Peripheral Vision: How Myths take root and are difficult to shift

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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, October 18, 2020

How Myths take root and are difficult to shift

The beauty of a book with large print is that it’s easy to go back and read – and that’s what I’ve been doing today with Bregman’s “Humankind – a hopeful history”. I also wanted to check out some references and landed up with some good material, including an interview and a discussion between Bregman and Steve Pinker.

But the main focus has been one of my famous tables which I’ve used to build a map of the various “research myths” about human nature which Bregman identified during the course of his writing – I’ve identified more than 20

I draw two conclusions from my rereading -

- first that, once a myth takes root, it’s very difficult to shift. The media don’t like revisionism and never give equal space or time to something that challenges the conventional wisdom – particularly if it seems to contain a positive message.

- second that most people are fairly decent – but power corrupts ie the evil is in those with power and the battalions of police, soldiers, spies and bureaucrats they control

Here’s Bregman with a couple of comments on two of the experiments -

The Stanford experiement

RB: Then many of these students said that they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to do it because they said: No, that’s not who I am. Then Zimbardo said: You got to do this because I need these results, then we can go to the press and say look, prisons are horrible environments. We need to reform the whole thing. That was actually a movement in the 60s where people said, you know, we got to abolish prisons totally.

And the terrible irony of this movement, which, and Zimbardo was part of that as well, is that it was then later used by conservatives to say, oh, well, if prisons you know don’t work at all, if rehabilitation is not an option, then, you know, let’s just throw people in prison and throw away the key, right? Let’s just lock people up for life, because then that’s the only option. It’s a history full of dark ironies.

But yeah, the Stanford Prison Experiment is — I think it can only be described as a hoax and it’s very sad that this has been taught to students for 50 years.

The Milgram shocks

RB; It’s a problematic experiment as well. The archives have opened up, again, and we now know that many of the subjects didn’t believe the situation was real. And we also know that the people who went all the way, to give 450 volt shocks, yeah, the chance that they would do that was higher if they didn’t believe the whole thing was real. Maybe it was not 65 percent, as Milgram initially reported, maybe it was 50 percent, or 40, or 30, but it’s still way too high. It’s still a very dark and sinister experiment that shows that, indeed, friendly people can do this.

But I do think the experiment needs to be reinterpreted. So Milgram made the argument that people became sort of rigid robots, that they just blindly followed orders, just as many Germans said after the war, you know, “I was just following orders.”

But I think what really happened in that experiment was something different. It was about joining; it was about followership. It was about people wanting to help the scientist, and yes, sort of feeling part of his group — which is not a comfortable message, right? It’s not a comfortable message at all. We talked earlier about, you know, how so often we do the most horrible things in the name of loyalty and friendship. And I think that’s also how we should interpret this experiment.

And then the table

Issue	Initial thesis	Revised analysis
Bombing of German cities	It would lower civilian morale	It boosted morale
Hurricane Katrina	Social breakdown	Social support strong
“mean world syndrome”	The world is getting worse	Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” tells us that past 70 years have been much less violent. It’s the media that stirs our pessimism and cynicism
Homo economicus	People are selfish	They are altruistic and cooperative
Veneer theory of civilisation	ditto	“Only recently have scientists concluded that the grim view of humanity needs revision” p19
“The Selfish Gene”	Richard Dawkins original book	Which he later disowned
Lord of the Flies	Even kids are aggressive	The original boys in Golding’s story actually rewarded cooperation
Friendly foxes	Darwinian selection rewards aggression	Russian geneticist demonstrating selection breeds friendly foxes
Cannibalistic apes	Aggression is inbuilt	Pinker wrong about violence of hunter-gatherers
“Soldiers who don’t shoot”	Fighting is natural	Only about 15% of soldiers fire their rifles
“The curse of civilisation”	When ice retreated, farming became possible and progress started	Settled life was labour-intensive; possessions and leadership developed – sickness and violence started
“The Mystery of Easter Island”	Large statues were rolled into place with logs – requiring chopping down of forests – people then turned on one another (Mulloy 1974)	Duly repeated in J Diamond’s “Collapse” (2005). Reality was that rats destroyed the forests and western ships brought slavery and plague
Stanford University	1971 experiment - Students separated into prisoners and jailors and role-played – with sadism and violence resulting	When students protested they were told that results needed to prove that prisons didn’t work. Zimbardo published that research in 1973. Martinsen then pushed that thesis – with strong media support – although his subsequent retraction got no publicity
Stanley Milgram’s shock machine	1961 experiment which had psychology students apply ever-stronger voltage to control subjects	Follow-up research indicated that many students understood it was a mock study
38 New York Bystanders	1964 incident when a young woman loudly stabbed to death – with no one going to her rescue. A few days later, the killer was apprehended by 2 bystanders	Experiment confirmed there was a “bystander effect” when people thought that others would deal with sit. No media reported fact that it was 2 bystanders who caught the killer Meta analysis pub in 2011. In 90% of cases people help!
The “Broken Windows” theory	James Q Wilson started this with a 1982 article in The Atlantic which was taken up by Mayor Giuliana and police Commissioner Bratton	A 2015 meta-analysis disproved a theory which had cops arresting anyone for minor felons. Demographic trends were the basic cause of the decline in crime. Arguably the strategy has led to racial profiling and increased police aggression
German fighting zeal in 2^nd WW	Janowitz and Shils discover that German soldiers fight for camaraderie	But outsiders don’t count 95% of soldier deaths in 2^nd WW were from “distance” weapons
The Pygmalion effect	Humans can and should be classified into positive and negative categories	Expectations are self-reinforcing - it’s the basis of theory X and theory Y schools of management. If you assume people are lazy, they will prove you right – and vv
Monetary rewards can demotivate	People need financial rewards to achieve	Edward Deci has demonstrated that bonuses are generally perverse
The tragedy of the commons	G Harin wrote an article with this title in 1968 which argued that people abused common land eg overgrazing	Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize in 2009 for proving him wrong – starting with a famous Workshop in 1973 to study the “commons” and her 1990 book “Governing the Commons”
Norway’s prisons	The US incarcerates about 10 times more people in prisons than the average country	Norway’s low recidivism rates demonstrate a better way
Drinking tea with terrorists	Heavy prion sentences are the normal recourse	Dutch and Danish treatment show there is a more effective way