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.

Psychotherapists Ignore Powerful Groupthink Forces

 

One thing that is a major theme in this blog is that many if not most therapists seem to think that most people’s problems are “all in their heads” and have nothing to do with the ongoing reinforcement of problematic behaviors through interaction with kin and ethnic group members. Groupthink is clearly one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful psychological force in everyday life. 

 

To see this clearly, think about what is going on in the USA today that is a constant focus in the press, talk shows, podcasts, and other media venues: the polarization of political life. Just look at the almost cult-like behavior on both sides, from the QAnon conspiracy theories on the right to the habitually offended community of social justice warriors on the left. Free speech, supposedly a cornerstone of the United States ethos, is attacked relentlessly by both sides without any irony or sense of awareness of the inherent contradictory nature of some of their viewpoints.

 

Yet so many therapists just ignore groupthink. The only exception is those who believe in family systems therapy, which was big in the 80's and 90's but has since fallen out of favor, particularly with psychologists. The problem with many family systems therapists, however, is the opposite: they seemed to have lost the individual. Although many people do not do it, they  are perfectly capable of employing critical thinking and coming up with their own thoughts, and behaving according to their idiosyncratic desires, if they are brave enough to do so. 

The current state of affairs would be amazing if it weren’t so sad. 

 

When I first started looking for clues about what was really going on in the lives of my patients when they were free associating in the psychoanalytic sense (back then, most psychiatrists still did psychotherapy and were analysts), I began to focus in on such things as logical fallacies. I, like most people, just thought those were common, somewhat accidental errors of thinking. I would start to express confusion about what the patient was actually meaning to say, and eventually happened upon information patients had not before volunteered. This lead me to start asking questions that my psychoanalytic supervisors never taught me to ask, like “what does your mother think about this?” – and I meant in the present, not when the patient was a kid.

 

What I didn’t know then was that the use of logical fallacies is one of the hallmarks of groupthink, so when I questioned them I was really finding a way to get at what they really thought, not what they were supposed to think. As my colleague Gregg Henriques points out, logic evolved not to get to the truth, but to justify group norms.

 

The more I got into it, the more I realized there were a whole lot of other “markers” that told me when I was hearing family groupthink and not the patients’ true thoughts and feelings. The following is a list of them, and there may certainly be other ones:

 

·       Logical fallacies

·       Defense mechanisms (as listed by psychoanalysts)

·       Irrational, self-scaring thoughts (as listed by cognitive therapists)>

·       Willful blindness (the refusal to even look at data which may challenge the group’s “wisdom”).

·       Plot holes (like when you are seeing  a movie and you get the feeling that such characters would never have said something like they did in the script, or that one of characters seems to know something they should have no way of knowing).

·       Ambiguous language (in which a sentence can mean two completely different or even opposite meanings, or a word has several different definitions and I couldn’t be certain which one the patient was using). This phenomenon is very familiar to people who work crossword puzzles.

·       Going off on tangents without returning to a main point or issue.

·       Circular reasoning

·       Spouting proverbs or maxims to justify behavior, such as “the grass is always greener…”  Often a marker for a family myth.

·       Mixed messages such as those exhibited by the infamous, so-called “help-rejecting complainer.”

It is interesting that when I bring up the ideas about group processes at professional meetings or in my books, no one actually disagrees or even argues with me. Instead, they just change the subject - or ignore the issue entirely.

Stupid Researcher Tricks

When David Letterman was a late night TV talk show host, he had a recurring segment called "stupid pet tricks." In this vein, this post is titled "stupid researcher tricks." The authors of certain studies in psychiatry employ logical fallacies - either knowingly or in some cases unknowingly - in their discussions of their results. This often results in their drawing totally misleading conclusions from their data.

I will discuss two telling examples of such fallacies. The first involves employing a hidden assumption that is not true. I discussed the general issue of hidden assumptions in a previous post. The particular example in this post can actually be thought of as Part II of my post on the heritability fraud. The second example involves a subtle logical fallacy known as the ecological fallacy: making inferences about individuals based on data obtained that characterizes an entire group, using averages on various measures, to which that individual belongs.

In the previous "heritablility" post I wrote about how that term is falsely used as a synonym with "genetic" in studies that purport to sort out genetic versus environmental factors leading to the development of personality traits or behavioral disorders. The statistic is developed from twin studies: identical versus fraternal twins, and/or those identical twins raised together and those raised apart. 

As previously described, these studies - despite frequent claims to the contrary - do almost nothing to sort out genetic versus environmental influences. The reason is because the statistic is based on phenotype (the final interactional product of genes + environment) and not genotype. As such, it includes a mix of purely genetic factors and factors that result from gene-environmental interactions, and there is no way to know how much of each is contained therein.

Another aspect of these studies I mentioned in the previous post: they also divide environmental influences into "shared" (family and home) and "unshared" (peers, media, teachers, and other outside factors). I mentioned that a determination of which parts of an environment are shared by siblings and which are unshared has a lot in common with finding water with a divining rod, because parents do not treat all of their children alike. Nor does each twin have exactly the same interactions with each and every other family member from the moment they are born to the moment they die.

Interestingly, the "shared" environments in these studies usually come out as less important in leading to behavioral issues than the "unshared!" This would mean that family and parental behavior is less of a factor in personality development than outside influences - something that runs counter to logic for a variety of reasons (for example: which peer group someone chooses to hang out with - when there are several different ones to choose from -  is not an accident).  

The researchers almost have to find that family is less important that peers and media because they just ASSUME that each twin is subject to identical influences inside the home. If you make this assumption, and then if the twins turn out differently on some characteristic, of course the home will appear to have no influence!

Maybe these ignoramuses should read the family systems literature on how siblings are treated differently. The more dysfunctional the family, the bigger the differences! 

Example number two, studies that employs the ecological fallacy, involves those that compare two different psychotherapy treatments for the same disorder. These studies are relatively uncommon, as most psychotherapy outcome studies compare a treatment with a "control" condition like a wait list or "treatment as usual" rather than with a second type of treatment. (Those control groups are also invalid, but that is a matter not relevant to this discussion).

In the few studies that compare one school of therapy with another, an interesting statistic is that 85% of the time, the treatment favored by the person designing the experiment "wins" and outperforms the other treatment [Luborsky, L., Diguer, L., Seligman, D. A., et. al. 1999.  "The Researcher’s Own Therapy Allegiances:  A “Wild card” in Comparisons of Treatment Efficacy." Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 6, 95-106]. This is due to something called the allegiance effect - the more enthusiastic a therapist in a study is about their own school, the better the patient tends to do.

But even ignoring this clear-cut sign that research conclusions in comparative outcome studies are inherently misleading, let us suppose that with one therapy treatment in the study, 45% of the patients improve significantly, while in the other, only 30% do. The conclusion of the researchers: the first treatment is superior.

Wrong.

This conclusion presupposes that all patients react to treatments somewhat identically, despite the fact that the majority (or at least a significant percentage) of patients in both arms of the study did not improve. It is quite likely that some patients are more comfortable and do much better with one of the therapy treatments than with the other. Of course there is no way to know for certain, but it is quite possible that the 45 percent of people who respond to the allegedly superior treatment are very different in many respects than are the 30% who respond to the allegedly inferior therapy.

A well-designed study, on the other hand, would have to recognize these differences and would look at the characteristics of the four different groups that comprised the study: those who got better with treatment A, those who got better with treatment B, those who responded poorly to treatment A, and those who responded poorly to treatment B. The researchers could then match the patient with the type of therapy they seemed to do best with, and then and only then compare outcomes.

In other words, as I have pointed out elsewhere, no matter what therapy intervention you use, some people will improve with it, while others either will not improve or may even get worse! Different strokes for different folks, people.

Groupthink: How Even Scientists Con Themselves in Order to Fit In

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In his brilliant book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues convincingly that logic evolved in humans not to establish the truth about the world or to establish facts, but to argue for ideas that benefit the kin and ethnic groups to which we belong, as well as to maintain a good reputation within those groups. My colleague Gregg Henriques calls this the Justification Hypothesis: logic is used to justify our group norms.

Many of our beliefs are based not on facts or reason at all and in fact seem to be impervious to them. They are instead based upon either our groupishness (the opposite of selfishness). For almost all of us, it is generally more important for us to look right than to be right.

This type of reasoning appears at the level of the individual, where it is called defense mechanisms and irrational beliefs. It appears at the level of the family or kin group, where it is called family myths. It also exists at the level of cultural groups, where it is called theology. Or if it is not your particular brand of theology, then it is called mythology.

Another name for this phenomenon in general is groupthink. We cede the right to think for ourselves for the sake of our group, and we often try to discourage our intimates from thinking for themselves for the same reason.

Even scientists are not immune. So what are some of the mechanisms by which they do this to themselves and to other people? That is the topic of this post.

First, a brief review of some previous posts. As I described in one post, I realized a long time ago that the so-called defense mechanisms discussed by the Freudians and the irrational thoughts catalogued by cognitive therapists (CBT) had a purpose that was not only intra-psychic but interpersonal as well. 

Defense mechanisms are defined as mental processes initiated, typically subconsciously, to avoid ideas or impulses that are unacceptable to our value system, and to avoid anxiety. Another name for this is mortification. We may, for example, compulsively try to act in the opposite way that the unacceptable impulse would dictate (reaction formation), or displace our anger from one person onto another, safer one.

Their interpersonal purpose is to screen out beliefs and impulses that are threatening to the kin group, which is also why they are threatening to the individual within the kin group.

The irrational thoughts of CBT, which they attributed to humans being basically irrational, also functioned much like the defense mechanisms. If you, for example, "catastrophize" about what might happen if you indulged an impulse that your kin group does not approve of (by, say imagining the worst possible outcome of doing so), you will indeed scare yourself away from engaging in it. (Of course, the CBT folks reject the whole concept of defense mechanisms - I recall a somewhat sarcastic reply from cognitive therapy pioneer Albert Ellis when I brought this up at one of his talks).

On a related note, there are the logical fallacies that are enumerated by logicians and which are well known to members of college debate squads. An example is post hoc reasoning, which assumes wrongly that if event A is quickly followed by event B, then it is true that A caused B. I saw patients engage in many of these fallacies when confronted with the negative consequences of the behavior that seemed to be demanded of them by their families. So, I believe, the logical fallacies can also be used as defense mechanisms - specifically designed to avoid troublesome questions about cherished beliefs that on the surface are simplistic at best and preposterous at worst.

As mentioned above, scientists are not immune from groupthink and groupishness. In fact, they are as nearly as likely as anyone else to employ them. I witnessed many times in scientific debates how the debaters would subtly employ various techniques and mind tricks to silence critics of their studies or ideas.

A few examples among many:

a) Black-and-white, or all-or-none thinking. Biological psychiatrists seem to think that everything in the DSM diagnostic manual is a brain disease, whereas the anti-psychiatry folks believe that nothing is, and the listed diagnoses are all just alternate lifestyles, different ways of looking at the world, or reactions to trauma.

b) Arguments that advance the idea that, because many parts of the thinking of someone like, for instance, Freud, were totally off-base (like "penis envy" and his theories about homosexuality), that therefore ALL of his ideas were wrong (including such obviously real things as intra-psychic conflict and defense mechanisms).

c) Stating facts about the results of studies without describing certain contextual elements that put those facts in a different light. A great example I have already blogged about is how the leader of the National Institute on Drug Abuse spoke about experiments with monkeys showing them pulling a level to get cocaine until they died - while neglecting to mention that the animals were in solitary confinement with nothing else to do. When that was not the case, they behaved very differently.

d) Conflating the issue of how a phenomenon arises or what it means in the scheme of things with the issue of whether the phenomenon even exists at all. For example, CBT'ers would deny that the concept of resistance, a psychoanalytic idea that states that people are often highly invested in their psychological symptoms and resist change - is a real phenomenon. All the while, they failed to report in their case studies the high level of non-compliance with CBT homework assignments by their patients in treatment.

e) Grossly exaggerating the strength of certain research findings while completely ignoring the study's weaknesses and problematic assumptions.

f) Conflating another scientist's conclusion about the significance of a clinical anecdote with the description of the anecdote, and not considering what else the anecdote might mean.

g) Scientism: the idea that randomized placebo-controlled studies of something are the end-all and be-all of science, and that everything else is just anecdotal and not science at all. I answer those who make this argument by asking for volunteers for a randomized placebo-controlled study on whether parachutes reduce the incidence of deaths and injuries during falls from airplane flights. 

I also point out that scientism creates a problem when it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in order to study an important psychological phenomenon like self-deception with a large enough study sample and within a reasonable time frame, you would pretty much have to ask people about their opinion of themselves. Sorta defeats the goal of the study, doesn't it? So does this mean that therefore studying self-deception should be completely off limits to scientists? 

Scientists will often accuse other scientists of doing these things while doing them themselves. This is projection - another defense mechanism. These mental mechanisms are so pervasive in human beings that we are quite likely to find at least some of them in any scientific discussion. 

Discerning readers will no doubt find examples in which I do some of it in my posts on my blogs. 

Ve Have Vays of Making You Talk, Part VIII: Countering Logical Fallacies

In Part I of this post, I discussed why family members hate to discuss their chronic repetitive ongoing interpersonal difficulties with each other (metacommunication), and the problems that usually ensue whenever they try. 

I discussed the most common avoidance strategy - merely changing the subject (#1) - and suggested effective countermoves to keep a constructive conversation on track. In Part II, I discussed strategies #2 and #3, nitpicking and accusations of overgeneralizing respectively. In Part III, I discussed strategy #4, blame shifting. In Part IV, strategy #5, fatalism.

This post is the fourth in a series about strategy #6, the use of irrational arguments (previously: non sequiturs; post hoc reasoning; begging the question). Descriptions of this strategy have been subdivided into several posts because, in order to counter irrational arguments, one first has to recognize them.  Until this post, I have held off describing the basic strategy to counter irrational arguments until after I finished describing some of the most common types.  Today’s post will be the last concerning these irrational arguments, and will also describe the basic countermeasure.

Irrational arguments are used in metacommunication to throw other people. Listeners either become confused about, or unsure of the validity of, any point they are trying to make or question they are trying to ask.  Fallacious arguments are also frequently used to avoid divulging an individual's real motives for taking or having taken certain actions. 

Today’s post will describe arguing from worst case scenarios, and ad hominem or personal attacks.

An argument is often made that a particular course of action is ill-advised because of difficulties that might arise in a worst-case scenario. In other words, one asks the question, "If I did so and so, what would be the conse­quences if everything possible went wrong?"

Posing a worst-case scenario does not always mean that the poser is engaged in an illogical maneuver. Indeed, for certain questions, such as whether to build a nuclear reactor near an earthquake fault, looking at worst-case scenarios can be a matter of life and death. Residents of Fukushima, Japan, will know exactly what I am talking about.

The worst-case argument becomes logically suspect if it is being used as an excuse to avoid some action when either of two con­ditions is present. The first is when the worst case is so unlikely to occur as to be almost meaningless. The second is when the worst case is preventable.

The most common usage of the maneuver in psychother­apy cases occurs when patients attempt to suppress some ­aspect of themselves by frightening themselves with the thought of dreadful consequences should the characteristic of self ever be expressed. One of the most often seen examples of this involves the ques­tion of whether or not to express anger.  


I once was the therapist for a group where every single member was in complete agreement that anger should be kept to oneself. They all painted a most shocking picture of the dire results that might ensue if their anger were ever unleashed. The anger would be destructive to the nth degree.

Everyone present said they had so much anger inside that if some of it got out, a dam would burst and a flood of violent fury would come pouring out. They might murder all of their loved ones and bomb government buildings. They would all suddenly become completely crazed, and each might end up in a mental institution or worse. They might tear the objects of their rage limb from limb and end up on death row. 


If thoughts like that did not scare them into keeping their anger quiet, nothing would.

The worst-case scenario that was proposed by the group members is illogical for several reasons. First, it is based on the non sequitur "If I let out some of my anger, I'll let it all out." Forgetting for the moment the unlikelihood that the rage they fear is as extensive as they believe it to be, how did they come to the conclusion that they would have more difficulty restrain­ing themselves once some of the anger had emerged than before the process started? They were each masters at self-restraint.


While it is often true that people who have been stuffing their anger may suddenly explode when there is a "last straw," this usually occurs in the heat of the moment, not when one is planning how to bring up for discussion anger-provoking behavior.  For this reason, 

the situation is not really analogous to the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. One can always catch oneself. 


Indeed, the extra guilt these people probably would feel for having exhib­ited angry feelings might make it even easier for them to re­strain themselves in the future. This worst case, in which all of a limitless amount of anger would come out in a deluge is a highly unlikely worst case. Furthermore, this worse case is preventable.

Acting out the anger is hardly the only way to express it. One can talk to the anger-provoking person in a constructive attempt to get them to knock off the provocations. 


The use of terrifying imagery to scare oneself out of a course of action  is a very clear example of what I mean by mortification. In this case, an aspect of self, the emotion of anger, is suppressed by frightening oneself with worries about horrific conse­quences.

One last fallacy that I would like to briefly mention is ad hominem. This translates from the Latin as "to the man." This fallacy is based on the non sequitur "if a person is reprehensible in some respect, then everything that person has to say is incor­rect." This fallacy is frequently encountered outside the metacommunicative realm in the area of politics. 

Politicians can have repulsive views on certain issues or may be self-serving liars. Nonetheless, any single assertion that they make might still be true or correct. One cannot reason logically that because their views are unpopular or because they have lied in the past, then any current assertion they make is false. 


From the standpoint of in­ductive reasoning, one can be highly suspicious of their state­ments because of their past behavior and motivation, but in order to actually disprove their thesis, one needs corroborating evidence. Just because Castro is a Communist autocrat, for example, one could not con­clude that he is always lying whenever he made accusations against the United States government.

In metacommunication, family members will frequently discount an idea because of the alleged motivation of the person making it, without addressing the actual merits of the idea.  The metacommunicator might be accused of being insincere or having some sort of ulterior motive for making an observation while the target completely ignores the merits of the observation itself.  

Invalidation is a form of an ad hominem attack.  The person bringing up a past event is accused of distorting it, or even making it up.  This situation usually leads to a fight or flight response on the part of the metacommunicator, which stops the effort to solve interpersonal problems in its tracks.

And now at long last, what does the metacommunicator do when faced with a person who uses illogical arguments to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable interpersonal issue.

The basic response is what many therapists refer to as the Columbo style of response. Columbo was a TV detective played by the actor Peter Falk who often got suspects to incriminate themselves by, in a sense, playing stupid.  He would point out discrepancies in the suspect’s story and kind of scratch his head, acting if he were the one who was not bright enough to figure out the explanation. 

Peter Falk as Columbo

He would never act as if he believed that the suspect were purposely misleading him, although he obviously knew that was really the case.  The suspect would then try to “help out” the hapless cop by clarifying the apparent discrepancy, much to his own detriment.

In metacommunication, the object of this strategy is of course not to make the other person incriminate himself or herself, but to get past the block to appropriate, metacommunicative problem solving.

In response to a logical fallacy, the metacommunicator tactfully expresses confusion about what the target is saying, or points out seeming contradictions. This is done in an almost apologetic fashion.  Rather than accusing the other of purposely being misleading or confusing, metacommuncators try to indicate that they themselves are taking responsibility for any lack of interpersonal understanding.

In addition to decreasing the target’s need to become defensive, with this strategy the target often feels obliged to clear up the patients’ confusion.  In order to do so, he or she must drop the logical fallacy.  When this happens, it is important that the metacommunicator seem grateful for the new clarity, and not have a kind of “I told you you were irrational” attitude.

Now maintaining this bemused, self-effacing sort of style is often particularly difficult to do if there is an ad hominem component to the target’s irrational argument.  


In that case, as mentioned above, it is the metacommunicator who usually becomes defensive, and who derails the effort for problem solving.  In this case, learning and practicing many of the strategies described in my series of posts on how to disarm a patient with borderline personality disorder, such as giving the other person the benefit of the doubt and acknowledging one’s own contribution to the problematic past interactions, come in very handy.

Ve Have Vays of Making You Talk, Part VII: Begging the Question

In Part I of this post, I discussed why family members hate to discuss their chronic repetitive ongoing interpersonal difficulties with each other (metacommunication), and the problems that usually ensue whenever they try. 

I discussed the most common avoidance strategy - merely changing the subject (#1) - and suggested effective countermoves to keep a constructive conversation on track. In Part II, I discussed strategies #2 and #3, nitpicking and accusations of overgeneralizing respectively. In Part III, I discussed strategy #4, blame shifting. In Part IV, strategy #5, fatalism.

This post is the third in a series about strategy #6, the use of irrational arguments  (previously: non sequiturs; post hoc reasoning). Descriptions of this strategy have been subdivided into several posts because, in order to counter irrational arguments, one first has to recognize them.  I will hold off describing strategies to counter the irrational arguments until after I have finished describing some of the most common types.

Irrational arguments are used in metacommunication to throw other people. Listeners either become confused about, or unsure of the validity of, any point they are trying to make or question they are trying to ask.  Fallacious arguments are also frequently used to avoid divulging an individual's real motives for taking or having taken certain actions. 

The third major logical fallacy I will describe is begging the question. A person begging the question merely insists that an assertion is proved without offering any proof at all. If someone offers some evidence that the assertion is false, the beggar states that the evidence must be incorrect. After all, since the assertion is true, any evidence to the contrary must be faulty. 

It might seem that the absurdity of this kind of reasoning should be quite ob­vious when it occurs, but it can be quite subtle. Often an inter­vening argument for the questionable assertion is made by the beggar, which is then refuted by the disputer. The beggar then goes on to offer yet another argument, which in turn is refuted. This process continues until the beggar suddenly announces that he or she has won the case - by ignoring all of the previously refuted arguments and merely re-offering the initial unproved assertion.

I first truly understood this process one day in college when I caught myself doing it. I was engaged in a friendly argu­ment with a fellow student over the relative merits of the space program during the sixties. My friend took the position that going to the moon was a complete waste of money, because there were important human needs here on earth for which the money could be used. I was and am of the opinion that scien­tific knowledge is valuable for its own sake, but at the time I was unable to formulate a convincing argument for that posi­tion. Instead, I advanced the oft-used argument that the space program had yielded important scientific by-products, such as Teflon, that were quite useful here on earth.

He countered that Teflon could have been invented for far less money by doing research on nonstick surfaces instead of moon flights. I then countered with, "But this way, we also get to the moon!"

Another time when begging the question was used on me was when I was a trainee (resident) in psychiatry.  Back in the Stone Age when I trained, most of the faculty members were Freudian psychoanalysts.  When anyone dared question psychoanalytic dogma, they were told that they needed to get into therapy to find out why they were "resistant" to the ideas.  Of course, the concept of resistance is itself a psychoanalytic concept, so the statement was in fact begging the question of the validity of a psychoanalytic concept. 

Interestingly, the analysts' short sentence contained not one but three logical fallacies.  It was not only begging the question, but was also a non-sequitur (perhaps the person was questioning the dogma for some reason other than subconscious resistance), and a personal attack as well.  Personal attacks, or ad hominem arguments, are another fallacy I will discuss in a future post.

Begging the question is a maneuver that occurs most often when people are being questioned about their motivation but do not wish to reveal the true reasons for their behavior to others -  or perhaps even to themselves. They may assert that they behave in the way they do because that is how they truly wish to be­have or because they have no other options.

If listeners pre­sent evidence that the behavior seems to be something that is bringing them a great deal of grief or if they offer other options, beggars will then either just ignore what the other person has said, invalidate it by making a snide comment, engage in a game of "why-don't-you-yes-but," or begin the process of-making further refutable arguments and then returning to the initial assertion as if it had been justified.

A good example of begging the question occurred in the case of a poorly educated employee of a large manufacturing concern. Despite a horrendously abused childhood and a lack of formal schooling, he had managed to rise to a fairly responsible posi­tion with the firm. Then suddenly, through no fault of his own, the position was eliminated. Because of further bad luck com­plicated by his own aggravating behavior, he was gradually de­moted and shifted to a department that he despised, and continued to go downhill until he had become a glorified file clerk.

The more responsibilities were taken from him, the more upset he became. The more upset he became, the more poorly he per­formed in his job. The poorer the performance, the more re­sponsibility was taken from him, and so on. He felt that his supervisor wished to get rid of him because he was being paid far too much for his present position, but also believed that the supervisor was blocking his transfer to another department in which he might get a more responsible job.

I wondered why, if it were really true that he was unable to get out of the department and find a job with which he would be satisfied, he did not seek employment with a different firm. I conceded that such a move would be quite difficult considering his lack of education, but pointed out that he had not even at­tempted to look.

He replied that he did not wish to leave the firm. He stated that, in fact, he loved working for this company; it was just his department he despised. I pressed on. I pointed out that he had already told me that he could not get out of the department because of his mean supervisor. Why was it so important for him to stay with the same firm? He replied once again that he would not leave the firm because he loved working for it.  The conversation went something like this:

"The firm seems to be very important to you. What is it about working for the firm that you love so much?"

"They've been very good to me."

"Well, they certainly have been good to you - in the past. At the moment, however, you've told me that they are not being very good to you at all."

"That is the department that is being bad to me. I have no complaint with the firm."

"I know that, but you have told me that you are stuck with the department. Don't you think you might find a differ­ent firm that you would also like?"

"Yes, I might be able to do that."

"So why are you so intent on staying with your present firm?”

     

"I want to get in twenty-five years with the firm."

"What makes that important?"

"It is important to my self-esteem" [a possible non sequi­tur that I let go].

"So you'll consider leaving when you have been there twenty-five years?"

“No.”

"So there must be another reason why you feel you must stay with the firm."

"I don't want to give my supervisors the satisfaction of driving me out." [This is another assertion that does not make very much sense. Why should avoiding making them smug be worth daily torture at their hands? I avoided touching on this also].

"Do you really think they care all that much?"

"Probably not."

"So why stay?"

"I've told you. The firm is very important to me. I love working for the firm. Okay?"                                                                          

The last statement was, of course, merely a restatement of his initial position that did nothing whatever to shed light on why the firm was so important to him. This is exactly what is meant by begging the question.