Human psychology provides many obstacles to critical thinking. It’s easy to imagine how some of these traits might have been evolutionarily adaptive, but act as impediments to perspective in the modern world. I’ll discuss two that I tend to fall for below.
Pareidolia is the way our brains auto-fill missing information or perceive patterns based on vague or incomplete information. Think about how easy it is to see images in clouds or to misinterpret something someone said because you didn’t quite hear the last couple of words. Our own beliefs, biases and experiences influence the patterns we recognize. Many Christians see images of Jesus in food, for example.
Pareidolia is closely related to confirmation bias, which is our tendency to emphasize data that supports our predetermined opinions and ignore the evidence we don’t like. One personal example of this is the bathroom scale at my in-laws’ house. It tends to weigh lighter than my scale, so of course I ascribe more credibility to that scale. It must be the accurate one!
Mark Crislip wrote about a great example of pareidolia and confirmation bias in a Science Based Medicine article called Sky Maul. Dr. Crislip saw an ad in the Sky Mall magazine for an at-home needle-free acupuncture device. The makers of the device claim that the tattoos on Otzi, a famous 5000 year-old naturally-preserved mummy correspond to acupuncture points, therefore you should buy their product. The unstated major premise is that acupuncture is effective.
Crislip does an awesome job describing the multiple problems with this entire line of reasoning, beginning with the fact that Otzi has over fifty tattoos, which could correspond to a number of conflicting acupuncture modalities. It’s like connect-the-dots without the numbers: you can draw any picture you like. Crislip has an alternative hypothesis:
“I think they all have it wrong. Look carefully at the location of the tattoo points. There mark the intersections of the webbing on Spiderman’s costume. These are not acupuncture points, but rather reflect the ability of both Ötzi and the Peruvian mummy to see into the future imaginings of Stan Lee. I think it makes as much sense based on the data.”
My own bias leads me to suspect that Otzi’s tattos, whatever else they might represent, may have helped him impress women. Accurately or not, I tend to frame puzzling human behaviors in the context of status and power (evolutionarily adapted for sexual selection in my opinion).
The article’s comment section is awesome, and the discussion reminded me of a great material culture exercise I participated in back in Anthropology school. The point of the exercise was to illustrate how even contemporary artifacts can lose information when viewed out of context. We know a lot less than we think we know.
The professor brought in fragments of everyday artifacts we might find in our own trash. Some items were obvious, and some were surprisingly hard to identify. Or easy to identify but difficult to get to the details. For example, we correctly identified a broken zipper pull, but of course couldn’t make any sort of guess about what article of clothing it once belonged to. The things we had no idea about, we jokingly labeled “ritualistic object.”
We all interpret our world with our own lenses. A tall, thin, u-shaped wire that has been exposed to fire might indeed be an artifact of some sort of phallic fertility ritual. Or maybe it’s just the handle from jiffy pop popcorn.
Here are some things I found in a local trash midden. See if you can guess the artifact in the first series of photos before scrolling down for the answers. Consider how many possibilities exist for each item along with what critical information is missing. Consider what assumptions you make about me based on my trash. (The negative ones are likely to be incorrect.)
The first item is plastic, about the size of a quarter.
I remember those photos from my general psych class last semester. I got the inhaler one correct. Because I know what my inhaler looks like. I thought the roofing component one was a blister pack for a medication. The other two had me clueless.
Thanks Sylvie! The roof truss fastener was a tough one! My FIL had to tell me what it was :)