Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [70]
All of us do engage in this kind of deliberate and thorough source evaluation from time to time. And, as an ideal of intellectual inquiry, we both teach it to and expect it from other people, especially students, scholars, and professionals in data-driven fields. In our day-to-day life, however, departure from this ideal process is the norm. Instead of trusting a piece of information because we have vetted its source, we trust a source, and therefore accept its information. The philosopher Avishai Margalit put this nicely. “It is not the case that I am caught in a web of beliefs,” he wrote. “…Rather, I am caught in a network of witnesses.” Our relationships to these “witnesses”—the people and institutions that attest to the truth of various beliefs—predate and determine our reaction to whatever information they supply. As Margalit said, “my belief in [one of these witnesses] is prior to my belief that (what she says is true).”
Belief in is prior: however far this might be from our sense of how we should form our ideas about the world, it is the first principle of how we actually do so. All of us are caught in Margalit’s “networks of witnesses”—not just in one but in many, and not just from time to time but all the time, from the moment we are born until the day we die. As countless commentators have observed, this lends to our beliefs an element of the arbitrary. Montaigne, for instance, remarked that people “are swept [into a belief]—either by the custom of their country or by their parental upbringing, or by chance—as by a tempest, without judgment or choice, indeed most often before the age of discretion.”* This claim is at once obvious and irksome, not least because it is directly at odds with the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint. If we think we believe our beliefs based on the facts, we aren’t likely to appreciate the alternative theory that we actually believe them because we were born in Tuscaloosa instead of Dubai.
This relationship between communities and beliefs is a two-way street. If we often form our beliefs on the basis of our communities, we also form our communities on the basis of our beliefs. There may be no better contemporary example of this than the Internet, which has enabled far-flung strangers to form confederacies around their common convictions, whatever those may be. But people have been bonding together on the basis of belief since long before search engines made it so easy. Ancient Epicureans, Orthodox Jews, socialists, suffragists, indie rockers in skinny jeans: all of them, like all of us, sought out (and, when possible, settled among) the like-minded.
Sociologists call this predilection “homophily”: the tendency to like people who are like us. Homophily isn’t necessarily the kind of thing we explicitly espouse. Here in the United States, with our ethos of melting-pot multiculturalism, two-thirds of us claim to want to share a community with those whose beliefs and backgrounds differ from our own. In reality, though, most of us live around people who look, earn, worship, and vote a whole lot like we do. (As the Washington Post pointed out after the 2008 presidential election, “Nearly half of all Americans live in ‘landslide counties’ where Democrats or Republicans regularly win in a rout”—just one example of our tendency to hang out with our own.) Whether we