In the five stages of the acceptance of new ideas, Stage 4 occurs when the idea has become so well adopted that people claim that “I knew it all along.” This is not (always) just an attempt to usurp the glory; it can also reflect something called hindsight bias.
Many studies have shown that once people are aware of the correct answer to something, they are certain that they would have known the answer, even if they were previously uninformed. Knowledge of the correct answer allows us to build a nice story around the answer, and when the answer is “taken away” in our imagination, the story remains. The story structure that contained the right answer makes it seem as though we would have obviously selected the right answer.
Hindsight bias also affects recall of our confidence in the truth of an assertion. That is, if we find out that an earlier assertion was indeed true, this will increase our recalled confidence in its truth. And if we discover that the assertion was false, it will decrease our recalled confidence in its truth. Let’s say we were originally very impressed by a certain telepathy experiment. Later, we heard a rumor somewhere that this study contained a flaw (real or imagined).
Hindsight bias will covertly reconstruct our memory so that we begin to recall that we were actually not at all impressed by the experiment in the first place. Hindsight bias also occurs if we are repeatedly exposed to an assertion. Regardless of whether the assertion is true, repetition will improve our memory of it and, as a result, falsely boost our confidence in its truth! This means that incessant television shows with stories about angels and aliens will boost our confidence in those ideas, completely independently of whether those stories are true.
Mediated Evidence
Most of what we know about the world at large, especially about science, and even more so about psi research, comes not through our personal experience but through heavily refined, preprocessed, “mediated” information on television and in magazines and books. All the informational and motivational biases already mentioned operate on this mediated information just as they would have operated on the evidence if we had seen it with our own eyes.
The difference is that we’ve learned (it is hoped) that preprocessed information invariably presents only part of the story. Someone had to decide what to present and what to leave out, and this means we should always be wary of scientific evidence presented in the brief formats available on television shows. When a program host says, “Here’s the evidence for psychic phenomena. Now you decide what to believe,” this sounds great but it’s actually a ridiculous assignment. We haven’t been shown all the evidence, nor do we have any guidelines about how to evaluate the evidence. All we saw were a few selected bits that looked good on TV.
To overcome the suspected biases in any source of mediated or predigested information, we should look for multiple sources of similar information and see if the evidence converges. Of course, this takes effort, usually more effort than most people are willing to spend. In addition, informational and motivational biases provide very reasonable-feeling excuses to ignore any mediated evidence that contradicts our beliefs. If we don’t like what the TV show is saying, we just flip the channel.
The television medium in particular is designed to manipulate our attentional biases by playing the commercials a little louder, by making pro grams faster-paced and brighter, and by escalating the number of emotionally stimulating scenes. Television rarely presents information about what actual data mean, or how data were collected, or how to under stand the analysis and interpretation of the evidence. Television shows are forced to bypass most of the caveats and alternative explanations that form the cautious side of science, because the alternatives are not always so simple to convey.
Because most of what people know about “the paranormal” comes through television programs and movies, those who would like to know what to believe often assess the quality of the evidence through the credibility of the show. A calm, sober presentation of evidence on the PBS science program Nova should carry more evidential weight than a sensational ghost story on a “tabloid” program. This sounds reasonable, except for something called the “sleeper effect.”20
The sleeper effect is a memory distortion whereby information be comes separated from its source. Let’s say that we see a silly ghost story on a sensational, “tabloid” show. Later, we see a scientific psi experiment de scribed on a sober science program. Initially, we will perceive the ghost story as less credible than the experiment, but after a while the information from the tabloid show and the science show will become mixed up in memory. Soon the ghost story and the psi experiment will be remembered as equally evidential, because the sources of the information have been for gotten. If our prior opinion says that ghosts are silly, then the psi experiment must also be silly—because we will assume that they both came from the same source.
Beyond the Perceptual Filters
Beyond expectation, hindsight bias, and cognitive dissonance, psychotherapists have identified many other ways that the mind consciously and unconsciously protects itself from seeing what it does not wish to see. These mental protection schemes, which are the emotional first cousins of the more intellectually motivated perceptual and cognitive biases, have been labeled suppression, reaction formation, repression, identification, dissociation, and projection.21 Let’s examine them briefly.
Suppresion
Suppression refers to a conscious avoidance of something we may wish to do or say. Say you’re in a meeting where your boss is about to give a presentation to some important clients. You notice to your horror that your boss’s toupee has slipped, and it now bears a striking resemblance to a squirrel perched on his head. You have an overriding impulse to laugh, but you suppress your impulse, because laughing would cause a public embarrassment that might put your job in jeopardy.
People who do not control their impulses, such as when they are drunk, are perceived as impulsive and antisocial. For the wheels of civilization to turn smoothly, some impulses must be suppressed. Litde children speak whatever comes to mind and get away with it, but adults who do this quickly find that they have no friends. Children are taught very early on not to speak about what adults have called “psychic experiences,” because the social order in the Western world does not know what to do with children who are “violating natural law.”
Reaction Formation
Defense mechanisms can be consciously applied, as in suppression, or applied in the unconscious. The deeper in the unconscious the defense is, the more powerful are its effects, and the more difficult it is to recognize the defense as being part of us. Reaction formation is usually just below the level of awareness, but it can be recognized as an unrealistically enthusiastic or wildly negative response to something.
For example, say you really wanted to get a promotion, and you thought that you were the obvious choice, but another office worker, call him Bob, was promoted instead. When you learn of this shocking miscarriage of justice, reaction formation will immediately protect your ego by making Bob out to be a nasty, backbiting, stupid, ugly person.
The same reaction can occur in the opposite direction. Say that you were taught as a child that only bad, evil people become angry. This message may have been deeply engrained throughout your childhood, and it has become part of the way you perceive the world. Thus, when Bob is given the promotion that you worked hard for, your initial impulse to be come angry may be transformed, because you are not allowed to become angry. Reaction formation would cause you to become wildly enthusiastic about the wisdom behind Bob’s promotion, and to tell everyone what a wonderful guy he is.
Typically, when someone complains a little too much, or is inappropriately over-enthusiastic, it may be a sign of reaction formation, in which case the person’s real feelings may be the opposite. As the queen responded after Hamlet asked her how she liked the play, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The more vigorous skeptical attacks on parapsychology are reminiscent of reaction formation. Likewise, some equally emotional at tacks on psi research by psychic enthusiasts (who resent the intrusion of science into their private domain) suggest the presence of underlying defense mechanisms.
Repression
When a feeling or desire is completely blocked from awareness, this is a form of repression. In contrast to suppression, which is a conscious blocking of inner impulses, repression is blocked below conscious awareness. Because repression is hidden from awareness, it is usually inferred from unconscious changes in behavior. For example, suppose your spouse notices that you never call your siblings on the phone. He asks you if some thing happened that has caused you to ignore them. You honestly cannot think of any reason that you don’t call them, so you presume it is because you have been too busy. And yet your spouse notices that you are absent-mindedly clenching your jaw and twisting your fingers as you answer the question. An inference can be made that you have repressed something about your siblings.
Repression also occurs for things that run counter to what we have been taught. Unfortunately, one of the outcomes of going to school is that the natural curiosity we are born with is repeatedly suppressed. We learn not to ask too many questions, not to wonder out loud about certain taboo topics, and to overcome our creative impulses for the sake of conforming to social pressure. In adulthood, these rules may become deeply embedded in the psyche, and are then repressed.
If, as an adult, you have a spontaneous, psychic experience, repression may quickly set in. This protects you from bad memories about how “only crazy people get psychic impressions,” and thus the experience will disappear from awareness almost as fast as it arises. An experience so dramatic that it doesn’t get repressed may weigh heavily as a secret event in your life, rarely admitted to anyone. This practically guarantees that radically new ideas rarely rise to the surface in properly socialized folks. It also guarantees that those who do suggest new ideas are quickly labeled “wacky” or “heretical” and regarded with suspicion. It further explains why the evidence for psi is more or less invisible to the orthodox.
Identification and Introjection
We all carry ideas about who we are, or who we have been taught to believe we are. If we have an inappropriate reaction to something, like a sudden outburst of anger, we might be surprised and think, “Hey, that isn’t me.” When this occurs, it reflects the fact that not only is our perception of the world a construction, but also our sense of who we think we are. That sense of ourselves is formed from identifying with role models during our developmental years, and with role models we admire (or fear) as adults. Some times you may find yourself thinking or saying certain things and suddenly realize that it wasn’t “you” but rather a tape playing from something one of your parents said repeatedly when you were growing up.
If you forget that the mental tape player is not you but your parent, you may begin to identify with the messages on the tape. You will introject an image, or simulation, of that person into you. If you are unlucky, the internal tape recorder may be constantly replaying messages like “you will never amount to anything.” Unconsciously identifying with these messages will lead to the unshakable belief that in fact you never did amount to anything, regardless of what you may have actually accomplished.
Say that one of your favorite college professors insisted that psi is impossible because it contradicts a dozen inviolate Laws of Nature. Say that he or she (but usually he) gave lots of wise-sounding reasons for dismissing the “obviously sloppy” research promoted by psychic researchers who were clearly motivated by secret religious cults. It would take years, or perhaps never, to no longer identify with those skeptical messages.
Dissociation
If you’ve learned that some desires or emotions are taboo, and yet you still have them, then parts of your personality may split off and dissociate from the rest of “you.” In the extreme case of multiple-personality syndrome, these split-off personalities can act like separate people in one body.
For example, if you were brought up in a staunchly atheistic family, religious thoughts or feelings may never have been discussed. If mentioned at all, the topic was immediately derided as superstitious nonsense. As an adult, you may be faced with the uncomfortable situation of having a strong psychological block against something that seems to be a deeply instinctive part of the human psyche. To accommodate both in the same person, the mind compartmentalizes these conflicting desires and beliefs into an “ordinary you” and a “secret you” who yearns for religious experiences.
A mild form of this compartmentalization can be seen in scientists who for six days each week immerse themselves in a purely materialistic, scientific mode that provides no outlet for spiritual ideas. While playing the role of Dr. Scientist, they are essentially atheists, or at least agnostics. And yet on the weekend they attend religious services and sincerely pray that every one in their family remains safe and sound for another week. Maintaining these conflicting attitudes can be mentally painful, especially because it is taboo to mix science and religion. So the mind compartmentalizes the two “you’s” into personality segments that do not overlap. This dissociation also occurs in scientists who publicly and vigorously deny the existence of psi while harboring a couple of secret psi experiences that they have not admitted to anyone.
Projection
If we unconsciously deny that inner feelings or beliefs are from us, we may project them onto others. Let’s say that “Mary” was taught that it was inappropriate ever to tell a lie. And yet she also discovered that she could manipulate people quite easily by telling lies. Faced with the conflict between what she has been taught and what she does, Mary may perceive that she is surrounded by inveterate liars (“they are lying, not me”).
Because our perception of the world, including our perception of other people, is a mental construction, we are always projecting to some extent. As psychologist Charles Tart says, “Watch out for the tendency to assume that anyone who doesn’t confirm your perception (projection) of him is lying!”22 What then are we to make of extreme skeptics who insist that the only rational explanation for psi is fraud, collusion, or mushy-minded thinking? Or of extreme enthusiasts who do not see any value to constructive criticism of psi research, and who view all critics as malicious, evil rationalists? Could this be projection?
Perception and Belief
All this leads us to predict that a person’s level of commitment to the cur rent scientific worldview will determine his or her beliefs about psi. Be cause perception is linked so closely to one’s adopted view of reality, people who do not wish to “see” psi will in fact not see it. Nor will they view any evidence for psi, scientific or otherwise, as valid. This effect should be strongest in people who are committed to a particular view, motivated to maintain it, and clever enough to create good rationalizations for ignoring conflicting evidence.
We can indirectly test this prediction by examining belief in psi among four groups of people: the general public, college professors, heads of divisions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and members of the National Academy of Sciences. We would predict that belief in psychic phenomena will decrease as the degree of commitment to and belief in orthodox science increases. Sure enough, as shown in figure 14.1, belief (measured in surveys by questions such as “Do you believe in the certainty or in the possibility of psychic phenomena?”) drops from about 68 percent of the general public to only about 6 percent of members of the National Academy of Sciences.
It might be argued that this drop in belief is related to the fact that prominent scientists know more about perceptual and memory biases, and about wishful thinking and self-delusion, and this is why they are so skeptical. But another explanation is that the expectations of the scientific elite actually put them more at risk for being swayed by perceptual biases than the general public. After all, the scientific elite have lifelong careers and their credibility on the line. They are strongly motivated to maintain certain belief systems. By contrast, most members of the general public do not know or care about the expectations of science. So if Joe Sixpack and Dr. Scientist both witness a remarkable feat of clairvoyance, we can predict that later, when we ask Joe what he saw, he will describe the incident in matter-of-fact terms. In contrast, when we ask Dr. Scientist what he saw, he may become angry or confused, or deny having seen anything unusual at all.
Given that we see what we wish to see, who is more likely to report genuine psi experiences? Probably not people who enthusiastically subscribe to New Age beliefs, because they see psi everywhere, whether it is really there or not. Probably not confirmed skeptics, because they never see psi any where, whether it is really there or not. And probably not the scientific elite, because they are motivated not to see psi, or at least not to publicly admit that they have had such experiences. This is why the strongest neutral evidence for the existence of psi is the cumulative results of experimental studies, evaluated through a technique like meta-analysis.
Once we realize that preconceptions make it difficult to see the scientific evidence for psi, another question naturally arises: where did these preconceptions come from? The next chapter explores the origins of these assumptions, and discusses why many of those assumptions are no longer justified.
THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE
The Scientific TruthOf Psychic Phenomena
Dean I. Radin, Ph.D.
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