I found myself baffled by a recent article by psychologist Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D, in which she says: “When skepticism becomes a commitment to the belief that a phenomenon is unlikely, nonexistent, or already fully explained within existing models, it is no longer neutral”, then goes on to describe biases which can lead to this.
I must admit that I was tempted to ignore the article and move on, but I forced myself to read it and try to understand the point being made. While the article uses the word ‘skeptic’, the through-line appears to describe a ‘denier’, with a chain of reasoning in which each point seems more-or-less reasonable on the surface, but leads to dubious conclusions.
Looked at in that light, the article became far more interesting to me. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the article is an attempt to reframe skepticism as denialism, but Dr Vilhauer’s role as an Advisory Board Member of the Disclosure Foundation – an organisation whose mission is described as “Advancing the understanding of unidentified anomalous phenomena through policy, law, and public education” – makes me wonder. I will, however, resist the temptation to make assertions regarding motivations, as I would like to avoid the fundamental attribution error.
And that brings us to bias, which most skeptics think of as something to be guarded against.
The original meaning of the word in English appears to refer to a physical slant or slope, which generates a tendency to move in a particular direction. It can also refer to ballast, which is used to increase the stability of a sailing ship.
In modern usage, the word generally carries negative connotations, and suggests erroneous or inappropriate preference for a particular position. This appears to be the central position of well-known psychologist Daniel Kahneman, described by Daniel Gilbert as
…human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds.
The wording implies a trade-off between the efficiency of unconscious heuristics and the effort required for conscious, deliberate thought. In Kahneman’s famous book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, these are referred to as ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’.
While I believe Kahneman’s work has enormous value, and has significantly increased our understanding of how we approach the world, I have some concerns about this framing, as it implies a value judgment that deliberate thought is ‘better’, though more labour-intensive, and that our built-in heuristics have value mainly when there’s no time for a ‘superior’ method for making decisions.
Instead, I think we should be trying to understand our heuristics and biases in terms of their adaptive value. This perspective does not attempt to make value judgments, and allows us to evaluate these phenomena in a more balanced way. This is consistent with the position of German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who argues that heuristic reasoning should be thought of as a tool which is adaptive in itself, rather than as a short-cut for when there is no time to do things the ‘right’ way.
As an illustration, consider the fundamental attribution ‘error’, which refers to the tendency of people to vary their evaluation of situational and personality factors, depending on whether they are evaluating their own actions or those of another. This is where someone might think that they are late because of factors beyond their control, but someone else is late because they are lazy or selfish.
The general framing of this bias is negative, where we ‘fail’ to show the same degree of empathy to others, or judge members of our ‘in-group’ less harshly than those outside because we are not being ‘fair’. From an adaptive perspective, however, it is possible to view this differently. Think of humans fifty thousand years ago, moving in very small groups, where survival was dependent on the social cohesion within those groups. In such an environment, trust within the group was essential to survival, while excessive trust outside the group represented a potentially lethal risk.
With this in mind, I would offer analogies with modern technology that describe the overall system in objective terms, without making value judgments. At a high level, a computer can be described as running applications – such as a web browser, which are executed by an operating system – such as Linux, Windows, or MacOS, which runs on the underlying hardware. In practice, applications can be changed with comparative ease, while the operating system includes settings which can be adjusted to some degree but also includes hardware-based settings which cannot be changed unless the hardware changes.
Our deliberate, System 2 thinking can be considered analogous to applications, which can be changed significantly during a human lifetime. By extension, our System 1 heuristics are closer to the operating system – some can potentially be adjusted to some degree, but most are dependent on the hardware and change on an evolutionary timescale. This makes intuitive sense as well, as many of our cognitive biases appear to have developed to optimise our cognitive load, particularly in survival situations.
So, where does this lead us? Rather than treating bias as something negative which must be guarded against, we should try to understand it in context, and in a non-judgmental way. I think the distinction is subtle, but important.
Looking again at the fundamental attribution bias, if we consider it something negative, we might be inclined to encourage people to evaluate others through a deliberately emotionless lens. But humans are inherently social creatures, so I think that approach would be destined to fail.
If, however, we think in adaptive terms, it becomes apparent that we can address it through working to broaden our understanding of others and increasing our ability to feel empathy for their positions. As it happens, humans are good at empathy, so this is much more likely to be effective. Eventually, our built-in heuristics will catch up, and we’ll be better able to function in environments alien to those of our distant ancestors.
It may seem a minor point, but I think it’s important to recognise bias wherever we see it – especially when we’re talking about bias.
