The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [106]
Unlike oracles, connoisseurs have a testable, demonstrable skill. If only that were enough. Blankert calls attention to an argument proposed by a Dutch art historian named Harry van de Waal, a member of the generation that followed Bredius and De Groot. Connoisseurs, wrote Van de Waal, come to new paintings with years of expectations about, say, what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer. Once the expert buys into a particular reading—“here we have an early Vermeer heavily indebted to Caravaggio”—there is almost no shaking free of it. If he is certain that a particular painting is a Vermeer, he’ll be unable to see what is right in front of him. The expert falls for a fake, Van de Waal contends, precisely as a child who believes in Santa Claus sees Santa, and not his uncle, no matter how ludicrous and ill-fitting the uncle’s fake beard and red jacket.
So primed are we to see what we want to see (and to reject what runs counter to our hopes and expectations) that psychologists and economists have coined an entire vocabulary to describe the ways we mislead ourselves. “Confirmation bias” is the broad heading. The idea is that we tell ourselves we are making decisions based on the evidence, though in fact we skew the results by grabbing up welcome news without a second glance while subjecting unpleasant facts to endless testing.
This form of self-deception pops up in the most ordinary circumstances and in the most momentous. When the number on our bathrooom scale is the one we hoped to see, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out, we happily hurry off to get dressed. When it brings dismaying news, we step off and try again; we dry off even more thoroughly; we see if perhaps we can do better by standing at a different spot on the scale. On the battlefield, generals respond to good news and bad news in much the same way.*
Science teaches us to challenge our preconceptions, but that kind of skepticism does not come naturally. One small demonstration illustrating the point involved an experiment where volunteers watched films of babies they didn’t know. Half the babies were identified as males, half as females (the babies were so young that they looked alike). The babies were playing with a jack-in the-box. When the box popped open, the startled babies pulled back. “When people were asked, ‘What’s the child feeling?’” the psychologist Elizabeth Spelke explained, “those who were given a female label said, ‘She’s afraid.’ But the ones given a male label said, ‘He’s angry.’ Same child, same reaction, different interpretation.”
When the stakes are low—when it is only a question of skipping dessert for a few nights—we may be able to acknowledge the facts we’ve been trying to avoid. But what if our pride and sense of professional identity are at risk? What if changing course would mean admitting the possibility of having gone disastrously, humiliatingly wrong?
Bredius never backed away from Emmaus or any of Van Meegeren’s other “Vermeers.” De Groot went to his deathbed maintaining that his Frans Hals forgeries were legitimate, despite incontrovertible proof to the contrary. He clung to the paintings throughout his life and left them to the Groningen Museum in his will.
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” the psychologist Leon Festinger once marveled. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
46
THE MEN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
Even if we concede, though, that the connoisseurs clung to their pet beliefs far, far too long, we have yet to take on one central question. How did the experts come to hold their false beliefs in the first place? How did Van Meegeren get away with it?
The flippant answer—by choosing foolish victims—misses the mark. (In matters of art, Goering was an ignoramus, and tricking him was no coup, but Bredius and the others were not fools.) The modern-day magician Teller, writing about hoaxes generally, made a far more useful suggestion. “When you’re certain you cannot be fooled,