Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

This difference in order (between hearing, accepting, and evaluating versus hearing, evaluating, and then accepting) might initially seem trivial, but it has serious consequences. Take, for example, a case that was recently described on Ira Glass's weekly radio show This American Life. A lifelong political activist who was the leading candidate for chair of New Hampshire's Democratic Party was accused of possessing substantial amounts of child pornography. Even though his accuser, a Republican state representative, offered no proof, the accused was forced to step down, his political career essentially ruined. A two-month investigation ultimately found no evidence, but the damage was done — our legal system may be designed around the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," but our mind is not.

Indeed, as every good lawyer knows intuitively, just asking about some possibility can increase the chance that someone will believe it. ("Isn't it true you've been reading pornographic magazines since you were twelve?" "Objection — irrelevant!") Experimental evidence bears this out: merely hearing something in the form of a question —

*The converse wasn't true: interrupting people's consideration of true propositions didn't lead to increased disbelief precisely because people initially accept that what they hear is true, whether or not they ultimately get a chance to properly evaluate it.

rather than a declarative statement — is often enough to induce belief.

Why do we humans so often accept uncritically what we hear? Because of the way in which belief evolved: from machinery first used in the service of perception. And in perception, a high percentage of what we see is true (or at least it was before the era of television and Photoshop). When we see something, it's usually safe to believe it. The cycle of belief works in the same way — we gather some bit of information, directly, through our senses, or perhaps more often, indirectly through language and communication. Either way, we tend to immediately believe it and only later, if at all, consider its veracity.

The trouble with extending this "Shoot first, ask questions later" approach to belief is that the linguistic world is much less trustworthy than the visual world. If something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we are licensed to think it's a duck. But if some guy in a trenchcoat tells us he wants to sell us a duck, that's a different story. Especially in this era of blogs, focus groups, and spin doctors, language is not always a reliable source of truth. In an ideal world, the basic logic of perception (gather information, assume true, then evaluate if there is time) would be inverted for explicit, linguistically transmitted beliefs; but instead, as is often the case, evolution took the lazy way out, building belief out of a progressive overlay of technologies, consequences be damned. Our tendency to accept what we hear and read with far too little skepticism is but one more consequence.

Yogi Berra once said that 90 percent of the game of baseball was half mental; I say, 90 percent of what we believe is half cooked. Our beliefs are contaminated by the tricks of memory, by emotion, and by the vagaries of a perceptual system that really ought be fully separate — not to mention a logic and inference system that is as yet, in the early twenty-first century, far from fully hatched.

The dictionary defines the act of believing both as "accepting something as true" and as "being of the opinion that something exists, especially when there is no absolute proof." Is belief about what we know to be true or what we want to be true? That it is so often difficult for members of our species to tell the difference is a pointed reminder of our origins.

Evolved of creatures that were often forced to act rather than think, Homo sapiens simply never evolved a proper system for keeping track of what we know and how we've come to know it, uncontaminated by what we simply wish were so.

4

CHOICE

People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and another who would rather watch an old movie on television. The two are in continual contest for control.

— THOMAS SCHELLINC