information sources that I honestly don't know how to evaluate. What it looks like from my perspective is that people are putting a lot of faith in third- or forth-hand reports - whereas I tend to assume that even people who were there don't necessarily have the whole story. Or that people are making the emotional decision to believe person X over person Y because they simply like person X better - whereas I tend to assume that even the best of people screw up and make mistakes and misunderstand things and make errors in judgment.

It's possible that I am hyper-critical of information. I do happen to believe that most people usually try to tell the truth. I just don't believe that people unfailingly know what the truth is. If you've ever read Stranger in a Strange Land there's a passage where somebody asks a character in the story what colour a house is. She responds, "It's painted white on this side." That's me.

And this disconnect happens often enough that I've actually started to wonder if there is some additional information going around that I just don't have the skills to access. I mean, the whole time I was growing up I kept running afoul of all the unwritten rules that nobody ever explained but that everybody else seemed to understand through some kind of osmosis. It took me many years of watching people to figure out just how much information is transmitted non-verbally. Maybe this is another one of those cases where I'm missing something that is so obvious to other people that they can't even articulate where they got it - it just becomes yet another thing that "everybody knows".

Or maybe people just have ESP.

Comments

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

You may be too rational for your own good? Hope you don't mind the terminology spam, but I've found psychology really useful in my overanalysis of things. All these labels aren't really precise, but they point to underlying dynamics.

From my perspective, there's a few cognitive biases errors in play there. First, premature closure:
http://www.isabelhealthcare.com/home/misdiagnosis_faq/media?ida=isabelstory

A 2005 study published in Archives of Internal Medicine found that cognitive error, often referred to as premature closure, is the single most common cause of diagnosis errors. Premature closure occurs when a clinician arrives at an initial diagnosis that seems to fit the facts then does not consider other reasonable possibilities.

Once a conclusion is made, no more effort is spent re-examining the alleged evidence that led to the conclusion. Intolerance of ambiguity can lead to a tendency toward premature closure. Further tendencies toward dogmatism don't help either, since some types dislike backtracking, deriding it as "flip-flopping" and so forth. Sometimes it's rational to reserve final judgment instead of running with a snap judgment. However, rationality isn't always optimal in a historical evolutionary context when one might be in a fight-or-flight situation, and reserving judgment could mean being a predator's meal.

Two, people can sometimes trust what they hear from their social network despite contradictory evidence:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21311730/wid/11915773

The new study, published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals individuals sometimes place so much stock in gossip that they accept it as true even if their own observations and experiences suggest otherwise.

It could be in-group bias in play there. It's interesting that it's been found to be sometimes sufficiently strong that a disconnect from reality occurs. Cue Philip K. Dick.

Finally, intentions only go so far in my book. People may even genuinely think they're telling the truth, but sometimes they're undone by motivated reasoning:
http://www.ciadvertising.org/SA/fall_05/adv392/kasey/site1/motivated_reasoning2.htm

Research on motivation has consistently shown that people are motivated to come to a desired conclusion (see Kunda 1990 for review). Building support through a broad sample of research, Kunda's (1990) theory of motivated reasoning posits that "people rely on cognitive processes and representations to arrive at their desired conclusions, but motivation plays a role in determining which of these will be used on a given occasion"...

Kunda devotes much of the theory of motivated reasoning to motives arrived at through directional bias to reach a desired conclusion. Motivation affects reasoning "through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes: strategies for accessing, constructing and evaluating beliefs"... This occurs when people are motivated to reach a certain, desired conclusion, and they conduct a biased memory search to find justification for their decision.

That's also reflected in confirmation bias, where people tend to look for things which they already agree with, and avoid looking for things that might contradict their position.

More likely people think they have ESP, when they don't. Heh.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

You are always the best source of links.

I saw an article in Scientific American last month that suggested that decision making is easy and fast for us, but re-evaluating conclusions is a lot more work. Based on measuring brain activity. I should dig that sucker up.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

Cool. Neuroimaging studies are fascinating.

On my way home, I was reminded of another angle on things: cognitive dissonance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/science/06tier.html
I was listening to a podcast featuring one of the authors of the book mentioned here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12125926