unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [71]
Self-interest doesn’t make a statement false. What an electric utility says about what’s coming out of its smokestacks can be accurate, even if the company quite naturally would like to avoid paying for expensive scrubbers. And an environmental group’s statements might not exaggerate the dangers and extent of pollution, even if the group does get more money by telling donors the skies are being poisoned than it would if it said the air is getting cleaner, as happens to be the case. (As we mentioned earlier, the EPA’s tracking of the six major air pollutants shows a 12 percent decline in the five years ending in 2005, which amounts to a decrease of more than 19 million tons per year of volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, soot, and lead.) Both sides in the environmental debate have a clear motive to tilt the facts in one direction or the other, and so we shouldn’t accept either at face value. Which brings us to:
RULE #7: Seeing Shouldn’t Necessarily Be Believing
WHEN WE GAVE AS OUR FIRST RULE THAT YOU CAN’T BE 100 PERCENT certain of anything, you might have said to yourself, “I’m certain of what I see with my own eyes.” Don’t be. Researchers have found, for example, that people can rather easily be talked into seeing things that aren’t there (or saying they do). In one of the most famous experiments in the history of social science, the late Solomon Asch showed lines of different lengths to groups of students and asked each to say which was longer or shorter. But only one student in each group was a test subject; the others were Asch’s confederates, whom he had instructed. When the test subjects heard a majority of others say that the longer line was the shorter, they often said the same even though the opposite was obviously true. In fact, 37 percent of the subjects expressed the bogus view of the majority. In an even earlier experiment, from 1935, the social psychology pioneer Muzafer Sherif showed people in a dark room a light that was not moving. They reported that the light was moving—and, more important, they gave reports of the amount of movement that were consistent with what they had heard others report.
Personal experience can mislead us. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable even when given in court, under oath. Years of research show that witnesses regularly pick innocent “foils” from police line-ups. As we write this, 189 persons have been exonerated after DNA tests showed they had been wrongly convicted, according to the Innocence Project. And more than 70 percent of those were convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness testimony!
Scholars also tell us that people tend to overestimate how well they remember their own experiences. If you have siblings, you can test this by picking some major event in your family’s past that you and they shared: each of you write an account, then see how well they agree. Scholars have found that an apparently distinct memory of something that occurred long ago may be a reconstruction, often a self-serving one. As distance from the event increases, memory decays.
Even very smart people misremember things. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is by most accounts a very smart man, yet even he