New episodes out for the Token Skeptic podcast!
The first is for all of those keen on psychogy of deception, illusion and how we can be fooled – Token Skeptic #29 features an interview with Prof Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, talking about their new book ‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Decieve Us’.
You can directly download the mp3 here: (Token Skeptic 29 – On The Invisible Gorilla – An Interview With Daniel Simons And Christopher Chabris) or you can subscribe on iTunes.
The second episode – Token Skeptic #30 (as I’ll be very busy for the rest of the week, so I thought I’d get this out early) is is one for all the ABC TV fans who have enjoyed the Hungry Beast pro-skeptical investigations and have checked out the offerings for Science Week here in Australia. It’s Daniel Keogh, talking to me from the ABC Ultimo studios, during the time I was in Sydney for a Philosophy education conference. Download the mp3 here: Token Skeptic 30 - On Science Communication, Hungry Beasts And Professor Funk – An Interview With Daniel Keogh.
Daniel is responsible for this particular segment that has been very well-recieved – ‘Gardasil For Guys’:
For a teaser of some of the content – here’s a short transcript from some of the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ interview that was relevant to both episodes – why might people be anti-vaccination?
Kylie: I was particularly impressed by Chapter Five in the book (‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Decieve Us’), looking at vaccinations and the vaccination myths that are out there. What led you to tackle this issue, because I was really surprised to find it the book?
Chris: I’ll start with that. In the book we sort of progress from perception – we talk about what we pay attention to and what we notice – into memory. And then from memory, into questions of confidence, which is sort of a natural connection; we have different levels of confidence in our memories, we’re certain of our memories when they’re really not accurate. And from there, we sort of moved into the direction of ‘well, what about our confidence about what we know and where do those beliefs come from?’ The illusion that you’re talking about here is called ‘The illusion of cause’. It’s the illusion that we understand what causes what in the world. In fact, we’re drawing that conclusion from evidence that doesn’t support that conclusion, that something is causing another thing.
For example. if two things only happen to occur together, there’s an association between them: ‘Kids who watch more television are more aggressive’. Well, it’s natural to assume that watching more television made them more aggressive. But it could equally go the other way – it could be that kids who are more aggressive are more likely to watch television – or there could be some third factor that causes both of them, maybe their parents don’t pay much attention to them, so the kids watch TV and go out and are aggressive, you could create an infinite number of explainations. But our minds for some reason, like to jump to the causal conclusion. That one must be causing the second one.
In fact, it can be even easier, we don’t even need the kind of statistical data like TV and aggression! We just need one good story, for example, one’s personal experience, having their child be vaccinated for measles, for example (or any one of the childhood vaccinations, but measles tends to be focused on) and then be diagnosed with autism unfortunately, shortly after that. Those two things might be connectly closely in time (say, the vaccination preceeded the diagnosis) and, this is crutially important, there has to be some sort of plausible reason or some belief that would let you connect those two things. So, ‘Vaccination involves injecting strange, foreign subjects into the body and autism is a noticible change in behaviour.’
So you can see how those things might inform the belief that ‘one causes the other’ - and being told later that people have done studies, with hundreds of thousands of subjecst, finding that there is no difference in the rate of autism between people who have been vaccinated and people who haven’t been vaccinated – that information can have very little effect on the causal belief you’ve formed, based on the vivid story of personal experience. And that’s the illusion we’re talking about in that chapter, this illusion of cause – believing that you’ve detected that one thing causes another, when in fact, all you’ve got is that one thing came before another one, or that one thing happens in the presence of the other, but there’s no causal relationship.
Daniel: Let me just amplify one thing about this – we’re not saying that people who do this are in any way dumber or less educated or less intelligent…
Kylie: No…
Daniel: …in comparison to anyone else. This is just what all of us do naturally – we reason based on anecdotes and stories, and examples. And it’s very hard to reason based on statistics, it’s not something we do naturally, any of us, even scientists. So, if you look at the people who are the proponents of this link between vaccines and autism, at least in the United States – on average they are better educated than the general public and they’re higher income than the general public. So, these are not people who are lacking in education or resources. It’s something we do very naturally, because we accumulate anecdotes really well and in many ways it’s a lot like accumulating this belief that you’ll always notice unexpected things, because you’re only aware of the ones where you noticed it.
In the case of vaccines and autism, the only cases that get reported are the ones where people think there is a link. The anecdotes are: ‘My kid got vaccinated and now they have autism.’ It doesn’t get reported: ‘My kid got vaccinated and he DIDN’T get autism!’ Because that’s not newsworthy. So, we don’t accumulate those numbers we would need in our minds, those anecdotes in our mind that would give us the right pattern. Instead, we accumulate the ones that get publicised, and that leads to the wrong pattern. It happens very naturally: we accumulate anecdotes and when we do that, we give a lot more weight to them than we probably should.
Listen to the whole show at Token_Skeptic_29_-_On_The_Invisible_Gorilla!
You must log in to post a comment.