Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [4]
Nowhere are such idols harder to see in ourselves than the subtle psychological biases we harbor. Consider the confirmation bias, in which we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore disconfirmatory evidence. For my monthly column in Scientific American I wrote an essay (June 2003) on the so-called Bible Code, in which the claim is made that the first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch—in its original Hebrew contain hidden patterns that spell out events in world history, even future history. A journalist named Michael Drosnin wrote two books on the subject, both New York Times bestsellers, in which he claimed in the second volume to have predicted 9/11. My analysis was very skeptical of this claim (I told him in a personal letter that it would have been nice if he had alerted everyone to 9/11 before the event instead of after). He wrote a letter to the magazine (and had an attorney threaten them and me with a libel suit), which they published. In response, I received a most insightful letter from John Byrne, a well-known comic book writer and illustrator of Spider-Man and other superheroes. I reprint it here because he makes the point about this cognitive bias so well.
Figure I.10 (above left). The Virgin Mary on the side of a bank building in Clearwater, Florida. (The author, in the middle, is bracketed by Richard Dawkins, left, and James Randi.)
Figure I.11 (above right). Another Virgin Mary on another side of the bank building
Reading Michael Drosnin’s response to Michael Shermer’s column on the Bible “code” and its ability to accurately predict the future, I could not help but laugh. I have been a writer and illustrator of comic books for the past 30 years, and in that time I have “predicted” the future so many times in my work my colleagues have actually taken to referring to it as “the Byrne Curse.”
It began in the late 1970s. While working on a Spider-Man series titled “Marvel Team-Up” I did a story about a blackout in New York. There was a blackout the month the issue went on sale (six months after I drew it). While working on “Uncanny X-Men” I hit Japan with a major earthquake, and again the real thing happened the month the issue hit the stands.
Now, those things are fairly easy to “predict,” but consider these: When working on the relaunch of Superman, for DC Comics, I had the Man of Steel fly to the rescue when disaster beset the NASA space shuttle. The Challenger tragedy happened almost immediately thereafter, with time, fortunately, for the issue in question to be redrawn, substituting a “space plane” for the shuttle.
Most recent, and chilling, came when I was writing and drawing “Wonder Woman,” and did a story in which the title character was killed, as a prelude to her becoming a goddess. The cover for that issue was done as a newspaper front page, with the headline “Princess Diana Dies.” (Diana is Wonder Woman’s real name.) That issue went on sale on a Thursday. The following Saturday . . . I don’t have to tell you, do I?
My ability as a prognosticator, like Drosnin’s, would seem assured—provided, of course, we reference only the above, and skip over the hundreds of other comic books I have produced which featured all manner of catastrophes, large and small, which did not come to pass.
In short, we remember the hits and forget the misses, another variation on the confirmation bias.
In recent decades experimental psychologists have discovered a number of cognitive biases that interfere with our understanding of ourselves and our world. The self-serving bias, for example, dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us: national surveys show that most businesspeople believe they are more moral than other businesspeople.