I bias, We bias and truthiness

Nice piece in last week’s New Scientist Seeing Reason which chews over this year’s political shenanigans from the rationalist fact-based perspective: Trump, Farage and Fake News.It’s good to see Stephen Colbert’s notion of “truthiness” (something that you feel should be true but may not have any evidence to support them at all).

“Truthiness” is a bit like “scienciness” – what old ad lags used to use to promote toothpaste by sticking some one in a white coat to proclaim the benefits of said product while prefacing same (in good old Unreliable Narrator style) with the immortal line “hello, I’m not a dentist”.

As for Mad Men, so for MDs. Apparently, the symbolic value of the white coat is now being acknowledged in a ritual adopted by medical professionals in the US to mark the transition from student to practitioner (or theoretician to practical study). The White Coat Ceremony, indeed.

Both Truthiness and Scienciness are things to watch out for: is something actually true or do you just want it to be so? Do you want to believe in something because the evidence (a twitter poll or a spuriously over specific percentage) looks like evidential?

Good though the piece is – and it is sound as far as it goes in explain how cognitive biases can lead individuals to misunderstand the world and make bad decisions (the subtitle reads, “Human brains skew facts. How we can change our minds”), it’s still grossly unaware of its own biases and assumptions.

Let me explain:

1. It mixes up human minds and human brains (to make it seem more “truthy”, perhaps? When did prefixing an idea “neuro-” ever make it seem less smart?). These are different things and while we understand a fair bit about minds, we are still much nearer the beginning of understanding the brain and how the two relate to each other.
2. It presumes that human behaviour is predominantly shaped by what goes on inside an individual’s mind (when human behaviour is a complex phenomena shaped by many factors, many of which are environmental and social).
3. It presumes that good choices are always made by rational, fact-based thinking (if only…); any thing other is a disappointing and dangerous failure to think.
4. If individual thinking is the ideal (albeit prone to bias), social cognition and perception are only ever bad (internet memes and “truthy” stuff on twitter) 

   Of course, much of this comes from lifting the content from one discipline and being uncritical about the assumptions in that discipline. Cog Psych is not the only science involved in decision science. Indeed, it’s probably not the most important one to those of us engaged with how large numbers of people behave.

   Still at least we get to watch Colbert again