Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [49]
Whether the idea of a theory instinct turns out to be sound biology or just apt analogy, belief formation is clearly central to our species. Its survival value aside (as if survival were the kind of thing we could set aside), it defines the way we inhabit our environment, inarguably for the better. I invoke again the analogy to sex and language: it is good to make babies and shout warnings, but it is really good to make love and read Shakespeare. So too with theorizing: the instinct is about staying alive, but the excess is about living. It enriches our everyday life (those happy-hour debriefs about the boss) and enables our most extraordinary achievements (that hoped-for cure for cancer). Without it, we would be bereft of virtually all our hallmark human endeavors: religion, science, and storytelling; curiosity, exploration, and discovery. With it, we are able to venture beyond the known world and toward the terrain of all that is hidden from us—the past and the future and the far-flung, the cloaked machinery of nature, other people’s inner lives. It is the gift that beckons us beyond the eked-out existence of mere survival.
There is, predictably, a problem. Although we are highly adept at making models of the world, we are distinctly less adept at realizing that we have made them. As I suggested in my discussion of perception, our beliefs often seem to us not so much constructed as reflected, as if our minds were simply mirrors in which the truth of the world passively appeared.
Psychologists refer to this conviction as naïve realism. Naïve realism is an automatic tendency, not an intentional philosophical position. If you actually believed that the world was precisely as you experienced it, you would be an intentional naïve realist, but as far as I know, no one has seriously subscribed to this position in the entire history of humanity. Even the most impassioned realist, the kind that regards relativists as dangerous loons from Planet France, recognizes that our experience of the world is not identical with the world itself. To take only the simplest examples: there is no such thing as red if you are a bat, and no such thing as loud if you are a rock, and (so far as we currently know) no such thing as triumph or regret if you are a Shetland pony. Color and sound and emotion are all central to how we experience and make sense of the world, but they can’t inhere in the world itself, because they cease to exist the moment you take minds out of the picture. Conversely, plenty of things exist in the world that the human mind cannot experience directly: the infrared spectrum, the structure of molecules, and very possibly a dozen or so extra dimensions.
With good reason, then, there are no proponents of naïve realism. But that doesn’t mean there are no naïve realists. On the contrary, there are tons of them—starting, research suggests, with everyone under the age of four. Very young children seem to believe, truly and ardently, that our minds and the world never diverge from each other. As a result—and this is why naïve realism matters so much to this book—they think we can’t believe things that are wrong.
We know this about little kids courtesy of one of the classic experiments of developmental psychology. The experiment is known as the false belief test, or, informally, as the Sally-Ann task, after the most famous of its many variations. If you count among your acquaintances a child under the age of four, you can replicate it yourself—and you should, because until you’ve seen the results firsthand, it’s hard to grasp their weirdness, and harder