The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [119]
If it’s sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we’ve been wrong, this is also information about ourselves worth having.
A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do.
Why are we so’easily taken in by fortune-tellers, psychic seers, palmists, tea-leaf, tarot and yarrow readers, and their ilk? Of course, they note our posture, facial expressions, clothing and answers to seemingly innocuous questions. Some of them are brilliant at it, and these are areas about which many scientists seem almost unconscious. There is also a computer network to which ‘professional’ psychics subscribe, the details of their customers’ lives available to their colleagues in an instant. A key tool is the so-called ‘cold read’, a statement of opposing predispositions so tenuously balanced that anyone will recognize a grain of truth. Here’s an example:
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you.
Almost everyone finds this characterization recognizable, and many feel that it describes them perfectly. Small wonder: we are all human.
The list of ‘evidence’ that some therapists think demonstrates repressed childhood sexual abuse (for example, in The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis) is very long and prosaic: it includes sleep disorders, overeating, anorexia and bulimia, sexual dysfunction, vague anxieties, and even an inability to remember childhood sexual abuse. Another book, by the social worker E. Sue Blume, lists, among other telltale signs of forgotten incest: headaches, suspicion or its absence, excessive sexual passion or its absence, and adoring one’s parents. Among diagnostic items for detecting ‘dysfunctional’ families listed by Charles Whitfield, MD, are ‘aches and pains’, feeling ‘more alive’ in a crisis, being anxious about ‘authority figures’, and having ‘tried counseling or psychotherapy’, yet feeling ‘that “something” is wrong or missing’. Like the cold read, if the list is long and broad enough, everyone will have ‘symptoms’.
Sceptical scrutiny is not only the toolkit for rooting out bunkum and cruelty that prey on those least able to protect themselves and most in need of our compassion, people offered little other hope.
It is also a timely reminder that mass rallies, radio and television, the print media, electronic marketing, and mail-order technology permit other kinds of lies to be injected into the body politic,