Quotes from Robert Carroll

Political beliefs, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial beliefs seem impenetrable to facts that contradict them.

One of the first things I learned when I began teaching courses in critical thinking in 1974 was that those of us trained in philosophy needed to supplement our philosophical training with the study of various cognitive, perceptual, and affective biases or illusions. We had a lot to learn from the social scientists if we were to teach our students to think critically. Identifying fallacies, learning to test deductive arguments for validity, and the like would not be enough.

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined the term "backfire effect" to describe how some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly.

A measles epidemic in Ireland (over 1,500 reported cases in 2000) has been blamed on Wakefield. Three children died. Fears of an epidemic in Scotland (where Wakefield once practiced medicine) and England were also fueled by Wakefield's claims. Cases of measles in England rose to a 20-year high following the collapse in MMR immunization rates.

In May 2010, Wakefield and Walker-Smith were found guilty and had their medical licenses revoked. Murch was found not guilty. Wakefield is unrepentant. He has since published a book entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy (2010) with an introduction by actress Jenny McCarthy. (McCarthy denies that she is anti-vaccine. She claims she is pro safe vaccine, yet she seems to think there is no such thing as a safe vaccine.)

There's very little that Idi Amin and Newt Gingrich have in common, but they both used words to shape how people think about things without regard for the truth.

The church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves."—Robert Ingersoll

The backfire and continued influence effects should be disheartening to those who think that the first step in arguing with those who base their beliefs on misinformation should be to get their opponents to see what the facts are. Correcting errors may be pointless when dealing with some people.

correcting errors is a waste of time if the one you are correcting attributes his own beliefs to principled, unprejudiced inquiry, while attributing the beliefs of those who disagree with him to bias and ulterior motives.

The National Research Council (NRC) spent more than three years reviewing more than 500 scientific studies that had been conducted over a 20-year period and found "no conclusive and consistent evidence" that electromagnetic fields harm humans.

One of the problems with anecdotes is that they tend to be provided by the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones.

At the very least, one would hope that by becoming aware of the many ways our brain can trick us, we would arrive at the conclusion Bertrand Russell thought was a necessary consequence of the limits of knowledge: we should be less cocksure of our beliefs, hold them tentatively, and always be on guard against thinking our feeling of absolute certainty implies we're right.

We must work hard at overcoming the natural tendency to see causal connections and other patterns where there are none by examining all the evidence, not just the data that support our gut feeling. Critical thinking, skepticism, and science did not evolve on the savannah millions of years ago. They are unnatural and go against the grain of those instincts that helped our species survive for hundreds of thousands of years.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

One of the ironies of cults is that the craziest groups are often composed of the most caring people.

Accept the fact that sometimes coincidences happen. Clouds sometimes look like horses and clocks sometimes stop for no reason. Resist the urge to find meaning and significance everywhere you look.

Attacking a person, rather than the person's position or argument, is usually easier as well as psychologically more satisfying to those who divide the world into two classes of people—those who agree with them and are therefore good and right, and those who disagree with them and are therefore evil and wrong.

When presented with this evidence, believers in the "hot hand" are likely to reject it because they "know better" from experience.

Politicians play on our fears to manipulate us.

Psychologists call this natural tendency to be selective in both our memory and our perception confirmation bias. People with strong convictions often take confirmation bias to a level known as motivated reasoning. The more evidence one presents against their belief, the more motivated they become to refute the evidence and defend their conviction.

It's understandable that we would believe many things as children that our parents and others in our society have passed on to us as if they were absolute truths, even though they may be nothing but traditional prejudices. But why do we cling to what Mencken called the "palpably false" after we're old enough to think for ourselves?

It is not that hard to understand why most of us believe strongly in things that are palpably not true. We have a natural propensity to see causal connections where there are none and our beliefs are constantly reinforced by people we like and trust. For many people, one vivid and emotionally salient experience validated by a single neighbor or shopkeeper trumps a thousand randomized, double-blind, controlled scientific experiments.

Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic."—Karl Popper