Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (25 page)

People seem inordinately impressed with experiences that are in no way exceptional. Such circumstances can be explained away with relative ease, yet the experience itself feels overwhelmingly powerful. Walking through a gallery in a foreign city, I bump into my high school art teacher. For days I can’t stop talking about the coincidence. Can you believe that? My
art
teacher. In a
gallery
! In a foreign city, no less. I mean, what were the odds!?

Don’t try to tell me while I am in the throes of the coincidence, but the answer is that the odds were actually quite good. Not for
that
particularly gallery or that particular person, but the odds of experiencing this kind of coincidence are surprisingly large. There are two reasons for this: One is that by leading active lives we are constantly sampling a tremendous number of experiences—persons, places, circumstances—any one of which can enter into a coincidence. Second is what we have earlier termed
multiple endpoints
. Our definition of coincidence is tremendously flexible. A lot of different possibilities qualify for the award of “Amazing!” Viewed from this point of view, what is truly surprising is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen even more frequently.

As rational as this may sound, it is no match for the emotional impact of living through the experience. You know you have an anecdote on your hands almost from the moment it occurs and, like all good anecdotes, it becomes embellished to the point where it sounds like those events were truly unique and only those events would have qualified for the “meaningful coincidence” label. This makes the result seem even further from “chance” and closer to the
Twilight Zone
than it actually was. Consider a parallel situation that is probably known to every teacher of statistics in the world. If you are in a class with about thirty students, you can amaze them by telling them that there is a very high probability that two of them have the same birthday. Students who have never heard about this demonstration will find it counterintuitive and argue with you. Yet it works, time after time. In fact, if the number of students lies between thirty-five and forty, it is a virtual certainly. Even thirty students offer a very good chance your demonstration will succeed. There is no magic involved, no slight-of-hand. It is only impressive because—as in the art gallery example—people fail to consider just how many cases are actually being sampled. Of course, as that number grows, so does the likelihood of a “hit.” Most students falsely conceptualize the birthday example as if you were asking a room of thirty people whether they had one particular birthday. But you are not. In fact you are asking each of thirty-plus students whether they were born on any of thirty-plus different days. That creates a lot of opportunities for success, just as walking through life or European art galleries offers numerous opportunities for the “exceptional” to occur.

The final piece of the puzzle is suggested by Thomas Gilovich, who notes that all of this repeated sampling of events is not even obvious to the person. As far as she is concerned, she is simply living. Yet, for all intents and purposes, she is repeatedly flipping a coin or playing the roulette wheel. We fail to see the repeated sampling as such, however, because unlike roulette or tossing coins, we are constantly sampling different kinds of events as our lives unfold. There is almost nothing to remind us that we
are
repeatedly sampling until we experience a “hit.” At that moment, we understandably feel as if a very unlikely thing has happened. “I wasn’t even playing the roulette wheel and I won!” If we could be made aware that we had been doing almost nothing
but
playing the roulette wheel from dawn to dusk each day, would the occasional payoff seem like an episode worthy of the
Twilight Zone
?

Let me begin by making a simple claim: If our ability to gather and evaluate evidence were not so deeply flawed, there would be no need for continued discussion of ESP. Certainly, there would be
talk
of it, the same way there is occasional talk of x-ray vision or walking through walls or reincarnation. But the clear absence of reliable evidence for any of ESP’s most common forms, such as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, or psychokinesis, would remove it from the realm of serious consideration or rational debate.

As we know, this is far from the case. Belief in ESP is widespread and it is by no means confined to those with marginal intellectual gifts. There is even evidence that belief in ESP may correlate positively with education. How can this be?

Rather than debating whether ESP exists in any of its well-publicized forms, it is probably more instructive to examine 1) the kind of evidence we would need to confirm the existence of ESP, and 2) the kind of evidence we actually have. Needless to say, to believers, there is an adequate match between 1) and 2). To nonbelievers, there is not.

Debating ESP should not be like debating the existence of God; that is, its acceptance should not be based on faith. ESP is a phenomenon that rightly or wrongly has been dragged into the realm of the natural world. Confirming its existence should depend on well-established empirical and logical techniques. Science offers us a value-free body of skills for collecting data and evaluating evidence. These should pertain as readily to ESP as they do to astronomy, sociology, or molecular biology. Why, then, does the debate continue?

The answer is that we can’t seem to agree on the rules. For some, the tests
have
been run and the evidence overwhelmingly disconfirms the existence of ESP. But for others, the so-called negative evidence isn’t particularly relevant and might even be construed as positive. Thus, the search continues and the belief remains strong.

These discussions do not take place behind closed doors. In his book
How We Know What Isn’t So
,
³
Thomas Gilovich surveys evidence and cites the report of a blue-ribbon panel constituted in 1988 by the National Research Council. Offering an even-handed overview of 130 years of research, the panel concluded there was no evidence to support belief in ESP. A reasoned exchange between believers and skeptics appeared in 1987 in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
,
⁴
one of the most respected journals in the area of cognitive science. More than one hundred pages of journal space was devoted to the debate, which ultimately centered on the issue of
replicability
. The ability to repeat a result is a cornerstone of scientific credibility. The very idea that a finding occurs only once, and only in one place, is anathema to science. Yet it is what characterizes much of the evidence for ESP.

Because believers can anticipate that skeptics will point to the fleeting nature of their findings in any debate, they, themselves, have begun to raise the issue. A good offense is the best defense. By attacking the criterion of replicability before it can be used against them, believers have stalled serious discussion. This should not be confused with the case of old enemies who finally agree to sit down to work out their differences, only to be sidetracked by arguments about the size of the table or the color of the walls. In this case, the disagreement could not be more fundamental.

Replicability is the hallmark of the scientific method, and ESP supporters want immunity from it. There are two very good reasons not to allow this to happen. First, the history of ESP research is replete with examples of faulty methodology and outright fraud. Indeed, there may be no other area of psychological research where these problems are more glaring. If anything, history shows we need to tighten the strictures of the scientific method, not loosen them.

Second, ESP is a tremendously important possibility. If its existence could be proven, it would change the very way in which we see ourselves and the universe around us. This is no small matter, and, if anything, we want to be extremely sure of ESP’s existence before we embrace it. This hardly seems to be the place to lower the standard of evidence.

Just about everyone, including practitioners of conventional medicine, agrees that conventional/Western/AMA medicine doesn’t have all the answers. This is a good start: agreement from all parties. The problem is, where do we go from here? Does it follow that if A doesn’t have the answer, then B must? Logic certainly does not suggest that, yet people flock to alternative forms of healing. In some cases, they meet earnest practitioners who might hold some promise. In too many other cases, they meet quackery. Some of that quackery (like so-called psychic surgeons) is outright fraud, designed to prey on the desperate and gullible. Other brands of alternative medicine are not so cynical. The worst you can say about them is that they waste your time and money. That’s not the end of the world—people waste their time and money on bad books, movies, and relationships all the time. It’s theirs to waste.

Our concern here is not to distinguish between good and bad forms of medicine. Rather, we are concerned with the mental errors that lead to
beliefs
about alternative medicine. Why do we really think various therapies work when, demonstrably, they do not? How can we be so clueless in the face of clear evidence? Presumably, people do not want to hold erroneous beliefs about medicine, yet many of us do.

Just how widespread is the use of alternative approaches to medicine? Depending on how the question is phrased and which practices are included, the US National Institutes of Health report that about two-thirds of the population employs “complementary alternative medicine” (CAM). There is a lot of variation in what people turn to in addition to their family physician. For some it may be glucosamine plus chondroitin tablets for their arthritis or St. John’s Wort for their nerves. For others, it’s prayer or prayer groups or faith healing. For some, it may be iridology or applied kinesiology. Other patients visit a naturopath or chiropractor or homeopath. Roughly a fifth of the population purchases and uses “natural” remedies from health food stores or specialized sections of pharmacies.

How many of these approaches have been objectively tested and documented to actually help? The answer is, virtually none. Certainly, there have been studies that provide suggestive evidence—exactly the kind of thing that should prompt larger-scale, more rigorous testing. But such tests require sizable investments of time and money, neither of which seems to be in great supply. It is far easier to go on speculative or anecdotal evidence. How much does a package of echinacea lozenges cost anyway? Even if it doesn’t work, it isn’t going to kill you.

There is a fundamental flaw that runs through virtually all reasoning about alternative medicine. It is simply this: the body is likely to heal itself in time, regardless of what you do. This means, whatever you are doing at the time of this natural healing will receive undue credit for the improvement. Adding various chemicals and practices to the mix will simply complicate things when it comes time to understand your health and how to keep it. By analogy, think of one of those old-fashioned radios, televisions, or amplifiers that worked on vacuum tubes. You turned on the TV and had to wait for it to warm up. It
would
come on, but not immediately. Now imagine someone desperate to hear or see his favorite program. He turns the “on” switch and . . . nothing. He becomes anxious, rotating other dials needlessly. Still nothing. He paces, maybe turning circles in the room. Still nothing. Finally, he smacks the set on the side and immediately on comes the screen. From the wisdom of our vantage point we might understand that the smack to the side had no part in attaining the desired outcome. But at the time, frustrated by a lingering silence, desiring an outcome that seemed overdue, the connection seems reasonable. If the timescale were a little slower and the outcome were not
I Love Lucy
but your return to health, might you not be a little intrigued by that new herbal remedy you took just last night before you woke up feeling better?

In terms of scientific method, this is another case of the missing control group. You can’t just listen to someone raving about how quickly her cold was cured when she took gobs of vitamin C or tablets of zinc and goldenseal. You’ve got to compare that cure with a patient who took nothing, or was given a placebo or prayed to Sneezo, the god of colds. Anecdotal reports, even from good friends or family members, can suggest possibilities, but they don’t constitute evidence.

In his book
How We Know What Isn’t So
, Gilovich makes the intriguing point that were it not for this erroneous tendency to associate cures with preceding treatments, conventional medicine, itself, might never have survived the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when its offerings were pretty marginal by today’s standards. The bottom line is that virtually all forms of healing benefit from the same mental mistakes. Whether it’s conventional antibiotics or holistic medicine or faith healing, once we are invested in the process we are likely to attribute any improvement to it while discounting its failures as somehow irrelevant. In this regard, faith healers are perhaps the most resistant to criticism. Their approach is Teflon-coated as far as negative results go. If you’re a good person and God wants you healed, then the treatment will work. If my touch does not work, don’t blame me. I’m only God’s instrument. He’s the one who’s made the judgment not to heal you and in all likelihood that reflects something unsavory about you. Thus, not only does the unhealed patient have to cope with continuing illness, but she also has to bear the stigma of God’s judgment. A double whammy.

Some time ago my partner and I visited a very successful local naturopath. He checked us both, and told my partner she had intestinal parasites. I was spared the shame of parasites, but was told I had serious dietary allergies that contributed to my general sense of weakness, a state I didn’t recall having until it was both identified and explained in one visit. I asked him if there was anything that could ever go wrong with me that couldn’t be understood in terms of his methods. He looked a little cagey but replied, “No.” I then asked if he could imagine anything, any kind of outcome that would suggest to him that his approach had failed. He again shook his head, explaining that negative outcomes most often reflected deficiencies in the patient or his or her compliance with the therapeutic program. It’s been over twenty years and, to the best of my knowledge, the man still has a thriving alternative medical practice.