EDUC61711 Digital, Media and Information Literacy

Week 9: Cognitive biases, conspiracy theories and counterknowledge

Introduction

• In essence this presentation considers “failures of information literacy”.

• It discusses some examples of how and why people can be led to believe things that have no credibility or validity.

• We might think ourselves immune to this kind of deception: but I will show you how these things are innate in us all, and can be exploited.

• Indeed it is because of the existence of these biases that systems have developed to transcend individual perceptions of ‘truth’ and develop more robust, collective assessments.

Saving cognitive work

• The ETC materials in week 9 introduced the idea of ‘cognitive load’.

• Our senses are constantly gathering a lot of information about the world around us…

• … but because most of it is irrelevant, we filter a lot of it out.

Assuming you’re sitting down whileviewing this presentation…

Until you makethe next click forward…

…you’re not currently consciousof the feeling of your backside/back against the chair.

Now you are… because I drew yourattention to it. But most of the time, because the feeling is constant, yourmind filters it out.

Our minds make all sorts of ‘cuts’ like this and often they arevery useful.

For a start, they help us focus attention, e.g., on a conversationin a busy or noisy place.

More broadly, they bring a solidity to our psychology: meaning,we do not have to be constantly questioning the very basis ofour lives. We know certain things are consistently the case andexpect them to continue to be so.

In the movie Memento Guy Pearce’s character cannot do this, thus,every few minutes he has to work out where he is and what heis doing there. (Hence the tattoos.)

Imagine this in reality — I am sure it would be appalling.

Seeking patternsHowever, when information turns up that does not accordwith our expectations about the world, it can throw out ourperception.

On the next click, you will seea playing card. As soon as yousee it, call out what card it is.

Did you say the six of hearts?Many people do.

But it isn’t — it’s a red six ofspades. Look again.

The playing card exploits our minds’ tendency to expect things toconform to a known, common pattern. Here is another example.

This is a picture of ManchesterUnited FC lining up before amatch against Bayern in 1999.

However, there are 12 people inthis photograph, not 11.

This is not a MUFC player, buta guy called Karl Power, whojumped from the crowd to jointhe players as they ran onto the pitch.

What is the key thingthat he had to have inorder to pull off thisstunt?

The answer is, the kit. Had he been dressed in a suit he’d neverhave got away with it.

Football players wear kitsprecisely so that cognitive load can be saved. To have to spotfaces of one’s own team would be too difficult in a fast-pacedmatch.

So the stadium security, photographers and even most of the playerssaw only the kit, and not the man — and let him through.

(Though it seems Roy Keane, on the extreme right, may have noticed.)

This tendency to want to have things fit into patterns we arealready familiar with is a cognitive bias.

Specifically it is a bias called the “confirmation bias”.

If things don’t fit the pattern,we may become anxious orconfused — or ignore the information altogether.

We touched on this earlier in this course,when considering the work of CarolKuhlthau and “information anxiety”.

In the end, all learning requires us to process new information —but the confirmation bias shows how we can also easily rejectchallenges to our existing preconceptions, and thus fail to learn.

Other cognitive biases

We will return to the confirmation bias shortly, as it helps explainphenomena like conspiracy theories. But there are many othercognitive biases.

For instance, note the affirmation bias. We don’t like believing thatwe have screwed up or made a mistake. We take credit for oursuccesses, but want to deflect the blame for our failures.

The man in green was a banker called Nick Leeson. Over three years(1992-1995) he singlehandedly lost £827million on the stock marketand caused the collapse of Barings Bank.

Even when it became obvious that his strategy was disastrous, neither Leeson nor his employers read the danger signs. In factthe bank allowed him to check his own work, which was notusually done (precisely to avoid situations like these).

The affirmation bias is basically the psychological state of denial: wesimply refuse to believe that something is going badly wrong.

We ignore information that challenges the personal constructs we holdabout ourselves and our identities.

As the Leeson case shows (and see also the collapses of Enron, orthe 2008 sub-prime crisis), this can happen at an institutional levelas well as a personal one.

http://www.slideshare.net/efern211/cognitive-biases-a-visual-study-guide-by-the-royal-society-of-account-planning

The link below leads to a Slideshare presentationwhich lists over 100 other cognitive biases.

I highly recommend having a look. (The link isalso included in the week 9 materials.)

The point?It is largely because of cognitive bias that we have developedvarious other means of compensating for these failures ofindividual perception…

…like scientific method, which requires the testing of statementsabout the world, and not theirsimple acceptance, however“authoritative” the scientist mayseem to be.

Counterknowledge and ‘bad science’

Writers like Damian Thompson, in Counterknowledge and Ben Goldacre(see picture and www.badscience.net)are scathing about what they see as ‘pseudo-science’ infecting publicdebate.

Read Thompson’s extract, provided inthe materials (though you might notlike it…)

Remember that we spoke in week 3 about the ways that the academic enterprise is supposed to prevent the hunches, guesses and ideologies of researchers from entering thepublic sphere unchecked.

But both Goldacre and Thompson makethe point that the cross-fertilisation ofscience and the media mean that thesechecks and balances do not always getproperly applied…

…particularly not when there is moneyto be made from them.

Conspiracy theoriesConspiracy theories are a classic example of how cognitive biasescan lead to a failure to learn, to process information properly.

Peter Knight’s book Conspiracy Culture (2000) is an excellent study.

See the recorded lecture, slides and review in the week 9 materials.

The assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963 hasbecome the classic conspiracy theory.

Was he killed by a lone assassin, thought to be Lee Oswald?Or by the CIA or other unaccountable figures in the US government?

This photo of Oswald was widely distributed after the assassination,and used to support the ‘angry lonenut’ theory. Some believe it to be faked, however.

Knight makes a clear link here to the confirmation bias (2000, p.98):

“[conspiracy theorists] claim that any new piece of information which would undermine existing theories or confirm rival ones might itself be a deliberate plant by the powers that be to lead investigators astray. Likewise the lack of evidence of a conspiracy can itself be taken as evidence of a conspiracy to deliberately withhold vital information. The infamous backyard photos of Oswald confirm that he was indeed the lone gunman? Then they must have been faked.”

Conspiracy theories also arose around the work of Dr. AndrewWakefield in the UK, whose theories about a link between theMMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism led toa substantial drop in the vaccination rate (see graph).

• Why a ‘conspiracy theory’?

• Many other medical scientists tried to substantiate Wakefield’s claims— as good scientists should. None were able to repeat his findings.

• But because Wakefield had powerful allies in the media (particularly the Daily Mail), the same confirmation bias came into play.

• Studies which refuted Wakefield’s claims were treated as evidence that there was a conspiracy to keep him gagged - not that he might have been wrong.

ICT, the Internet and social media are often seen as culpable inhelping conspiracy theories and counterknowledge spreadmore rapidly… and probably there is some truth in this.

However, as Goldacre and Thompson both note, they can alsoprovide a valuable alternative perspective to that pushed throughthe mainstream media, which is quite prepared to push counter-knowledge itself.

• In the end, the only way to overcome cognitive biases, counterknowledge and conspiracy theories is to reveal them… reflect on them… and learn about them.

• Information literacy clearly plays a key role here…

• …hence this presentation.