Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [208]
* There’s some evidence that mildly confabulatory people are at risk of becoming majorly confabulatory people. In a 1996 study, the psychologist E. A. Weinstein asked the family members of anosognosics—some of them also confabulators, some of them not—to describe their afflicted relative’s personality before the onset of disease. He found that the confabulators in the group were consistently characterized as having previously been “stubborn, with an emphasis on being right.”
* And on and on: one implication of the philosophical definition of belief is that, technically, the set of beliefs each of us holds is infinite. (If you believe there isn’t a monster under your toddler’s bed, you also believe there aren’t two monsters under her bed, or three monsters, or…et cetera.) Needless to say, no one actually holds an infinite number of beliefs in the conscious mind. But the point of this definition of belief is that consciousness doesn’t matter. What matters is that our everyday actions are grounded in an essentially limitless number of implicit convictions.
* At the risk of further muddying some already murky lexical waters, I use the words “belief” and “theory” almost interchangeably in this book. Some thinkers have called for a distinction between the two terms, arguing that theories are more explicit, more developed, or more explanatory than beliefs. But such distinctions are largely untenable, or at any rate extremely slippery. For instance, try applying them to the statement “I believe in God.” If you are a five-year-old, that statement almost certainly represents a belief: a not very developed, probably not very explanatory, and possibly not even very explicit conviction. On the other hand, if you are the pope, it is clearly a theory. Moreover—and more important for my purposes—none of the differences we can posit between beliefs and theories have any bearing on their function. Theories, like beliefs, exist to represent the world around us.
* Remember the Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science? Here it is in action. While I was writing this book, the once uncontroversial claim that young children can’t grasp the existence of a gap between the mind and the world suddenly came up for debate. Recent evidence from infancy experiments (where eye gaze is used as a measure of babies’ beliefs) suggests that children might understand more about false beliefs than psychologists previously thought. Although three-and four-year-olds still reliably fail the Sally-Ann task, it now appears that fourteen-month-olds can pass it. It remains to be seen how these findings will be reconciled.
* Another variant of the Sally-Ann task provides a particularly poignant illustration of the difference between healthy and autistic children’s ability to understand other people’s minds. In this version, the experimenter shows the child a Polaroid camera, explains what it does, takes some sample pictures, and allows the child to play with it until he or she is familiar with how it works. Then the puppet show proceeds as in the original experiment—except that, when Sally puts the candy bar in the basket, the experimenter takes a picture of it there. At the end of the show, after Sally has left the room and Ann has moved the candy bar to the cupboard, the child is asked not where Sally thinks the candy bar is, but where it will appear in the photograph. Although this test and the original