Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

With these lessons about lessons under their belt, psychologists have recently devised debiasing programs that fortify logical and critical thinking curricula. They encourage students to spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range of contexts.⁸⁵ Some use computer games that provide students with practice, and with feedback that allows them to see the absurd consequences of their errors. Other curricula translate abstruse mathematical statements into concrete, imaginable scenarios. Tetlock has compiled the practices of successful forecasters into a set of guidelines for good judgment (for example, start with the base rate; seek out evidence and don’t overreact or underreact to it; don’t try to explain away your own errors but instead use them as a source of calibration). These and other programs are provably effective: students’ newfound wisdom outlasts the training session and transfers to new subjects.

Despite these successes, and despite the fact that the ability to engage in unbiased, critical reasoning is a prerequisite to thinking about anything else, few educational institutions have set themselves the goal of enhancing rationality. (This includes my own university, where my suggestion during a curriculum review that all students should learn about cognitive biases fell deadborn from my lips.) Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away” as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare.⁸⁶

Effective training in critical thinking and cognitive debiasing may not be enough to cure identity-protective cognition, in which people cling to whatever opinion enhances the glory of their tribe and their status within it. This is the disease with the greatest morbidity in the political realm, and so far scientists have misdiagnosed it, pointing to irrationality and scientific illiteracy instead of the myopic rationality of the Tragedy of the Belief Commons. As one writer noted, scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly.⁸⁷

Making the world more rational, then, is not just a matter of training people to be better reasoners and setting them loose. It also depends on the rules of discourse in workplaces, social circles, and arenas of debate and decision-making. Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities.⁸⁸ One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the truth usually wins.⁸⁹ Scientists themselves have hit upon a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it.⁹⁰

Even the mere requirement to explicate an opinion can shake people out of their overconfidence. Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.⁹¹ Though we think we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have no idea. That is also true of hot-button political issues. When people with die-hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking about, and become more open to counterarguments. Perhaps most important, people are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the consequences of their opinions. In a review of the literature on rationality, the anthropologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber conclude, “Contrary to common bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities, people are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate.”⁹²

The way that the rules in particular arenas can make us collectively stupid or smart can resolve the paradox that keeps popping up in this chapter: why the world seems to be getting less rational in an age of unprecedented knowledge and tools for sharing it. The resolution is that in most arenas, the world has not been getting less rational. It’s not as if hospital patients are increasingly dying of quackery, or planes are falling out of the sky, or food is rotting on wharves because no one can figure out how to get it into stores. The chapters on progress have shown that our collective ingenuity has been increasingly successful in solving society’s problems.