Skeptic speaks on weird beliefs
This just in –
Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster were spotted eating lunch together in The Hub last Tuesday.
And if you believe that, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.
“People believe all kinds of weird things,” said Michael Shermer, editor of “Skeptics” magazine and guest speaker at last Tuesday’s lecture, “Why People Believe Weird Things.”
“My job is to try and account for those beliefs,” he said.
A self-proclaimed skeptic, Shermer put forth the claim that “there is no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural; there is just the normal and the natural, and a whole bunch of stuff that science just can’t explain yet. When they can, we’ll just move on to the next mystery.”
But the greatest mystery, for Shermer, is trying to understand why people believe such strange things. According to a Gallup Poll taken in 1990: 22 percent of American adults believe that aliens have landed on the earth, 52 percent believe in astrology, and 42 percent of American adults believe in communication with the dead.
“Anybody can talk to the dead,” Shermer said. “It’s getting them to talk back that’s the hard part.”
With candid humor, Shermer proceeded to discuss some of the strange beliefs people hold and why they have those beliefs.
“The fact is we are a pattern-seeking people,” Shermer said. “We try to find connections between things.”
Citing such examples as the three faces on Mars (the human face, the happy face, and the Kermit the Frog face) and a sighting of the Virgin Mary on the glass windows of a bank in Florida, Shermer proposed that what people expect to see determines what they actually see.
“We also tend to remember only the hits and forget the misses,” Shermer said. “That’s just the way the brain works. That is the natural way.”
Again, Shermer pointed to some provocative examples to prove his point. He explained how a group of high school principals came to him with a “quasi-dowser” which, like water dowsers of old, was supposed to locate anything from lockers to golf balls to marijuana in students.
Skeptical as ever, Shermer and his team ran an experiment where some marijuana was placed at random in one of two lockers. One of the principals was then asked to use the “quasi-dowser” and locate the marijuana. It was located 26 times out of 50. Though the principal was impressed with the seemingly high number, Shermer pointed out that blind chance could do just as well as the $900 dowser.
“The question we always ask is, does it beat blind chance?” Shermer said. “Significant statistics start at 37 hits out of 50.”
Shermer also referred to a comic book writer, John Byrne, who has the uncanny knack for “prophesying” events weeks or even days before they occur.
From a blackout in New York back in the ’70s to the Challenger shuttle crash, Byrne has predicted enough calamities that his colleagues have taken to calling this ability “the Byrne curse.”
Byrne said, “In one issue [of Wonder Woman], the title character (named Diana) was killed in advance of her becoming a goddess. The title page of that issue was done with a newspaper front page reading, Princess Diana dies. That issue went on sale Thursday. The following Saturday … well, I don’t have to tell you what happened, do I?”
Byrne commented that even though he has predicted such major calamities hundreds of times, only a handful of them have ever come “true.”
Shermer points to this as another example of our tendency to remember the hits and forget the misses.
“That’s why 67 percent of Americans believe in psychic experiences,” he said.
Shermer also discussed the unreliability of our memories.
“Our brains are not like digital cameras,” he said. “How reliable are those stories we hear? What we remember we saw and what we actually saw are usually very different things.”
Most of the large crowd listened attentively to Shermer’s presentation.
Robert Leishman, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, felt the presentation was very interesting, though it did challenge the way he thought about things.
“I thought [Shermer] was a very respectable person with a very objective point of view,” Leishman said. “Even though he didn’t always understand why people believe certain things, he was willing to find out why they believed that, and he respected them. I learned that you have to be careful with what you think and what you believe because things aren’t always what they seem, especially with our perceptions. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see a lot of the time.”
Shermer said, “It is easy, even fun to challenge others’ beliefs when we are smug in the certainty of our own. But when ours are challenged, it takes great patience and ego strength to listen with an unjaundiced ear.”
Those interested in learning more about Shermer or skepticism in general can go to www.skeptic.com.
-mattgo@cc.usu.edu