THE MISCONCEPTION: We all believe we are rational, logical beings who see the world as it really is.
THE TRUTH: Everybody is deluded by bias.
There are 3 reasons for this: 1. Cognitive biases (predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions) 2. Heuristics (shortcuts you use to solve common problems and which speed up processing in the brain but which sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important) 3. Logical fallacies (arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you dont care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is).
These 3 are common to all of us. This is why when the initiated Mason is asked to reveal the truth he has learned he replies "At my initiation I was taught to be cautious." He then puts his finger to his lips in the sign of silence.
Another problem we face is conditioning by priming. There are many examples which demonstrate this. In 2005, Hank Aarts at Utrecht University had subjects fill out a questionnaire. They were then rewarded with a cookie. One group sat in a room filled with the faint smell of cleaning products while another group smelled nothing. The group primed by the aroma in the clean-smelling room cleaned up after themselves three times more often.
In another study by Ron Friedman two groups of people were merely shown but not allowed to drink sports beverages or bottled water. Those who just looked at sports drinks persisted 4 times longer in tasks of physical endurance than those who looked at water.
Scientist Jonah Lehrer observed that the emotional brain is older and thus more evolved than the rational brain. It is better suited for complex decisions and automatic processing of very complex operations like singing or shuffling cards. Those operations seem simple, but they have too many steps and variables for your rational mind to handle. You hand those tasks over to the adaptive unconscious.
Your true self is a much larger and more complex construct than you are aware of at any given moment. If your behavior is the result of priming, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions because you arent aware of the advice youve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.
We are far more complex than we realize. In 1996 John Bargh conducted an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In this experiment white participants sat down at a computer to fill out long boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or white men flashed on the screen for thirteen milliseconds faster than the participants could consciously process. Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning.
Those exposed to the images of African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw white faces. Even though they didnt believe themselves to be racist or to harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual. The experiment was repeated 8 times with the same results. The experiment was then repeated using African-Americans. Those exposed to the images of white faces became hostile and frustrated more easily than subjects who saw African-American faces.
THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media and scientific logic, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many provable examples.
THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is true if you can find just one example of which conforms to your biases.
Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would.
It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself. For two decades his work continued, and it earned him the highest accolade possible. One psychiatrist even going so far as to call Freeman "The greatest Genius of the 20th century." Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized. Today, the ice-pick lobotomy is condemned by medicine as a barbaric and naive approach to dealing with mental illness.
The rise and fall of the ice-pick lobotomy had a lot to do with the argument from authority. Freeman and others had jumped the gun on the scientific evidence. Without all the facts in place, they used psychosurgery because it gave them the results they were looking for. Hospitals welcomed Dr. Freeman; his authority went unquestioned as, one after another, he pulled aside patients who needed help and turned them into zombies. Just two decades later, the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one. His license to practice was revoked, and he died an outcast. The same community who lauded him in one era rejected him in another. After his techniques were abandoned neurologists and psychiatrists wondered how for two decades a whole field of science came under the spell of lobotomy. For two decades respected scientists published papers in respected publications endorsing the wonders of lobotomy. These papers were not speculation, they were well researched and backed by convincing evidence, yet today we know all this evidence was misplaced, biased nonsense.
The truth is that bias is the father of belief. You naturally look to those in power as having something special you lack, a spark of something you would like to see inside yourself. This is why people sometimes subscribe to the beliefs of celebrities. If you feel more inclined to believe something is true because it comes from a person with prestige, you are letting the argument from authority spin your head. If a celebrity basketball player tells you to buy a particular brand of batteries, ask yourself if the basketball player seems like an expert on electrochemical energy storage units before you take the players word.
THE TRUTH: Everybody is deluded by bias.
There are 3 reasons for this: 1. Cognitive biases (predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions) 2. Heuristics (shortcuts you use to solve common problems and which speed up processing in the brain but which sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important) 3. Logical fallacies (arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you dont care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is).
These 3 are common to all of us. This is why when the initiated Mason is asked to reveal the truth he has learned he replies "At my initiation I was taught to be cautious." He then puts his finger to his lips in the sign of silence.
Another problem we face is conditioning by priming. There are many examples which demonstrate this. In 2005, Hank Aarts at Utrecht University had subjects fill out a questionnaire. They were then rewarded with a cookie. One group sat in a room filled with the faint smell of cleaning products while another group smelled nothing. The group primed by the aroma in the clean-smelling room cleaned up after themselves three times more often.
In another study by Ron Friedman two groups of people were merely shown but not allowed to drink sports beverages or bottled water. Those who just looked at sports drinks persisted 4 times longer in tasks of physical endurance than those who looked at water.
Scientist Jonah Lehrer observed that the emotional brain is older and thus more evolved than the rational brain. It is better suited for complex decisions and automatic processing of very complex operations like singing or shuffling cards. Those operations seem simple, but they have too many steps and variables for your rational mind to handle. You hand those tasks over to the adaptive unconscious.
Your true self is a much larger and more complex construct than you are aware of at any given moment. If your behavior is the result of priming, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions because you arent aware of the advice youve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.
We are far more complex than we realize. In 1996 John Bargh conducted an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In this experiment white participants sat down at a computer to fill out long boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or white men flashed on the screen for thirteen milliseconds faster than the participants could consciously process. Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning.
Those exposed to the images of African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw white faces. Even though they didnt believe themselves to be racist or to harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual. The experiment was repeated 8 times with the same results. The experiment was then repeated using African-Americans. Those exposed to the images of white faces became hostile and frustrated more easily than subjects who saw African-American faces.
THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media and scientific logic, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many provable examples.
THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is true if you can find just one example of which conforms to your biases.
Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would.
It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself. For two decades his work continued, and it earned him the highest accolade possible. One psychiatrist even going so far as to call Freeman "The greatest Genius of the 20th century." Even the sister of President John F. Kennedy was lobotomized. Today, the ice-pick lobotomy is condemned by medicine as a barbaric and naive approach to dealing with mental illness.
The rise and fall of the ice-pick lobotomy had a lot to do with the argument from authority. Freeman and others had jumped the gun on the scientific evidence. Without all the facts in place, they used psychosurgery because it gave them the results they were looking for. Hospitals welcomed Dr. Freeman; his authority went unquestioned as, one after another, he pulled aside patients who needed help and turned them into zombies. Just two decades later, the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one. His license to practice was revoked, and he died an outcast. The same community who lauded him in one era rejected him in another. After his techniques were abandoned neurologists and psychiatrists wondered how for two decades a whole field of science came under the spell of lobotomy. For two decades respected scientists published papers in respected publications endorsing the wonders of lobotomy. These papers were not speculation, they were well researched and backed by convincing evidence, yet today we know all this evidence was misplaced, biased nonsense.
The truth is that bias is the father of belief. You naturally look to those in power as having something special you lack, a spark of something you would like to see inside yourself. This is why people sometimes subscribe to the beliefs of celebrities. If you feel more inclined to believe something is true because it comes from a person with prestige, you are letting the argument from authority spin your head. If a celebrity basketball player tells you to buy a particular brand of batteries, ask yourself if the basketball player seems like an expert on electrochemical energy storage units before you take the players word.
