Comments on Cognitive factors underlying paranormal beliefs and experiences
For someone like me, who is setting out to do research on superstition, the French and Wilson article published in Tall Tales about the Mind and Brain is just about the best place to find out what kind of psychological research is being done. Of course, the article goes through the various areas at the speed of a two-week European tour – memory research on the left, probabilistic reasoning on the right. But, if you just want to find out what the basics are, this would seem to be a great place to start. Of course, I should add that not being a psychologist I am not in the position to spot problems that would be obvious to a psychologist. Having said that, there is a big issue that is close to my heart and previous research.
My worries with the article are at the level of the relationship between superstitious beliefs and rationality that is assumed by French and Wilson – just the kind of issue for a philosopher to get worked up about and for empirical psychologists not to be bothered by. Indeed, when I discussed the matter with Chris French he felt it was merely a case of different viewpoints without significant practical differences. I must beg to differ. French and Wilson talk about superstitious beliefs as due to cognitive biases, where these biases are seen as examples of human failure to reach some standard. This is, of course, the standard view of superstition so the authors are in no way unusual in assuming it. None-the-less, I feel that it is the wrong view of to hold and it is out of this worry that my limited problems with their article arise.
The view which I would argue for is to speak in terms of cognitive illusions rather than biases. The use of the term ‘biases’ suggests an unbiased norm that is veered away from. This is problematic as it is far from clear what this norm would be. The obvious but profoundly problematic answer would be that rational norms are to be read off the laws of logic. The view is problematic as despite many centuries of effort no-one has been able to come up with a satisfactory ‘dictionary’ and, indeed, once we invented systems capable of very effective use of logic, i.e. computers, we found them, to put it delicately, somewhat lacking in reason. Speaking in terms of cognitive illusions allows us to understand superstitions in a very different way. Here, the analogy is to perceptual illusions which, although capable of leading us into error, are generally due to the functioning of very useful assumptions made by our perceptual mechanisms. An example may be the human tendency to view pictures as representations of three dimensional scenes – our visual instruments assume that they are dealing with three dimensional input and given even weak clues interpret what is seen in that way. The significant and practical difference is that talking of illusions immediately suggest a way of explaining why people are superstitious. It would be hard to see why people should be biased to hold superstitious beliefs and even harder to see why they should persist with their biases once they are pointed out to them. However, if we think of superstitious beliefs are due to cognitive illusions that, themselves, are due to the functioning of normally useful assumptions it what used to be problematic becomes clear. People are superstitious as a byproduct of their relying of generally useful strategies/assumptions. Their superstitions tend to be maintained as they naturally fall back into using those generally effective strategies which then lead them back to the same conclusions – even though they are incorrect in that particular case.
The argument between what I am calling here the biases and the illusions view has been at the core of the recent dispute regarding how Kahnemann and Tversky’s work on heuristics should be interpreted – with Kahnemann and other representing the “these are failures to be fully rational” view and Gerd Gigerenzer and others representing the “that’s what it means to be rational” view. Clearly, I fall on the Gigerenzer side of that debate.
In the context of the paper, the most important thing is the issue of what is examined and what is not examined. The studies French and Wilson site standarly look into the differences between the characteristics of ’superstitious’ and ’sceptical’ people – identifying correlations between particular traits and superstitiousness. While this research is of course both interesting and useful it also has particular limitations we should be aware of. The first is that the correlations tend to be fairly weak. It isn’t that certain kinds of people believe in superstitions while others do not but, rather, that certain kinds of people are often only slightly more likely to believe a higher number of superstition. People in general are more or less superstitious, with the sceptical group being merely comparatively less likely to hold superstitious beliefs and comparatively more likely to reject them when they are identified as such. This aspect remains hidden in the paper due to the fact that French and Wilson do not generally discuss how strong the correlations they identify are. Given an illusions view, weak correlations is what one would expect against a background of fairly ubiquitous superstition. More importantly, on the illusions view it becomes natural to think of superstition not in an undifferentiated way but as specific kinds of superstitious beliefs arising due to the application of specific heuristics that lead to specific cognitive illusions. This, it seems, opens the way to a completely different way of examining superstition empirically.
The second important practical issue is that understanding superstition in terms of illusions rather than biases also opens the way to a research programme which could look at the evolutionary basis for superstion – this being spelled out in terms of the evolutionarily comprehendible selection of reasoning strategies which are powerful and useful despite their limited unfortunate by-products that take the form of succeptibility to superstion.
Having read this post, I cannot claim to know the French & Wilson article yet. I can’t even claim to have even the most vague knowledge of the relevant philosophical background, so in practical terms, all of this is rendered rather impotent. There’s a high probability that I’m about to embarrass myself, but as I’m interested in this and don’t mind being proven wrong, I’m writing the following :
To me, the term ‘cognitive biases’ reflects the role which individual experience and belief occupies in reasoning and cognition. In statistical terms, abnormal refers to a score which is significantly different from the average – it does imply a value system of sorts. Norms are established through averaging a concept across a wide enough population.
It does not follow, however, that biases must reflect a deviation from an idealised state. I personally think this belief reflects societal values more than it does any concept with the term itself. ‘Norms’ are simply concepts which society has labelled. There lies no further significance to the term than that forced upon it by society. Certainly there are states or traits which are statistically more prevalent within the population, however, there are equally those traits for which there can be no statistical mean. This does not mean that individuals in these cases are not biased. They simply hold differing biases to each other.
Rather than describing a norm, I believe ‘cognitive biases’ to be descriptive of the mechanisms through which our perceptions of reality are endogenously manipulated. We may conform to generic models of processing, but as individuals, every experience changes us. We all approach problems with different heuristics, each specifically determined as a result of our individual experience with the environment – our learned behaviour and genetics. In this sense, we approach problem solving with a belief which is at least partially predetermined, ie: we relate our knowledge to the specific circumstances in consideration. My issue is essentially that approaching a task with a bias based upon our individuality cannot imply a prerequisite ‘norm’.
Equally, there is also an argument to be made, that the term ‘cognitive illusions’ might imply deviation from a cognitive truth. If an illusory state exists, then would the illusion not be masking a reality? This term would seem to be suggesting an objective truth which, if inoculated against the illusion, one may perceive.
I may well be a psychologist with little philosophical sense, but I know that the concept of an objective truth or reality is controversial.
Mark,
Thanks for your observations. I think we should be careful not to get too worked up about the precise terms used. As you point out, the term ‘illusion’ is just as prone to being used to refer to something which is thought of as a straight-forward error as is the term ‘bias’. In using the terms I was simply trying to give names to different views of superstition – one which see it merely in terms of it being a failure of (perfectible) reason and one, the one I favour, trying to explain it in terms of being an erroneous byproduct of a generally effective cognitive strategy/heuristic. Also, as I pointed out, the language of biases and illusions is the accepted one for discussing the difference between the views of Kahnemann and those of Gigerenzer – the psychological context where this issue is very much raised.
Unlike you, I do not think that the normativity of rationality is social in origin. I think that it is the fact that the world we live in is capable of affecting us in ways which we do not understand – but which we may come to understand – that lies at the foundation of rational norms. As you point out, the concept of objective reality – which I assume in my explanation – is controversial. However – as a good colleague always keeps telling me – we must keep an open mind but not so open that our brains fall out. So, I do not take the sceptical arguments so seriously as to doubt the existence of an objective reality. I do take them seriously enough to think that they do show that we do not yet properly understand what that objective reality is. In other words, the sceptical arguments do not show that we can not achieve anything by our epistemic endeavours but that we must keep trying.
Given the view I take, I do not see normativity in terms of specific norms but, rather, in terms of a constant pressure that our environment exerts upon us. Seeing cognition very much in a developmental context, both on the individual and the evolutionary scale, the great amount of similarity in the strategies/heuristics we do individually employ (again, the Kahnemann/Gigerenzer material is to be recommended in this context) is to be explained in terms of the similarities in the environments faced by us and the resources we bring to bear upon the problems we deal with. In that way, whatever statistical ‘averages’ result are the end product of those factors and, in some way, reflective of them. For that reason it is quite fascinating to find that the statistical ‘norm’ for people is to be superstitious!
http://www.freepsychicreadingfree.org
Superstition is borm of lack of knowledge, however a few have their roots is good common sense- eg, It’s not a good or safe thing, to walk under ladders