Book Review: Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer

 

Michael Shermer is the man behind Skeptic and the Skeptic Society. The group talks about all the crazy stuff people believe in and promotes science and critical thinking. This book was originally published in 1997 and a new edition came out in 2002. As someone who thinks that there are a lot of crazy ideas in the mental health fields, I wanted to see if Shermer had any ideas about the nature of weird beliefs that I had not already come across.

The book looks at some commonly seen unscientific ideas including abduction by aliens, recovered memories, anti-evolution notions, and Holocaust denial. It tears apart the tricks that leading “thinkers” in these movements use whenever they are seen in the media. Shermer has debated many of them, and seems somewhat surprised by how likeable and intelligent these people can be even when they are pushing very hateful myths.

Their methods include focusing solely on opponents’ weak points while avoiding saying anything definitive about their own position. They use quotations by reasonable experts but use them out of context. They take honest debates about one aspect of some phenomenon within a field to dispute the entire field. They focus on what is not known while ignoring things that are, and they emphasize data that does not fit the prevailing wisdom while discounting data that does.

One of their tactics I am familiar with is the use of the fallacy that if scientists were wrong about one part of a complicated theory like evolution, then the whole theory must be wrong. This reminds me of attacks on psychoanalysis. Just because Freud was wrong about the pervasiveness of the Oedipus Complex or penis envy does not mean he was wrong about the existence of intrapsychic conflicts and defense mechanisms. All-or-none thinking is a hallmark of groupthink.

Another tactic is one which I have written about. It occurs when a theory has been misused for foul purposes by a political or social group. If fact, any idea can be misused like that. Such misuse does not negate the validity of the theory. The big one for me is rejection by a majority of evolutionary biologists of the concept of kin selection because it might be used to justify social Darwinism. One of the people that is responsible for this turn of events is noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who is someone frequently quoted in a positive manner by Shermer throughout the book.

And speaking of groupthink, that is something the author alludes to somewhat briefly but does not seem to completely understand. In fact, groupthink maintenance is the best answer to the question posed in the book’s title in a lot of cases. I recall when it hit me that oft-used logical fallacies like begging the question and non sequiturs were not just random weaknesses in critical thinking but had a purpose: enforcing group norms, which are often, in turn, enforced by the use of illogical thoughts. In other words, they have a biological purpose.

Instead, Shermer focuses on somewhat more selfish reasons for why folks push a weird point of view. The thoughts are comforting (like believing in a specific type of afterlife), or the idea helps advance some political agenda like racist policies, or to sell books and become famous. He also discusses our ubiquitous tendency to look for data that fits our beliefs while discounting data that does not (confirmation bias). People are very good at “seeing what they are looking for.” People of high intelligence may even be better at that than those lower on that Totem Pole because they can devise reasonable-sounding justifications for their beliefs.

Another issue I had is that the author seems to think that in many of these cases the people who spout nonsense really believe what they are saying, rather than saying them because of an ulterior motive of some sort. He opines, for example, that some of these people believe in, say, alien abduction because they also mistakenly believed that hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations they experienced in which they saw an alien in their room. These hallucinations are actually a normal phenomenon that occasionally occur as people are drifting off to sleep or awakening from a deep sleep. Most of them only last a couple of minutes and, despite what the author says, feel somewhat dreamlike when the person comes to – at least those I’ve experienced did. 

To think that very smart people who don’t know about this phenomenon wouldn’t question their own sanity rather than believe that what they saw was real seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. As he points out, a lot of these people are quite bright, so they have to know that a lot of what they are advancing is b.s.

Despite these limitations, the book is a fun and interesting read. The history of fad-like belief systems is informative. He has a lot of amusing stories about arguing about these nutty ideas with their champions on talk shows like Phil Donahue.