Sunday e-mail 13th July
Things we know and things we don’t
Today let us briefly consider what we know, what we do not know, and the difference between the two. By way of illustrating our theme, let’s turn over in our minds this well-known quotation, visible now on a T-shirt or meme near you:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
I had intended to sue that as an epigraph to this Sunday e-mail. Naturally, I Googled it just to check that I was right about something I knew for sure. It was definitely Teddy Roosevelt who said it first. Turned out it definitely wasn’t. It wasn’t even Mark Twain, who would have been my reserve candidate. Would you like to know who did say it first? Of course you would. And so would lots of other people who don’t know either. No one does. You can read all about the quotation here. Did I say ‘quotation’? It’s not even that!
Here are some things you can know for sure:
· Whether or not other people have been talking about you when you walk into a room.
· A borrower’s trustworthiness.
· Traps are hidden in the small print.
· You’re going to enjoy this new book that you’ve never read but not that one.
As another popular T-shirt has it: ‘There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete information…’ Again, if that’s a quotation, I don’t know who said it first. All the items on our list are about extrapolating from incomplete information. Broadly, they’re about filling in the blanks.
If pressed, you’d probably struggle to say just how you knew that other people were talking about you when you came into the room. Even so, you can be extremely confident that they were (I’m sure they were saying only nice things).
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Let’s put it another way. There isn’t much information in the source material (the words, voices, expressions, and behaviour of the gossipers). You do however have stored in your mind a great deal of information about human beings and their relationships. For that reason, you are able to make fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate, too.
Psychologists have their own jargon for this. They talk about bottom-up and top-down processing. The former is driven by the information that comes into our senses from the outside world; the latter is what’s stored in the mind. It’s difficult to over-estimate the importance of top-down processes. Some estimate that about 95% of what we see when we look around is driven by them. In other words, even when we are looking directly at our surroundings, the vast majority of what we ‘see’ is just what we expected to see in the first place. Are there implications for eyewitness memory? Of course!
Perhaps it’s ironic that Psychology as a discipline seems to be uniquely vulnerable to the influence of what people think they know about the subject rather than what is really true. Here are some facts that are not facts. Many people know them for certain, but they just ain’t so:
We only use 10% of our brains. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across this one. The most egregious example is in Luc Besson’s film, Lucy. Poor Morgan Freeman is condemned to play a mad scientist who rattles on and on and on about what humankind would be able to do if only we could unlock the remaining 90% of our processing power. I pointed out loudly and repeatedly the logical impossibility of knowing what someone smarter than you would think about anything. Not only that, but it’s ridiculous to think we’d evolve a fabulously-complex brain that was 90% functionless. No one else in the cinema seemed to care very much. I’m not allowed back in Cineworld.
Psychology is all about the subconscious. It really isn’t. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever heard a psychologist use the word ‘subconscious’ except in a sentence like this one, explaining that we don’t use the word.
Different groups have different characteristics. This seems to be a consequence of Social Identity Theory, which we discussed in this article. The argument is sometimes applied to gender (‘Men are from Mars, women are from Venus’) or race (see almost any social media post or news article over the last decade or so) or even nationality (‘The English are like this but the Scots are like that’). Groups do not exist. At least, they don’t exist in the wild. They are a product of our own thinking processes, which are adapted for categorising objects, events, and people. But, even if there were real categories, the differences within them would dwarf the differences between them. In other words, groups only matter if we make them matter.
Psychologists can read other people’s minds. Well, this one is true. We just don’t let on. Please don’t tell anyone.
This week’s Crime & Psychology newsletter deals with another persistent fiction, one that has been so successful, it has even acquired the elevated status of an urban legend. What can it be? I know you are asking yourself already. You have only to wait until Wednesday for the answer, Crime & Psychology fan. It will be worth it, I promise! Meanwhile, make sure you bang a blue button below and think about buying me a coffee.