The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [186]
11. These have never been published, and I have no intention of ever publishing them.
12. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944); Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946); Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
13. Mises, Human Action, 860.
14. Freeman Dyson, “One in a Million,” a review of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience, by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, trans. Bart K. Holland, New York Review of Books 51, no. 5 (March 25, 2004).
15. I am here paraphrasing a line used by the comedian Bill Maher in his film Religulous, who is much funnier than I am when he makes that argument.
Chapter 4: Patternicity
1. Kevin R. Foster and Hanna Kokko, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-Like Behaviour,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276, no. 1654 (2009): 31–37.
2. William D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior,” American Naturalist 97 (1963): 354–56; Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, no. 1 (1964): 1–52.
3. Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil (New York: Times Books, 2003); Shermer, The Mind of the Market (New York: Times Books, 2008).
4. Foster and Kokko begin with a slightly different formula than mine—pb > c—where a belief may be held when the probability (p) of the benefit (b) is greater than the cost (c). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind doesn’t cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life. As Foster and Kokko note, we are very poor at estimating such probabilities (p). Since the cost (c) of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared to the opposite, there would have been a beneficial (b) selection for believing that most patterns are real.
5. B. F. Skinner, “Superstition in the Pigeon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–72.
6. Koichi Ono, “Superstitious Behavior in Humans,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 47 (1987): 261–71.
7. Charles Catania and David Cutts, “Experimental Control of Superstitious Responding in Humans,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 6, no. 2 (1963): 203–8.
8. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).
9. Edvard A. Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1921); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
10. Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
11. Vincent de Gardelle and Sid Kouider, “How Spatial Frequencies and Visual Awareness Interact During Face Processing,” Psychological Science, November 2009, 1–9, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/11/11/0956797609354064.full.pdf+html.
For a slightly dissenting view in which facial recognition did not appear to be processed holistically, see this recent study: Yaroslav Konar, Patrick J. Bennett, and Allison B. Sekuler, “Holistic Processing Is Not Correlated with Face-Identification Accuracy,” Psychological Science, December 2009, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/12/16/0956797609356508.full.
An article published just before this book went to press argues that the bizarreness of the reversed features is due to differential lighting, whether from the top down or bottom up, which would result in the reversed features showing a different shading than the rest of the face. And yet the effect is still evident in the Obama example I present here. See Zenobia Talati, Gillian Rhodes, and Linda Jeffrey, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Shedding Light on the Thatcher Illusion,” Psychological Science, January 2010, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/01/08/0956797609357854.full.