Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [65]
As all this suggests, our relationship to evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women, bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes, murdering innocent citizens of Salem: plainly, evidence is almost invariably a political, social, and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example, consider the case of Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich, close friend to Adolf Hitler, and the highest-ranking Nazi official ever to express remorse for his actions. In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. “I did not query [a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz], I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler,” he wrote. “I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate—for I did not want to know what was happening there…for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes.”
Judge William Stoughton of Salem, Massachusetts, became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together, they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us—and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like the U.S. legal system, we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection, Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query, he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. These are sins of omission, sins of passivity; and they suggest, correctly, that if we want to improve our relationship to evidence, we must take a more active role in how we think—must, in a sense, take the reins of our own minds.
To do this, we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically, and crucially, we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it. One person who recognized the value of doing this was Charles Darwin. In his autobiography, he recalled that, “I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.”
You don’t need to be one of history’s greatest scientists to combat your inductive biases. Remembering to attend to counterevidence isn’t difficult; it is simply a habit of mind. But, like all habits of mind, it requires conscious cultivation. Without that, the first evidence we encounter will remain the last word on the truth. That’s why, as we are about to see, so many of our strongest beliefs are determined by mere accidents of fate: where we were born, what our parents believed, what other information shaped us from our earliest days. Once that initial evidence takes hold, we are off and running. No matter how skewed or scanty it may be, it will form the basis for all our future beliefs. Inductive reasoning guarantees as much. And it guarantees, too, that we will find plenty of data to support us, and precious little to contradict us. And that, in turn, all but guarantees that our