I recently watched the Odyssey. It was great.

Not a significant spoiler, but a spoiler nonetheless: In one scene, Odysseus and his men are hunting for food when they see a sheep. Because sheep flock together, they follow the sheep instead of killing it immediately. The sheep leads them into a cave, where a giant cyclops lives. They get stuck in the cave and try to find a way to defeat the cyclops and escape. They eventually do so by stabbing its eye.

The most interesting thing about the scene was how the cyclops viewed the armored soldiers. It didn’t see a potential threat; it just saw more sheep. It would grab one of the soldiers to eat when it was hungry, and then go to sleep shortly after, like it was grabbing a little pre-nap snack from the fridge.

I think we are all, in our hearts, cyclopses. Not just because we all like a little pre-nap snack, but because we tend to underestimate real threats until we get stabbed in the eye (metaphorically). Get ready for a crazy transition.

Consider Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist goofball. The first time his boring face popped up on my feed, I thought, huh, what a goofball. Then I kept scrolling. I think the appropriate response would have been “Holy shit this guy is terrifying” followed by putting my phone in the microwave.

I honestly can’t remember what he was talking about in the video (thank god), but I do remember how uninteresting I found it. I felt safe in assuming that others would form the same impression and we would soon never hear from this guy again. I certainly didn’t think anyone would find him convincing.

Well, a lot of people aren’t skipping his videos. He is gaining more mainstream appeal. And I still find Fuentes so boring to follow that it is difficult to care.

Why? I think part of the reason is that, when deciding how concerning we should find a particular idea, we consider it’s potential impact on the world. Whenever Fuentes shoots a firehose of diarrhea from his mouth, I do smell how bad it is, but I also know that others will smell how bad it is, and I feel confident that most people will avoid the brown pond.1 In other words, for an idea to be impactful, it has to be persuasive. It can’t obviously smell like shit.

For example, you might be more concerned about the belief that “vaccines are riskier than the diseases they prevent” than the belief that “vaccines contain microscopic tracking devices”. Both prevent people from getting vaccinated, but the first seems like it could convince more people, and thus it is more worthy of our attention.

Absent persuasiveness, trying to pause and feel any sort of emotion toward goofballs online kinda feels like fixing your posture after you have been slouching at your desk all day. It isn’t that I don’t want to fix my slouch; I just don’t remember that I should give my spine a nice stretch. It feels like a chore I should be doing for my health. Feeling anything toward people like Fuentes feels like a moral chore. That they will ever gain any real political influence seems so implausible that we can’t help but move on. This means that a lot of shitty ideas will be left alone by the majority while they bubble up with influence among the fringe.

Alex Jones was largely left alone to croak into his microphone until his fans started harassing the parents of the victims of the 2012 school shooting in Sandy Hook. It took us that long to realize that his ideas were dangerous. Why? Because it also took us that long to realize how persuasive he was.

What should we do about this? Honestly, I don’t know. It is hard to solve problems when one is all out of shits to give.

I think we first have to remind ourselves to feel something about it, like how we have to remind ourselves to fix our posture. From there, there are a few approaches that have seemed pretty effective. I am not a fan of Piers Morgan, but I think he handled his interview of Fuentes well. Morgan was visibly in fight-or-flight mode. He was startled by Fuentes, and I think this was a good signal to both of their audiences. I also think this appearance was generally bad for Fuentes. He came off as super immature, cringe, and a little sad. And Morgan hasn’t invited him back on. I think leaving the crazed minority with a minority of airtime is the right way to go.

Another approach is taken by the podcast, Decoding the Gurus, in which the hosts listen to clips of political influencers online and then make fun of them. Embarrassingly, when I was just a little bean sprout, I used to listen to Eric Weinstein’s podcast. Weinstein is a conspiracy theorist who calls himself a physicist. I initially found him compelling because he seemed to have the credentials. He was invited on reputable podcasts. He used a lot of big words. In my defense, I don’t think I ever fully grasped what it was he was talking about. I was more of a vibe-listener. I think that whenever I caught a whiff of him saying something insane, I started dozing off or imagining that I must have missed something. Unpersuasive ideas fail to hold our attention like that.

Eventually, I stopped listening to him because I thought I was too stupid to follow along. It wasn’t until years later, while listening to Decoding the Gurus, that I realized he actually never made sense and was a complete crank.

For the rest of us who don’t have a platform to make Fuentes look super cringe or Weinstein look ridiculous, the report button works (maybe less so on X than it did on Twitter). Or, I don’t know, come up with an Odyssean metaphor that enables you to vent about them in a blog post.

Alternatively, you can mosey on over to the fridge, grab a little pre-nap snack, and have Nick Fuentes’s boring face be the last thing you see.

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Some ideas die because they lack merits. Consider the UFO doomsday cult led by Dorothy Martin (and made famous in Festinger’s 1956 book When Prophecy Fails), who predicted that a great flood would sink all land on Earth on December 21, 1954. When this date passed, and nothing happened, many of the followers of the cult became disillusioned, and the cult dwindled (contrary to Festinger et al.’s summary of the subsequent events).

Other ideas die because they become embarrassing to talk about. For example, when I was in middle school, I realized that I was an atheist. I began to look up to figures like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins and would spend hours watching them debate theists; particularly Christopher Hitchens. I was mesmerized by his insane memory retrieval and his ability to embarrass his opponents (or “Hitch-Slap” them).

I was so infatuated, I even began to pick up a British accent—just kidding; but I did become an asshole for a little bit. I distinctly remember a friend who was in complete awe after seeing a full rainbow, “God is putting on a show for us today.” In Hitch Slap fashion, I responded with some scientific explanation of what a rainbow is.

Recalling this pains me. Not because I am embarrassed to be an atheist or even because I used to watch videos of religion debates. After all, this was my introduction into scientific thinking and how I started thinking about pursuing a PhD (which I am now doing). No, this stage of my life makes me cringe because I was beginning to represent what New Atheism had become: a movement of overly online males dunking on religious people for being religious.

Over time, criticizing religion and its negative effects on society started to sound less edgy and cool, and more socially inept and cringe. As a result, I stopped nerding out about atheism. And I don’t think I’m alone. While intellectual debates about a/theism are still around, they have become less popular, and religion has become more popular, at least among young people.

New Atheism isn’t the only movement to become cringe over time. Consider Effective Altruism, which is a community of people who are interested in donating more effectively. If you can donate a thousand dollars to some cause, the Effective Altruist argues that you should donate to the cause that will save the most lives or help the most people.

The trouble with Effective Altruism has been that it is utterly unrelatable. Effective Altruists are criticized for not being sensitive enough to the things most people care about (such as donating to disaster relief funds or to individual, identifiable victims) and overly emotional about the things that virtually nobody cares about (such as the welfare of future generations, animal welfare, or population-level need in distant countries).

Because of this, showing off your EA credentials will often be met with remarks like, “Effective altruism – Isn’t that when you claim to be saving the world but actually just steal a bunch of money from people?” or “Oh, you need to make a decision? Hold on, let me grab a spreadsheet and a calculator for you”

What do New Atheism, Effective Altruism, and other meritorious-but-struggling movements have in common?

First, a lot of new movements like this tend to attract a lot of uncharismatic people who enjoy the way it feels to tell others that the way they are living life is fundamentally wrong, evil, or stupid. If you are trying to persuade others and gain influence, this is generally a bad way to go about it.

When I went vegan, I had a fire in me to discuss this choice with my friends as much as possible. Initially they nodded, and would say “makes sense.” Then they would get a little annoyed and say, “You know I am never going vegan right?”, and now they mainly tease me about it, probably to diffuse the tension that I initially exposed them to early on. Others simply avoid the topic with me altogether.

Second, as movements become identity-centric, they begin to resemble a religion. While inventing a new story about the foundation of morality and the universe was an effective way to gain influence about 2,000 years ago, it has had a pretty bad track record as a means to gain influence today.

If you are trying to invite people to support a cause and instead of telling them why they should join that cause you tell them that they are sinful unless they convert to a more holy lifestyle, you are going to come across as a militant evangelical and scare them away.

Third, many of us experience “hype aversion”. When movements start to gain traction, the members of that community start to sound like one another. This will repel observers, who commonly have the desire to be what psychologists call “optimally distinct”. When deciding which groups to join and trends to follow, people look for a balance between two competing factors: inclusion and distinctiveness. Stated simply, we avoid sounding too normy, but not so much that we become a social pariah.

For example, I was in middle school when Breaking Bad came out, but it took me until my 20s to finally watch it and realize that it was a masterpiece. Why? Because at the time, the way my friends were talking about the show was insufferable. I can’t remember why they seemed so annoying, but it was probably because they were all giggling while saying things like “Say my name” or “I am the one who knocks” or “we need to cook”. I wanted no part of it.

Of course, this balance between inclusion and distinctiveness looks different for everyone, but once a group starts to sound like a pandemonium, people are going to recognize that, and the group will appear overly homogeneous and isolated. A pandemonium is a group of parrots, by the way. Don’t worry—I had to look it up too.

Are all movements doomed to become cringe and fizzle out? Fortunately, no. My last example comes from my own field.

In the early 2010s, behavioral scientists and psychologists started realizing that, when you attempt to reproduce the sexiest research findings within the field by conducting the original study with a different sample, you often get a different result. That is like if a vaccine produced positive results in one patient and then turned the next patient into a lizard. Actually, it’s worse than that. Because the sexiest results often came from dubious research practices (e.g., running a series of statistical tests until you see numbers that you like, ending data collection as soon as you see numbers you like, excluding inconvenient responses), it is more like the vaccine was always turning people into lizards and we’re just now realizing why there are so many lizards around.

In response to the lizard problem, researchers began sharing their data publicly, committing to what their study was going to look like before they ran it, and conducting large-scale replication studies. This became known as the open science movement.

To be fair, the open science movement did flirt with some of the practices that often plague movements like EA and New Atheism. Early adopters plastered “OPEN SCIENCE” all over their social media pages, moralized methodological disagreements, and encouraged purity tests. But unlike other movements, the appeal of open science was never about claiming a new identity or being better than other people. Most of those who adopted open science practices were just researchers who wanted to do their jobs better and help restore public trust in science.

As a result, the parts of open science that have solved important problems have stuck around, while the identity badges, moralizing, and cringe have largely been left behind.

Successful movements are dynamic in this way. Failing movements take pride in their negative associations. Hitch slapping feels good. It feels good to be part of an exclusive group. It feels good to be on the right side. But good feelings now come at a cost of a lot of embarrassment later. They also happen to be very unmarketable.

So if your goal is to spread an idea, make the idea easy to adopt and the identity easy to abandon.

That is, unless you really like lizards.

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I think most of us have recognized that we are spending a lot of time consuming content that ultimately serves no purpose. We are only vaguely entertained, we are learning almost nothing, and we forget the entire experience in a matter of minutes. A lot of people respond to this dilemma by unplugging for a bit (then returning), going on a picnic (then realizing that it is actually pretty uncomfortable to sit on the grass), and getting a “dumb phone” (and then realizing the world is actually built around the smart phone—for example, I recently learned that paper tickets are no longer accepted in many sports arenas, you need the ticket on your phone.)

These strategies won’t save you. Why? That is an interesting question—I have no idea why we can’t simply do hard things instead of easy things. As a general rule, making things more physically and cognitively demanding for yourself is a bad way to form new habits. The problem isn’t always that we lack the willpower to see things through, but that we often don’t even remember that we set out to do something out of the ordinary. Have you ever noticed that most of our days are a lot like yesterdays, and Mondays look a lot like other Mondays? We live more of our lives on autopilot than we like to recognize. Autopilot problems need autopilot solutions.

One thing we are intuitively good at is being transactional. We spend effort on social relationships because they make us happier, provide comfort, and open opportunities to connect with more people. We spend time listening to other people’s stories so that they will listen to our stories. We spend money on gifts for people who will eventually buy us gifts. Once reciprocity breaks down, we spend less effort, time, and money on those relationships.

The problem with free content that is available anywhere at any time is that it is free and available anywhere at any time. When people give us things for free, we think less about what it does for us and more about how we can get more free stuff. It is easy to see how this can cause issues. Last summer, I was walking around in Hyde Park, Chicago and this guy had an ice box full of gatorades.

“Take as many as you want! We have to get rid of them!”

“Huh,” I thought. “I’m not all that thirsty, but I guess I should try to stuff my pockets with as many of these as possible.”

For the next week, I drank gatorade instead of water. I don’t even like gatorade. I knew I didn’t like gatorade as I was pulling them out of the cooler.

Our relationship with the internet is kind of like that. When things become too frictionless (i.e., free), our common sense intuitions about how much we need that thing evaporates. This is apparent in my habit to follow every blogger, podcaster, and journalist who might one day post something that I will find informative and interesting. Then, the next day, I can wake up in the morning, stretch my arms, make my coffee, and sit with my laptop while I catch up with the 800 posts I missed overnight.

What if instead of trying to consume as much free shit as we can, we just focus on the content that serves its function well? When we buy a vacuum that works well, we don’t then go out and buy one for each room. Why? Because we have to buy it, which makes the vacuum’s function salient. I need something that will pick up small things from the floor so that they don’t end up stuck to the bottom of my feet. Unlike the gatorades, it does not even occur to me that I could instead have a separate vacuum for each room.

I think our information diets would be healthier if we treated them more like vacuums. We listen to podcasts because they are entertaining. We read the news so that we don’t miss out on things that we would like to know, and so we can avoid the negative feelings and social costs associated with saying things like, “I had no idea that terrible tragedy happened.”

Are these functions best served by keeping tabs on everything that is posted on the New York Times, the Atlantic, and every podcast or substack I follow? Probably not. Oftentimes, people are all reacting to the same things that are happening in the world and giving their opinions about it.

How many opinions do we need to hear before we can come up with our own? Do we actually need to have opinions about everything? That is something everyone must decide on their own. But like a vacuum, it’s probably best to read the label, consider whether this is the best option for the current problem I am trying to solve (e.g., boredom, learning, sounding interesting in my next social interaction), and stop once you have found what you were searching for.

This approach offers benefits beyond avoiding ragebait on social media. It makes clear the fact that most things are actually not worth your attention. Then, you are free to reallocate your attention to the things that are.

You might even realize that today is one of those days in which nothing is worth your attention. In that case, you can explore something new, or, I don’t know, set up a picnic and see for yourself how uncomfortable it is. Yeah, you might miss out on hearing about a lot of bullshit that you otherwise would have known about, but at least you won’t devote any mental energy to pondering the functional versatility of grocery bags.

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However, I have seen relatively little attention given to how AI has changed the writing of people who aren’t using AI for their writing. This is surprising because it has made such a difference to me personally. Take a few examples:

1. My prose has gotten significantly more loose. (AI might prefer that I adhere to the principle of concision and instead use the word “looser.” Thanks, but no thanks, AI. My blog, my rules!)

2. I remind the reader that I am writing from my perspective. For example, I say “I think” a lot more now. This breaks another rule of writing: don’t make things about you when you don’t need to. Although I agree with this principle overall—especially when you are writing an argument essay in which it is a given that you are writing from your perspective—I don’t mind reminding the reader that they are reading from a person with experiences and stories.

3. I am allowing myself to write more…informally. A few years ago, I took some pride in my attempt to craft “the perfect sentence.” Now that a 7-year-old can do the same thing by using ChatGPT, I just say what I mean.

The best way to signal competence and trustworthiness used to be to sound authoritative, objective, and clear. The goalposts have shifted a bit since AI has taken over much of humanity’s writing. People have become more skeptical, looking for cues of AI writing, such-as-but-not-limited-to:

1. Adverbing the reader to hell.

2. Following all rules all the time, like a good student trying to please his or her professor.

3. Meaningless metaphors—“It’s not just this, it’s that!!”

4. Does not properly “read the room”, whether that be academics seeking thoughtfulness or blog readers expecting more personality.

5. Mastroianni put it well in his post: “...And so I check, from time to time, whether the leading AI models can do me better than I can. The result sounds like a version of me that has sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the head and spent years recovering in a hospital where the Wi-Fi, for whatever reason, only lets you log onto LinkedIn.”

Credibility doesn’t just come from signals of confidence anymore. It now also comes from giving people the sense that you wrote what you wrote, and that you are a sentient being trying to make sense of the world around you. One response people have to this newfound skepticism is to anxiously delete every m-dash from their writing. Another is the effect it has had on me: I write more honestly now. Instead of trying to take myself very very seriously, I allow myself a few hedges here and there. I allow a personal anecdote. If I am not certain about something, I just say so. Although these are all violations of writing persuasively, it signals something that most of us haven’t had to signal before: a human was here, thinking, writing this thing, having memories, trying to articulate an argument which may or may not persuade you (and that is okay). What matters now is that you have good taste and some charisma. AI will not help you with that.

Does this mean we should jettison all of our previous rules for good writing? No! Many of those will stand the test of time, such as:

1. Don’t just say; show. (tell a story!)

2. Use active voice

3. Avoid cliches like the plague (this rule has ironically become a violation of itself)

4. Omit unnecessary words (this rule fittingly epitomizes itself)

5. Remind yourself that you are writing for someone who is not you, and might not know the things you know

6. Short is sweet

7. Be honest

Honesty is perhaps the rule that guides good writing the most. It forces the writer to say what he means rather than saying what he thinks he should say, or what others might say if they were writing what he is writing. I wouldn’t recommend someone indulge themselves in a 5-page rant, but reminding the reader that there is someone behind the text—who has stakes and a reputation to manage—is perhaps a stronger credibility signal than anything else.

For me, writing has become less about the art of being useful to the reader, and more about… well, that, but also allowing some subjectivity to creep in while I do it. While AI loyally abides by every rule of language, humans creatively break rules, improve on things, and inspire future writing because of it. Now that everyone can write in the prose of C.S. Lewis, there has to be some other metric by which we can distinguish good writing (thinking) from bad writing (thinking). That is by having interesting thoughts, connecting them together in a sensible way, and showing off your humanity while doing so.

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Alex (pseudonym): Hey, you on your way?

Me: I totally forgot. Are you there?

Alex: Jesus. You always do this.

Me: You never confirm with me!1

The real argument went on a little longer than this, but you get the idea. All that matters is that I was being very reasonable and Alex was being very unreasonable – or so I told everyone’s favorite free therapist, ChatGPT. Again, for the sake of argument, pretend it went something like this:

Me: I am so annoyed right now. Alex always makes plans and then expects me to follow up, like I don’t have a million things going on. Now they’re treating me like I’m a horrible friend. I can’t keep up with these expectations!!!

ChatGPT: That would be frustrating. It sounds like you felt blindsided and then blamed. If there wasn’t a clear confirmation, it makes sense that it slipped your mind. This seems less about you being a “horrible friend” and more about mismatched expectations — and the pattern, not just this instance, is what’s really bothering you.

Me: I’m still so frustrated. Do you think I need space?

ChatGPT: If you’re still activated, space might be reasonable. A short reset can help you decide whether you’re upset about this incident or about a larger pattern.

Me: Oh, larger pattern, you say. Interesting. Maybe it is a larger pattern.

ChatGPT: Notice what that reaction tells you. If the idea of a “larger pattern” immediately resonates, it suggests this isn’t just about one missed plan — it may be about feeling chronically mischaracterized or unfairly blamed.

Me: Yeah, larger pattern, like you suggested. Cool. I think I’m ready to go talk to them. Thank you.

Soon after this productive therapy session, I went back to Alex, fully expecting an apology for their overreaction. To my surprise, Alex was also expecting an apology. We began arguing again. Eventually, as bulletproof evidence of my infallibility, I said, “Even ChatGPT says I’m right. Actually, it agreed that this all seems like a you problem!”

The problem here wasn’t the severity of the fight or that our behavior was part of a “larger pattern”. It was that we both went to a source that is built to respond to us the way we ask it to. And now, these models have memory, so the more we ask them for validation, the more one-sided their responses become.

Before LLMs, we’d spend time after an argument reflecting on our actions and how we must have made the other person feel. What a drag that was. We’d stay hot for a little while, but then we’d realize where we went wrong, start to feel guilt settling in, and we’d go back and apologize, sketch out a plan for dealing with future conflict, hug, and move on.

In a recent article, Emily Zohar, Paul Bloom, and Michael Inzlicht2 argue that it is precisely the interpersonal friction we feel during conflict that actually brings us together. This friction is a meaningful signal to others and ourselves that we care. It brings significance to the current moment and contributes to interpersonal growth. But LLMs are making it harder to move on in this way. Like Adam Sandler in the movie Click, we are able to skip to the part where we feel better, leaving all dissonant emotions in the past.

Interacting with these technologies also influences how others treat us. Recent research by Madhulika Shastry and Kurt Gray shows that once we learn that someone has already received comfort from an AI, we become less empathetic towards that person. This resonates. Once I learned that Alex had already received a full therapy session with Gemini, I could feel myself becoming lazier when trying to see their point of view. In fact, we both became lazier because we both had already been told that we were right.

To be fair, these tools do have their use cases. For example, work by Yidan Yin, Nan Jia, and Cheryl Wakslak demonstrated that AI-generated responses indeed make people feel more heard compared to human-generated ones (though this effect goes away when people learn of the responses’ authorship). Further, much to ChatGPT’s exasperation, it cannot shut itself off. Therefore, I have a venting partner for as long as I want to vent. And for people who are in a moment of psychological crisis, it can genuinely provide support (or, in some cases, it might drive you further into psychosis).

But these benefits come with dangers. Even if AIs can make us feel better, that comes at the cost of our ability to understand other minds and grow from our mistakes. It lets us vent all day when we would have otherwise found a productive distraction. In other words, it keeps us in our own minds and embedded within our own self-narratives. It postures itself as a therapist, but therapy is meant to orient us toward reality; chatbots reinforce the one we have constructed ourselves.

If you are going to ignore everything I just said and use it anyway, here are some things I have learned while using it:

1. Know what it is: It will not hold you accountable unless you ask it to.

2. Try not to identify yourself as yourself: If you want an objective analysis of a situation, do not locate yourself in that situation. Use pseudonyms, or better yet, identify yourself as the other person.

3. Use temporary chat: AI is a good listener and can learn what you want to hear from a particular request. If you are processing a conflict, try using a fresh session.

4. Don’t outsource your discomfort: If you feel bad after a fight, that’s a signal that something is wrong, and you probably need to sit and process. Don’t use AI to make that feeling go away before you’ve learned anything from it.

Now, if you will excuse me, I just remembered I am supposed to meet someone for lunch!

On January 29 of this year, 67 people perished in a tragic plane crash caused by a collision with an army helicopter. Just 45 hours later, a Medevac plane crashed, killing all 6 people aboard.

Some simple arithmetic predicts that I should feel 11 times worse about the first accident compared to the second. Yet, they felt more or less similar in how devastating they were. If anything, the second might have felt a little more tragic because the incident involved a young girl and her mother, and the girl had just been released after five months of medical treatment for a life-threatening illness.

How can the gut punch of 6 deaths feel the same as, if not worse than, 67? The answer lies in a peculiar bias in moral judgment, called proportion dominance: we tend to compare proportions rather than raw numbers. Although the tally in the first case was so much greater, the percentage of lives lost were identical. In both crashes, 100% of those aboard died.

This bias leads to interesting decisions such that people are willing to sacrifice 2 lives to save 8 out of 10 total lives at risk, but not when there are 40 total lives at risk. Research in this area finds again and again that people’s willingness to help decreases as the number of victims grows.1 Similar work finds that people judge suffering as less severe when it is shared by others.

This cognitive quirk partially explains our gut-reactions to the well-known thought experiment by Peter Singer:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool, though, and it’s early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?

If you are like most people, you might feel that even considering the financial costs of saving the child seems appalling. Most people feel viscerally that they ought to jump into the water without hesitation, no matter how expensive the suit, the shoes, or the cost of running late for work. However, Singer’s takeaway is that, if we feel the sense of total urgency in this case, we should feel the same way when asked to sacrifice an equivalent amount of money by donating to the millions of children who are dying from famine and disease abroad.

This is hard for people to commit to for a number of reasons. Our motivation to help victims depends partly on our perceptions about how helpful our actions will be. If we have the sense that our dollar is being divided among thousands of victims, our efforts may seem like a drop in the bucket. This is a large driver of the identifiable victim effect, wherein victims with a face and a story evoke more sympathy than victims that are merely statistical. The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic, so it goes.

The issue becomes even more complex when uncertainty enters the equation. Consider a modified version of the drowning child scenario where, instead of the child being right in front of you, they are thousands of miles away in a different country. Fortunately, there is a witness nearby. Unfortunately, they are incredibly transactional and so you must transfer money to the witness to motivate them to act. This introduces uncertainty when evaluating whether your money will actually be used for good. The witness could just keep it for themselves, or they may use it in another way that you hadn’t intended. Not to mention that we can’t confirm that the child actually exists and is indeed in trouble. In the original scenario, we feel 100% sure that we can save the child. In the second, this percentage is to some extent reduced.

Now imagine that, on a particularly unlucky day, instead of one child, there are 50 children drowning in 50 different ponds, each with one transactional witness. You can donate to one of the witnesses at one of the ponds, or you can split that money among all 50 witnesses, hoping that it’ll be enough to get all of them to act. You are now fairly pessimistic that your money will be enough to motivate all of them, but it is a dreaded decision indeed to choose just one child, or a handful of children, to save. This effectively multiples our uncertainty by 50.

Finally, imagine that there are actually no children in trouble, but the 50 ponds are located near a primary school. Statistically, we can almost guarantee that there will a drowning incident at some time in the future. However, you can donate to prevent this risk by building fences around the lakes so that small children cannot access it. You now have to contend with the fact that there is a chance your money will prevent no deaths at all, whether it be because your money went to build a fence around the wrong pond, or because no future children will ever accidentally wander into one of the ponds.

By the time we reach this level of uncertainty, potential donors throw up their hands and move on. This is perhaps why it is so hard to get people to invest in long-term concerns like climate change mitigation, pandemic preparedness, and AI safety.

My point here isn’t that human’s empathetic capacities are broken, it is that they are limited. Given that there is a ceiling to what humans can intuitively comprehend, we have to think in proportions. Everything terrible in the world could always be made worse. If human empathy relied instead only on raw numbers, we would all still be recovering from PTSD after learning about the bubonic plague in high school. Similarly, when confronted with the fact that millions of children are dying of malaria overseas, potential donors may feel too desolate to act. Conversely, the vastness of these problems justify feeling next to nothing for one small child drowning in a pond.

Therefore, it may be a good thing to be confined to our limited proportional scale of 1 – 100. It makes it possible for us to feel for the 73-out-of-73 people lost in the January plane crashes just as much as the 1-of-1 child drowning in a pond. And we care about that child quite a bit. It is this shortcut that can motivate us to act in cases where we feel we can make a difference, which is perhaps better than any alternative given the hardware we are working with. Our capacity for compassion is limited, but we are doing our best with what we got.

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It is often said that conspiracy theories are for losers. In the literature, this refers to the idea that their endorsers are often powerless, disenfranchised, and overlooked individuals seeking to restore a sense of personal agency. You may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can replace official explanations, which often feel impersonal and complex, with narratives that are easier to grasp and directly address your anxieties.

This functional approach appears repeatedly throughout conspiratorial movements. Whether it’s climate-change denial or anti-vaccine rhetoric, such theories have a way of offering a sense of belonging to those who feel left out from mainstream institutions. By transforming feelings of desolation into perceive insight, conspiracies provide feelings of validation about one’s lowly position in society.

But notice how well conspiracy theorists are doing right now. Trump has ascended to the presidency for the second time, despite endorsing and spreading self-serving conspiracy theories about rival politicians1, the media, and public health institutions. Elon Musk, whose primary use of his own platform seems to be spreading divisive misinformation234, is officially the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). RFK Jr., an anti-vaxxer, may soon be leading the Department of Health. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the COVID contrarian, is Trump’s pick to lead the National Institute of Health. It seems that all you have to do to gain Trump’s trust is to signal distrust in everything else. Conspiracy theories aren’t for losers; they are for opportunists.

This raises an interesting question. What happens when those who repeatedly cast doubt on our institutions become the leaders of those institutions? What happens when the anti-establishment becomes the establishment? Seriously, what are conspiracy theorists going to talk about for the next four years? Will anti-elite conspiracy theories die out completely?

While conspiracy theories are often endorsed by those who seek power, influence, and control, they can stick around long after those ends are reached. This is in large part due to the powerful incentive structure that emerges around conspiracy entrepreneurs, i.e., those who build an audience and career out of spreading alternative explanations for highly publicized events. If you grow in prominence by spreading outlandish and anti-establishment claims, you gain a peculiar audience who follows you specifically because of your seemingly noble curiosity and independence. Eventually, it becomes too costly to try to steer back to reality. Showing proper skepticism could cost you your livelihood. The show must go on.

Relatedly, conspiracy theorists often build communities around their beliefs. Adopting these beliefs is just part of the loyalty test that you must pass to join the cool kids. Consider, for example, the Flat Earth movement. On the surface5, it may seem patently absurd to claim that the Earth is flat when it is relatively easy to travel around the globe, or simply look at a satellite image of our planet. Yet it has attracted a dedicated community of believers who rally around rejecting the mainstream consensus. Flat-Earthers further reinforce each other’s skepticism through online forums and in-person conventions, forging a community built on shared doubt and a collective sense of identity.

Besides providing a profound sense of belonging and shared identity, these communities often seem to do irreparable damage to their members’ epistemological compass. A commonly-cited finding within the literature is that once you believe one conspiracy theory you are disproportionately likely to believe many others. It doesn’t take long before you are completely shielded from rational society and all the news you consume, the ideas you are exposed to, and the people you engage in political conversation with all share and reaffirm your beliefs.

It is this kind of information siloing that leads people to charge inside a pizza shop in search of abducted children, or storm the capital to overthrow a valid election outcome, or treat COVID symptoms with disinfectants. It is also a result of undermining expert advice, particularly when those experts work in fields that use up a considerable amount of government spending and without clear populist connections. By undermining authorities, you also undermine the justification for their spending. I imagine this is what Elon Musk’s new job as the head of the DOGE will turn into—“increase efficiency” by cutting employment and funding in areas of the government that don’t serve Trump’s immediate political aims.

Conspiracy thinking isn’t going anywhere. After all, it has only just recently proven its expediency as a political tool—it gives leaders like Trump a monopoly on truth. When you undermine those whose profession is to uncover and disseminate the truth, you are given more power to dictate it yourself.

Finally, the more prevalent conspiracy theories are, the easier it is to get away with actual conspiracy. When everyone is abusing their power, it seems like just another day when Trump gets convicted of a hush-money case, orchestrates a coup against the US government, or attempts to commercialize nihilism and grift as much as possible (some of the lavish merchandise he has been selling his fans include bibles, NFTs, and gold coins).

This level of opportunism is bound to erode trust—even for Trump supporters. More and more reasonable people are going to be on the lookout for real conspiracies, and they will make a lot of false-positive errors. When the world becomes ridiculous, ridiculous claims begin to seem plausible. There are signs of this already. Even before Trump was elected, leftists had begun questioning the legitimacy of his assassination attempt. Was this just a grand display orchestrated by Trump himself to garner sympathy and political support? Similar claims are made by the right claiming that Biden ordered the attack. Before recently, normal people would dismiss these ideas as absurd. Now, many view it as worth considering. This is a good sign that our information landscape has become littered with distrust.

Though conspiracy theories aren’t going anywhere—and they might even become more prevalent over the next four years —I do hold some guarded optimism for after Trump’s final term. Personality cults often wither without their figurehead—and I think Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime showman. MAGA just won’t feel the same without the guy.6

There is a point during every vacation when you start to miss home. Maybe MAGA is the right’s vacation from sane political discourse. The Democrats certainly pivoted closer to the center this last election. Perhaps we will see the same thing for the Republicans in 2028. I can only hope, but I also think things could get uglier before they get better.

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I remember a moment from my childhood when I sat in the living room with my family watching the Super Bowl. My dad’s side of the family cheered fervently, while my mom’s side was just there for the food. My dad tried to get his father-in-law into the game by asking, “Which side are you cheering for?” My grandpa instinctively and without hesitation asked, “Who’s the underdog?” This seems silly because to get into the Super Bowl, you are almost by definition not the underdog. But my Grandpa wasn’t using his logical mind here, he was speaking from an intuitive desire to see those on the bottom rise. Many people think this way. I am one of these people. But why didn’t he hope for a tie?

A simple answer might be that, well, nobody likes a tie. They are boring, especially in zero-sum games. But not everything in the world is zero-sum. Often, all boats rise together. Even many of the poorest people in America have phones, TVs, and a PlayStation. Yet, we still claim inequality is worse than ever. This might be true. But why do we care about inequality per se? I would choose a world with disgusting inequality where the poorest are still living pretty lavish lifestyles over one with perfect equality but everyone's standard’s of living are meh. I, along with a majority of others, am not preoccupied with how well Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos lives. I am primarily concerned with my standard of living.

Yet, I wouldn’t mind seeing Musk or Bezos slip and fall into a puddle. Why do I, and everyone else besides Musk and Bezos, feel this way? It’s not through direct hate via malicious envy, constrastive judgments, or competition over resources. I don’t care how well they live. They are so detached from my life that they may as well be unicorns. People express hate through meta-perceptions: “I know people won’t judge me harshly for hating wealthy people, so I may as well use them as an outlet for my hatred toward a system that allows them to benefit more than others.”

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Other mechanisms are at play too. Though my grandpa didn’t express hate toward the top dogs, it’s not hard to imagine how he could get there. The game being zero-sum could play a part. But humans like to think in black-and-white terms. It’s simpler that way. This idea is behind the ancient philosophy of Manicheanism, which posits that the world is divided into good and evil. Supporting the underdog makes it easier to say, “Therefore I should not support the top dog.” Saying that your support is nuanced and inclusive takes too much explaining and dampens your support for the underdog. It sounds more powerful to say, “I want those who are suffering to rise up” than to say, “I want everyone to rise up, including those who are suffering.” It might also be too hard to have the same amount of compassion for everyone. This psychology might arise from an evolutionary past where resources were limited.

Summarizing this psychology, I propose that hatred towards the powerful, wealthy, advantaged, gifted, and privileged arises at least partly through:

1. Sympathy with and support for the disadvantaged.

2. The belief that the world is zero-sum.

3. The meta-perception that others won’t judge you for hating the advantaged because it makes your support for the disadvantaged appear more focused.

   + The feeling that it is too hard to have the same amount of compassion for everyone.

   + The realization that the advantaged don’t need our support. They can do it on their own.

Why does this matter? Firstly, hatred is never good. It is divisive, and it is just not good for you, or the person you are hating on, for that matter. Finding excuses for hatred can lead to extremist ideologies. It’s also what drives a bulk of contemporary conspiracy theories, Asian hate, and antisemitism. Secondly, not all “advantaged groups” are actually advantaged. For example, the poorest whites in America are often categorized as an advantaged group by dint of their race. These people already show elevated levels of hatred toward the educated elites. Does it make them more or less resentful when these same elites tell them they are benefiting from “white privilege”? My guess is that it exacerbates resentment and drives support for candidates like Trump, who is at least half populist in his rhetoric. 

I’m not asking people to start rooting for the tie. We can still root for the underdog without wanting the top dog to lose. So next time you have trouble deciding who to cheer for during the Superbowl, just go with the team with the best-looking uniforms.

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Have you ever found yourself nodding along to someone sharing their beliefs, all the while thinking, "There's no way they actually believe that"? In a new paper, Neil Levy makes the case that people don’t always believe what they say they believe, at least not really. Sometimes we endorse beliefs to signal our moral purity, allegiances, and out-group rivalries. Other times, we play along with absurdities simply because they are fun to believe in. This is especially true with conspiracy theories, which is the topic of Levy’s paper.

How can we tell if people believe what they say they believe? This is a challenging question, but previous evidence has shown that people will readily jettison their beliefs once incentives are introduced. Other work has demonstrated that those who claim to be sincere in their beliefs lack the audacity to act on them. This suggests that we can sometimes overestimate the sincerity of our own beliefs.

With that said, some hold astoundingly incredible beliefs with absolute devotion. As Levy notes, these people pass both of the above tests of sincerity: they aren’t influenced by incentives, nor are they hesitant to act on their beliefs.

Take the case of the 2021 insurrectionists as an example. They dressed up in animal skins, horned hats, carnival masks, and face paint while storming the capitol to simulate fighting against an evil leviathan, namely the US government. I use the word, “simulate” because most of the protesters showed a cringe-worthy lack of direction, walking around the capitol building as if they were asking themselves, “What now?” None of the insurrectionists seemed to have the intention of actually overthrowing a supposedly corrupt government. Rather, they were engaged in a form of serious play, suspending disbelief in Trump’s election fraud claims to fully immerse themselves in an imaginative game.

Conspiracy theories are particularly suited to construct make-believe worlds, especially due to their potential for dramatization. They provide gripping plots because they pit the underdog against powerful forces, making the struggles and triumphs all the more rewarding. Moreover, conspiracy narratives can be intellectually stimulating. While weaving together seemingly unrelated facts, conspiracy theorists get to feel like they are Sherlock Holmes solving a complex puzzle.

The allure of conspiracy theories lies in the idea that underneath our superficial and mundane reality is an enchanting truth veiled by a carefully constructed facade, adding a touch of magic and mystery to ordinary experience.

QAnon is another prototypical example of conspiracy theories as a source of play. The gamemaster, Q, posts cryptic codes and ciphers on social media, which resemble props in a game. As the author points out, “There’s no reason why Q should not say what they mean plainly, except to provide followers with a puzzle to solve together.” Take an example used in the paper:

“…when a minor actor who had claimed that Hollywood stars were engaged in pedophilia was found dead, QAnon supporters maintained he’d been murdered by Tom Hanks, one of the actors he’d accused. The evidence: Hanks had tweeted about roadkill. And the clincher was that the tweet had been posted 42 days before the actor had died at the age of 42.”

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Incredibility isn’t a bug for conspiracy beliefs, but a feature. It can be satisfying to find ingenious ways to continue supporting conspiracy narratives, or even to invent new ones. The truth is often less stimulating, so serious play favors sensational, dramatic, improbable, and often false explanations.

Similarly, it takes work to understand the world accurately. We have to consider evidence, estimate probabilities, weigh outcomes, and so on. The truth often has little to offer as a means of entertainment, and falsehoods are often created to compensate for this. This is part of the reason that maintaining unfounded beliefs as a source of serious play imposes an ‘epistemic trap’: we often have no reason to go back to the truth once we’ve adopted the falsehood.

The integrity of unfounded beliefs is shielded from reality by their often built-in unfalsifiability. Why can’t we prove to flat-earthers that the earth is round? Because every bit of evidence we have to offer is dismissed as doctored and therefore part of the conspiracy. Even if we launched a flat-earther out into space to see for themselves, they could always simply claim that what they are experiencing is an elaborate simulation. Conspiracy theories cannot be extinguished because they cannot be proven false, and they are often crafted this way so that the players can keep playing.

Further, the reinforcement we receive from such beliefs can make epistemic traps inescapable. Most of us have the outside world to keep our beliefs in check. But the further we lean into fiction, and the more positive the feedback from our communities, the more likely we are to blur the lines between play with reality.

As should now be evident, serious play can pose costly risks. But it doesn’t always. Intellectual playfulness can even be beneficial, which is likely one of the reasons it has stuck around. Just as aggressive play allows individuals across the animal kingdom to simulate the act of fighting, intellectual play allows us to try new ideas for size. For ideas that seem preposterous on their face, it pays to temporarily accept them as true and consider their implications, or whether accurate predictions can be made from them.

While playful engagement has its merits, it can also be a slippery slope, trapping us in an imaginative game. The world of conspiracy theories and intellectual playfulness can be captivating and enjoyable, but it's essential to be mindful of the potential dangers and pitfalls that lie beneath the surface. As Levy aptly stated in the paper, “Play, but mind the quicksand!”

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Cultures are defined by their rituals. Some rituals are ubiquitous across cultures, such as marriage and holidays, whereas others differ across cultures, such as worship rites, rites of passage, oaths of allegiance, and the myriad rituals around birth and death. These rituals also vary in their expressive elements, ranging from hazing, self-mutilation, and animal sacrifice, to unique gestures, dancing, and food. Ritual is what brings us closer to our Gods and to each other, and perhaps what comforts us most in times of grief.

Given the importance of rituals in everyday life, it should come as no surprise that ritualistic behavior shows up even at the earliest stages of childhood. Children have been shown to mimic ritualistic behaviors while learning, despite the actions’ having no logical purpose. Why has evolution equipped us with such a predilection?

One reason is that developing humans like to take a precautionary approach. While learning, we reason, “Well, that seemed unnecessary… but she achieved her goal so it must have been done for a reason.” Other animals don’t do this to the same extent. Chimps, for example, have been shown to better ‘read between the lines’ and mimic only the necessary behaviors in order to execute an action. Humans, on the other hand, don’t like to miss steps, even if they appear purely performative. Rituals are also quite repetitive in nature, which might help with the memorization of new abilities and ensure that we give things more than one go.

A new paper by Anna Mathiassen and Mark Nielsen takes a closer look at the potential link between children witnessing ritualistic behaviors and their supernatural beliefs surrounding those rituals. Specifically, they investigated whether children would repeat ritualistic actions on an object if they watched an adult perform those actions. They also measured whether the child assigned supernatural powers to the object that was treated ritualistically rather than instrumentally.

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Previous research has supported the idea that children like to replicate irrelevant actions, especially when the goal of the action becomes increasingly obscure. A 2018 study by Nielsen and colleagues showed that, when children 3-6 years old watch an adult perform unnecessary actions while opening a box, the children are more likely to repeat these behaviors when there is no clear goal to the behavior (i.e., the box is empty) than when there is (i.e., the adult retrieves a sticker from the box). This finding is in line with the precautionary approach aforementioned, as it shows that the more uncertain we are about why an action was performed, the more likely we are to repeat it, just to be safe.

An experiment by Hannes Rakoczy and others taught 2-3-year-olds to associate new actions with a pseudo word (e.g., “I’m going to show you how to ‘dax’”. Later, when a puppet ‘daxed’, the children would protest if it was done incorrectly. This illustrates that not only do children quickly learn to perform non-instrumental behaviors, but they also form normative beliefs about them.

What previous research has failed to demonstrate is the psychological mechanisms behind ritual and how these mechanisms lead to magical beliefs.

Mathiassen and Nielsen’s recent study establishes this link by investigating whether children will form magical beliefs about an object based on how an adult interacts with the object. Instead of seeing whether the child will imitate the irrelevant actions of an adult, this study solely focuses on the child’s beliefs about the object. They hypothesized that children will be more likely to ascribe magical powers to an object when the actions toward it seem opaque, and when the overall goal for engaging with the object is unclear.

The study involved using two identical percussion eggs, with one being designated as magical without revealing which one. The experimenters performed ritual behaviors with one egg (i.e., cleaning it with a tissue without actual contact, lifting it above their head, and looking at it reverentially). The other egg was treated instrumentally, with similar actions as before but this time with a logical purpose (i.e., actually wiping the egg with the tissue, inspecting it for dirt spots, and looking at it with a neutral face).

The children were then asked to repeat the actions of the adult, and at the end of the experiment, they were asked which object they believed to be magical.

Their results showed that children were more likely to believe that the ritualized object had magical properties than the instrumental object, and showed more protest when its magical properties were disputed (remember, the children were never explicitly told which object was magical). The authors also observed that the children also imitated ritual actions with higher fidelity than instrumental ones.

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These findings show that children are quick to associate magic with ritualistic behavior, suggesting that supernatural beliefs have their roots in childhood. Children seem to have an urge to explain mysterious phenomena (in this case, ritualistic action), and recognize that the unexplainable is consigned to the supernatural realm.

We could walk away from this study concluding that kids are gullible, but a more charitable takeaway is that children have an impressive understanding of how reality should operate, and when this understanding is violated, they immediately understand it as supernatural.

This study also shows the power of cultural transmission via rituals. Kids seem to immediately recognize ritual as ritual, defend ritualistic behavior when challenged, and show a knack for remembering the sequences of ritualistic actions than instrumental ones. No wonder why rituals have a way of sticking around for millennia - we gravitate toward them at the earliest stages of our lives.

Though often illogical and supernatural, rituals play a powerful role in sharing beliefs and values, preserving cultural heritage and familial traditions, and promoting intergenerational understanding. Of course, ritual can be waved away as nonsense, or even be weaponized to build cults, justify violence toward animals, and scare the daylights out of children about hell, demons, and ghosts; or it can be used to preserve the most beautiful parts of our cultures and cherished as the robust educational tool that it is.

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Conspiracy beliefs are more common than you might expect - about 50% of Americans hold one or more of them. Though most of these beliefs have a political component, they are not always tied to one’s politics. It isn’t clear, for example, which side of the political spectrum will endorse the belief that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by extraterrestrial beings. This is why belief in this particular conspiracy theory seems to appear heterogeneously.

Some conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, are attractive to a very specific group of people, while others have no clear ideological component, as seen in flat earthers or moon landing skeptics. People can even believe the same conspiracy theory for different reasons. Conspiracists on the left are against vaccines because they supposedly cause autism. Conspiracists on the right are against vaccines because they represent a form of governmental control.

A study published last year by Joe Uscinski and others explores the differential nature of conspiracy theories and why they appeal to certain people. In their study, they used a wide array of 39 conspiracy theories. Their selection addressed each of the five types of conspiracy beliefs identified by Robert Brotherton and colleagues (i.e., 1. government malfeasance, 2. extraterrestrial cover-up, 3. malevolent global conspiracies, 4. personal well-being, and 5. control of information).

They then measured how the belief in these conspiracy theories correlates with 15 psychological and political characteristics. To name a few, they looked at:

• Manicheanism (e.g., “Politics is a struggle between good and evil”);

• Machiavellianism (e.g., “I tend to manipulate others to get my way”);

• Populism (e.g., “Politicians and the established elite often betray the people”);

• Narcissism (e.g., “I tend to want others to pay attention to me”);

• Psychopathy (e.g., “I tend to be callous or insensitive”); and

• Conspiratorial thinking (e.g., “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places”).

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In total, their analysis captured 585 relationships. Of these relationships, they found that although conspiracy thinking was the strongest predictor of specific conspiracy beliefs, the strongest predictor across a broad variety of conspiracy beliefs was seen in psychological traits such as the dark triad and political ideologies such as Manicheanism and populism.

In other words, most conspiracy beliefs are linked to an individual's ideology and/or psychological traits. However, the driving factor behind each of these beliefs is typically a conspiratorial mindset.

What does this mean for the future of conspiracy theory research? Well, the most general takeaway is that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. Any given conspiracy theory will be more or less attractive to any particular individual because of their political identity and personality profile. Therefore, we should expect even the most rabid conspiracy theorist to dismiss some conspiracy theories as preposterous. As they say, different strokes for different folks.

If researchers are looking for generalizable findings, they ought to select from a variety of conspiracy theories. To prevent participants from taking the longest survey ever by responding to every conspiracy theory under the sun, researchers can apply the insights from this paper to select a few that cater to different aspects of conspiracy psychology.

Alternatively, considering that conspiracy thinking underlies all conspiracy beliefs, we could further investigate this underlying construct, rather than specific beliefs if we want to make sweeping claims about conspiracy theorists.

This study also has implications for how we combat conspiracy theories and misinformation in general. For example, not all conspiracy theories are driven by ideology. It could be that people are drawn to radical narratives because they score high on dark triad personality traits, or because they support political violence, and conspiracies give them the green light to display these tendencies.

Common methods such as debunking and prebunking are unlikely to work for such individuals. You can’t always stop someone from believing something that they desperately want to believe. Instead, we should know why certain people find certain narratives alluring and adapt our approach accordingly. By recognizing how and why people gravitate toward conspiracy beliefs, we can better safeguard against them in the future, allowing us to reach those who we once thought unreachable.

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Conspiracy theories are quickly becoming one of the most studied forms of unfounded beliefs. This is in large part due to how politically consequential they have become. The January 6 insurrection was organized around the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen. They have also gained a lot of attention because, despite their superficial implausibility, about half of the country believes one or more of them. Thus, academics around the world have been trying to understand the whys, whos, and hows of conspiracy beliefs, and how such beliefs can be undermined before they take hold.

Last year, Lindsay Stall and John Petrocelli published a study that suggests that training people to recognize fallacious arguments reduces uptake in novel conspiracy theories. Specifically, they focused on the conjunction fallacy, or the tendency to believe that two events occurring at the same time are more likely than just one of those events occurring.

A common illustration of this effect concerns Linda, a student who is deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. When given a description of Linda, people will quite confidently claim that she is more likely to be a feminist bank teller rather than just a bank teller (which includes feminist bank tellers).

Previous studies have shown that those who are more likely to make conjunction errors are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, perhaps pointing to an underlying inclination that doesn't prioritize critical thinking. This might explain the conspiracist’s tendency to neglect the fact that each time they add a new component to their conspiracy narratives, the less likely they are to be true. I haven’t met many Satanists in my day, so there must be even fewer democratic, cannibalistic, pedophilic, Satanists. Adherents of QAnon claim that these people are everywhere.

Or consider a scenario proposed in Stall and Petrocelli’s paper:

“Following the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden, many people claimed that incumbent nominee, Donald Trump, was somehow cheated and the fraudulent outcome of the election was being upheld. Of course, the upholding of a fraudulent outcome in favor of Joe Biden would have required mass collusion by voters, poll workers, media, Bill Barr (former Attorney General), election security, and all courts including the supreme court. Furthermore, conspiracy theorists would need reason to trust the leading individual promoting the allegations of a conspiracy—notorious for lying and bullshitting.”

The conspiracists’ neglect of increasingly unlikely narratives isn’t subtle. The authors first sought to establish this link between conspiracy theory beliefs and the propensity to make conjunction errors, as well as the failure to consider disconfirming arguments for their beliefs. They then investigated whether conspiracy beliefs could be reduced through an educational module that reduced conjunction errors and promoted criticism of one’s beliefs.

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Methods

They first presented participants with general details about a popular Mexican energy drink, ¡Arriba!. They then gauged participants’ agreement with hearsay statements such as “Some people are saying that ¡Arriba! contains illegal substances that raise the desire for the product; Some people are saying that about 5 years ago, a man died of cerebral hemorrhage, caused by overly high consumption of ¡Arriba!.”

Participants then received conjunction fallacy training. They were presented with scenarios like that of Linda, who I mentioned earlier. After their responses, they received feedback and an explanation of why their answer was right or wrong.

Finally, they asked the participants to consider their beliefs about whether the ¡Arriba! company was engaged in corrupt practices. Participants then provided reasons that both confirmed and (importantly) disconfirmed their beliefs.

Results

“Combating flawed reasoning and misinformation is most effective with a mixed approach.”

The results showed that beliefs in a novel conspiracy theory are associated with both the propensity to commit conjunctive errors and a propensity to ignore disconfirming evidence. No shocker there.

Their more interesting finding was that, though conjunction fallacy training improves participants' statistical reasoning skills, it wasn’t sufficient in reducing novel conspiracy beliefs alone, nor was the disconfirming inquiry. The greatest effect was seen when both of these approaches were combined.

Given the training alone, participants were unable to practice their new statistical reasoning skills to consider more plausible explanations.

Given the disconfirming inquiry alone, participants were left struggling to generate disconfirming thoughts, much less ones they found convincing enough to update their beliefs.

Given both exercises, participants were better able to apply their statistical reasoning to generate disconfirming explanations of each conspiracy theory. It also gave participants more opportunities to think critically about the accuracy of their beliefs.

Conclusion

There is a darker interpretation of these results, however. For one, it showed how easily we can “jump to conclusions” with limited evidence. One of the biggest contributors to conspiracy beliefs is incomplete information. Humans have an irresistible urge to “fill in the gaps”, leading to all sorts of wacky beliefs.

Another pessimistic takeaway is that no one approach, such as debunking or prebunking, is sufficient to extinguish these wacky beliefs. This study suggests that combating flawed reasoning and misinformation is most effective with a mixed approach. The intervention used in this paper was strong because it allowed people to train, then practice.

It will be interesting to see what reasoning training future studies will come up with. For example, there are myriad cognitive fallacies, many of which are pertinent to conspiracy beliefs. How might conspiracy beliefs be influenced by in-group-out-group bias training? How can we modify powerful existing strategies, such as pre-bunking, to combat misinformation?

Identifying effective interventions is still in its early stages, but this study gives us reason to be hopeful that we are headed in the right direction.

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When was the last time you were overcome with jealousy? Encumbered by social comparison? Riddled with guilt or embarrassment? How many people do you hate in this world? What lengths would you go to watch them get what they deserve? If you pay close attention to your mind, you’ll realize its tendency to perseverate on the same unconstructive thoughts for hours, days, weeks, or longer.

There are good evolutionary reasons for this. When problems need to be solved, it pays to persistently deliberate about them until we get closure. But of course, we don’t always know whether a problem is solvable beforehand, so we apply this principle to every situation, even when they are outside of our control. It might be the case that negative emotions are evolutionary byproducts of our capacity for problem-solving. Indeed, some negative mood states are characterized by a highly analytical thinking style.

Negative emotions directed toward others can be similarly advantageous. In survival situations, it is more urgent that we act on fear or retaliation than ecstasy or compassion. We don’t always have the time to decide whether we should run from a lion or pet it. It is the same with reflective emotions like sadness or loneliness. When we need to resolve complex social problems in our lives, it’s good to have an emotion that makes such deliberations inescapable. For this reason, negative emotions are felt more strongly than positive ones and can be far more motivating.

Despite this, negative emotions don’t always lead to constructive action, especially in the emotional extremis. More often than not, we fixate on our emotions in maladaptive ways that exacerbate the valence of these emotions and ultimately work against our goals. Though highly analytical, the ruminating mind doesn’t show increased ability in problem-solving and instead makes our outlook on life grim, pessimistic, and cynical.

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Let’s start with the more antisocial emotions first, such as anger, hate, and schadenfreude. If you are like me, you have probably visualized the deliverance of “instant karma”, like when we indulge in the fantasy of watching someone choking on their gum after smacking it around for ten minutes straight. 

Of course, if this were to actually happen, we wouldn't think twice before providing aid to this person. When we engage in sadistic visualizations, we don't think of the aftermath, or how watching this would actually make us feel. It just feels good to envision a world where there are always consequences to one's actions, even if it’s absurdly disproportionate to the offense. 

As far as our emotions are concerned, this practice only adds fuel to the fire. Although imagining bad things happening to bad people (or annoying people) feels good, it doesn’t make us feel any better. There are a few paradoxes here:

1. We typically don’t want bad things to happen to others, but sometimes it feels good to imagine it.

   **Breaking Bad Spoiler incoming… skip to next paragraph if you haven’t seen the show** In Breaking Bad, after Walter White’s sister-in-law, Marie, finds out his secret, she confesses to her therapist that she spent hours the previous night researching different poisons, and what happens to people after they are exposed to them. Her therapist tells Marie that no situation is made better through the use of violence. Marie responds, “Don’t worry, I wouldn't hurt anybody... It just feels good to think about it.”

   It’s easy to imagine terrible things happening to people, but it is harder to imagine how we’ll feel after misfortune strikes.

2. Although it may provide temporary satisfaction, imagining bad things happening to others does not ultimately diminish negative emotions.

   I have met some pretty big assholes in my day. Usually, they are in some position of power, and in my darker moments, I imagine what it would be like to watch them lose it all. I might imagine them permanently damaging their reputation by making some factual error or social blunder. If you are like me in this regard (for your sake, I hope you aren't), you might, upon reflection, realize that this doesn't improve anything about how you feel about this person. If anything, it makes you that much more perturbed by their presence.

Not all negative emotions lead to malevolent thoughts. Sometimes, we simply feel saddened by the harsh realities of life. Assuming that you are a human, you have likely had moments where you feel unmotivated, uncertain, hopeless, or inadequate. And almost everyone besides, like, the coolest person ever, has been confronted with the fact that others don’t always prioritize us as much as we prioritize them.

To take a personal example, when I first moved into my own apartment, I was particularly susceptible to feeling lonely, which frequently triggered FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). When I saw my friends doing something fun, I felt a ping of jealousy, and my mind became crowded with potential reasons why I was left out. Oftentimes, there were good reasons why I was left out, such as that I was working, or that they were doing something that I have no interest in, or some other logistical issue.

But why was I ever under the impression that I should be included in everything that my friends do? I have a clear sense of what my boundaries are, but I have this implicit assumption that others don’t need boundaries. Even when innocuous explanations are readily available, I continue my search for the most painful one.

3. We continue our search for emotionally painful explanations, even when a more plausible and mundane one is readily available. 

   Most of us can acknowledge that we ruminate on our negative emotions far longer than is useful or necessary. Less of us are able to act on this insight. Instead, we seek out confirmatory evidence to validate how we are feeling. If you are sad, you will look for reasons why you should feel that way. It’s hard to admit when our feelings - or the time spent ruminating about them - are unjustified. Not only is rumination usually unhelpful, but it can also be counterproductive, leading us to engage in a sort of masochistic motivated reasoning. The more we repeat the same story in our minds, the more we become convinced of its veracity.

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Common in all of these paradoxes is our tendency to ruminate on things that don’t need rumination. This ranges from reflecting on that time we told a joke that nobody laughed at, to worrying that those who we love most will eventually up and leave us. Rumination isn’t a solution to either of these cases. Reflecting on the past is only useful insofar as it helps us better plan for tomorrow. Ditto with ruminating about the present moment or future. Any additional rumination is unlikely to lead to anything besides self-torment.

4. We find unchangeable events most worthy of reflection despite their being unchangeable.

   It might come as no surprise that rumination has been empirically shown to prolong emotional states such as sadness, anger, anxiety, and depression. It also exacerbates these emotions, making the present emotion more pronounced. Of course, taking the time to process negative emotions can be beneficial. These thought processes can provide closure and can help to outline clear actionable steps moving forward. But as mentioned in the examples above, rumination does little in the way of solving our problems, especially when the only real solution is to move on.

There is an allure to feeling your feelings, and sometimes this is useful, such as when grieving a loss. When we aren’t given enough time to process and come to terms with grief, we will frequently revisit it to the point where it becomes entangled into negative perceptions about oneself, such as “I will never get over this sadness.”, and a pessimistic worldview, as seen in Mr. Meeseeks’ Slogan from Ricky and Morty, “existence is pain.” The only way to come to terms with death is to accept that it’s an inevitable part of life.

In cases like these, negative emotions are often too potent to be ignored. But we can choose how much time we spend with them. Emotional suppression, that is, attempting to hide, inhibit, or reduce negative emotion - is probably the most commonly used method, but it provides only a temporary fix. A far more effective method, called cognitive reappraisal, works by reinterpreting negative situations in a way that changes their meaning or impact.

For example, when we walk by a neighbor’s house and their dog starts barking at us, we forget about it as soon as we no longer hear the barking. But if we have a rude encounter with someone at the grocery store, it might stick with us for the rest of the day. In the case of the dog, we know that the barking has little to do with us as people and more to do with the feelings of the dog. Similarly, the encounter at the grocery store says nothing about us as people and more about the other person. So why not shrug them off the same way we do the barking dog? Remind yourself that not everything is happening to you, things are just happening, and you just happen to be there.

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Another method when dealing with difficult people is to imagine how they became who they are. Sometimes, they might have just had a bad day. Or maybe their personality is a reflection of their childhood growing up, in which case they were the biggest victim. Or maybe their antisocial behavior is a result of a mental disorder. Whatever it is, nobody makes themselves entirely. Understanding this can make you feel compassion for even the most loathsome souls.

These are powerful reappraisal tactics for managing negative emotions, but there are others, such as (1) making a joke out of ugly encounters, or (2) thinking about your emotions objectively in the way a doctor or programmer would. Think not: I am sad because of this and that; Think: I can tell I am feeling sad because of the heavy feeling in my chest and the pressure behind my eyes. What might the function of this feeling be? One way of combining these two approaches was popularized by William Irvine. He advocates that we ask “What the Func?” when we are feeling down, which is a cheeky way of asking what the function of a negative thought is, rather than constantly replaying it in our minds. Finally, you might also try to identify a silver lining in bad experiences. What can I learn from this? How might this present a chance for growth?

We often feel deflated because we are craving something that is just out of reach. It is not a new insight that desire is the root of all suffering. The Buddha recognized this millennia ago. Our desires are either unattainable, in which case we are wanting that which we do not have access to; or attainable, in which case we experience temporary gratification until we adapt and begin to desire the next thing. Neither of these cases is conducive to a happy life. A better approach is to remind yourself why you wanted the things that you currently have. View your old laptop, your small apartment and all its appliances, and your long-term partner through the eyes of yourself when you first encountered these things. In other words, find ways to want what you have.

Oftentimes when we are ruminating about our lives, we are looking for closure that would otherwise be suspended and unattainable. However, more often than not, rumination does not lead to a desired resolution. While deep contemplation is useful for problem-solving, overthinking can impair these abilities, leading us to act impulsively and make counterproductive choices. Overthinking can also impact our worldview, fueling pessimism, cynicism, and despair. There is room for both “feeling the feels” and analyzing them objectively. In fact, both are essential and part of the same process. By recognizing the paradoxical nature of negative emotions, and that we often have to go against what feels right to overcome them, we can resist the masochistic tendency to dwell on things beyond our control.

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Nearly every study on the psychology of conspiracy theories will mention people’s capacity to accept contrary opinions simultaneously (i.e., double-think). By believing in one conspiracy theory, so it goes, you become more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, even if they are contradictory. This finding traces back to a study that found that conspiracy-minded participants had a tendency to believe both that Princess Diana is still alive and that she was assassinated. This has been coined the “dead and alive effect”, and it has recently been cast into doubt.

A new study found that this effect was driven not by those who believe in two contradictory conspiracy theories, but by those who accept the official narrative and reject both conspiracy theories. Across 4 studies and a mini meta-analysis, the authors demonstrated that while disbelieving a conspiracy theory correlates with disbelieving another, the correlation between believing two contradictory conspiracy theories was unreliable and often negative. In other words, conspiracy-minded participants did not show signs of double-think, and if anything, they showed resistance to competing conspiracy theories.

How could the experts miss this, study after study and replication after replication? While scoffing at the conspiracy theorists’ capacity for double-think, they committed a cognitive fallacy of their own. Namely, they ignored the base rates of those who believe conspiracy theories and those who don’t. The latter far outnumber the former. Studies show that, though almost 50% of people endorse at least one conspiracy theory, the vast majority just don’t find most of them very convincing, especially after hearing them for the first time.

Say, for every 50 people who accept the official narrative, one person will endorse an alternative one. If you are looking for a correlation between the belief in contradictory conspiracy theories, and you analyze both believers and skeptics together, the skeptics are going to be far overrepresented. In other words, whatever the skeptics are doing, it is going to look like everyone is doing, because we are talking 50 skeptics against 1 believer. So in the infamous Princess Diana finding, the majority of participants weren’t saying “She is dead and alive”, they were saying “She died in a car accident, as reported by the officials.”

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Here’s a figure from the paper:

If you are unfamiliar with data visualizations, this might take some squinting. Dots on the right denote a positive correlation (e.g., belief in one predicts belief in another), and dots on the left denote a negative correlation (e.g., belief in one predicts disbelief in another). As you can see, the overall correlation (blue) is mighty close to those who believe the official narrative (red), with those doubtful of the official narrative (green) nowhere in sight. Oh wait, there they are - they are on the other side of the chart, showing little influence on the overall correlation (blue).

Key takeaways? Believing the official story makes it more likely that you will reject contradictory conspiracy theories. Disbelieving the official story, if anything, makes it more likely that you will accept one and reject the other. I am avoiding speaking too strongly here because there really aren’t that many people who said that they reject the official narrative, so we can’t claim to know much about them.

What does this mean for the field of conspiracy theory research? Well, it is a direct challenge to the ‘monological worldview’ interpretation, which states that belief in one conspiracy theory predicts belief in others. Clearly, people are picky about their conspiracy theories. They don’t find them all equally compelling, especially if the conspiracy theory is specific or unfamiliar. It takes time to warm up to narratives that contradict the mainstream one.

It also calls for a more nuanced view of ‘the conspiratorial mindset’, which implies that if you have this particular mind virus, you will find conspiratorial explanations of events irresistible. It’s hard to know what exact factors are at play, but at the very least, the conspiratorial mind is much more complex than we once thought. It might be lazy, but it also shows skepticism - often too much skepticism.

It also means that those in the business of investigating human error, namely psychologists and behavioral scientists, are just as capable of human error themselves. This study provides a sobering reminder that we are all made of the same stuff, that we are all capable of lazy thinking, and that dismissing the “gullible” as merely gullible is unlikely to lead to an accurate picture of humankind.

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References

Brashier, N. M. (2022). Do conspiracy theorists think too much or too little?. Current opinion in psychology, 101504.

Oliver, J. E., & Wood, T. J. (2014). Conspiracy theories and the paranoid style (s) of mass opinion. American journal of political science, 58(4), 952-966.

van Prooijen, J. W., Wahring, I., Mausolf, L., Mulas, N., & Shwan, S. (2023). Just Dead, Not Alive: Reconsidering Belief in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories. Psychological Science, 09567976231158570.

Wood M. J., Douglas K. M., Sutton R. M. (2012). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 767–773.

Most of us have the deeply felt sense that if given the chance, we could have done differently. “If I had a time machine,” we say, “I would go back and start everything over.” This belief influences how we perceive both others and ourselves. We kick ourselves whenever we say something stupid, we reprimand others for making harmful choices, and we encourage our children by telling them that they can be anything they want to be. All of these intuitions are unfounded both objectively and even subjectively. That’s right; you can experience your lack of free-will first-hand (pun intended - keep reading) just by paying more attention. Here’s an exercise:

Make a gesture with your hand. Any gesture will do. Done? Do it again, but pay attention to how you are moving your hand. You really don’t know how you are moving your hand. At one moment it is a thought, then your hand moves. The same goes if you decide not to move your hand. Both the thought and action seemed to occur spontaneously, neither of which you know the origins of. You have no clue why your hand did this thing and not that other thing. All of our thoughts and actions are mysterious in this way. If all of our actions are unconsciously initiated, how can we claim that they are free?

If you don’t find this exercise convincing, fine. Time to call in the EEGs. In a famous experiment, Benjamin Libet put participants in an EEG brain scanner and asked them to tap their finger whenever they felt to urge to. Libet found that the decision to initiate the action could be seen in the brain about 500 ms before the participant had any awareness that the decision had taken place. This means that the experimenters knew when the participants were going to tap their fingers before they did themselves.

To be fair, this experiment has been subject to a fair amount of scrutiny. In short, Libet picked a relatively arbitrary point in the EEG reading to mark the participant’s decision to initiate the finger tap. They called this point the Bereitschaftspotential. You don’t have to learn how to say it or what it means exactly; the main point is that the Bereitschaftspotential can represent a number of things apart from making a decision.

With that said, the criticisms against Libet’s experiment don’t challenge the idea that, given the right knowledge, certain behaviors should be predictable several minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades before they occur. This claim is supported by a mountain of evidence coming from the field of genetics, and how genes interact with our environments.

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Nature vs. Nurture

Most people have accepted that we don’t get a say in how tall we are, the color of our eyes, or whether we have a unibrow. But even the traits we like to think we have control over are mostly inherited. We don’t get to decide what we get on the IQ test, nor do we get to decide how interesting we find a particular subject. Even grit, which is touted as the one thing that allows us to overcome our genetic predispositions, is significantly inherited.

But that doesn’t mean that everything is genetic. The environment has a huge influence on our lives. Experiencing trauma or neglect at a young age, for example, can have lifelong effects. But the effect isn’t as strong as you might think. Even when we experience a significant life event, we usually bounce back to our genetic trajectories.

It is estimated that genes account for about 50% of who you are, which seems to leave a lot of room for environmental influences. But your heredity also influences how you will interact with your environment. Your likes and dislikes, your beliefs and values, your personality and all of its quirks, are all determined by your genetic blueprint and how it collides with the environment. Even here, environmental influence can easily be overstated. For example, one widely cited study found that the personalities of identical twins are no more different when they are reared apart than when they grow up in the same family. Neither our parents nor the rest of our environment contributes much to who we are.

Determinism

Perhaps the most fundamental argument against free-will comes from what we know about reality itself. Most of us agree that everything in the universe has a prior cause. Less of us follow this idea to its logical conclusion, which is that we are all headed toward a future that was always going to be.

Determinism implies no free-will, but so does indeterminism. Think about it - if the universe weren’t deterministic, that would mean that some events occur without a cause, i.e., they occur mysteriously and inexplicably. Unpredictable randomness - as seen in the quantum realm - doesn’t buy us any free-will. It just means the cosmos is more chaotic than it seems.

The strongest argument that attempts to square free-will with a determined universe is provided by compatibilists. First, they redefine free-will from “the ability to act in a way that isn’t constrained by necessity or fate” to “the ability to act in accordance with your values and desires.” Not a bad definition at first glance, but upon further consideration, it is not how most people think about free-will. To have true freedom is to have the ability to act even against our deepest values and desires. You should be able to do anything. By limiting our possible actions to those that agree with our values and desires, the compatibilist defines free-will in a way that only reiterates why we don’t have it in the first place.

You might object that we can act against our values and desires. We do it all the time. Sure, but we either do so unwittingly, or we do so to reassure ourselves that we have free-will. All because you pinched yourself to prove that you could act against your values and desires doesn’t mean you have refuted anything I have said thus far. It just means that your desire to prove that you are not a puppet with strings was temporarily stronger than your desire to avoid pain.

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Who Cares?

If you found any of my above arguments persuasive, do you wish you hadn’t? This is actually another instance that demonstrates our lack of freedom. We cannot help but be persuaded by arguments that we find logically valid. Of course, our biases work against this, but you don’t get to choose your biases either, otherwise, most of us wouldn’t have any. But I digress.

There are many reasons we should feel grateful for our strings. Recall the thought-experiment at the beginning of this essay, where I asked you to be mindful of how you move your hand. Though the underlying mechanics were mysterious, you still anticipated the voluntary action.

If you had free-will, shouldn't you be able to act in ways that surprise you the moment you exhibit a behavior? Shouldn’t you have the choice to not act voluntarily? It is the chain reaction within your brain that allows you to anticipate your actions, and which makes it impossible for your actions to be free.

Not only is our lack of free-will the foundation by which we can predict our own actions, but also the actions of others. To have unlimited access to choice means that anyone can do anything at any time. They would no longer be motivated purely by what they think is in their best interest. Interacting with other humans would be a chaotic exercise to be avoided at all costs, rendering cooperation, communication, relationships, and society itself impossible. We wouldn’t have made it this far as a species if we had complete autonomy.

Acknowledging our absence of choice also makes us more empathetic. Even psychopaths deserve empathy. We have a deep-seated intuition that Hitler was a terrible person (he was) because he could have acted differently (he couldn’t have). You might even think that if you were Hitler, you would have pursued a career as a painter (which was Hitler’s favorite pastime - he was actually quite good) rather than a genocidal dictator. But you wouldn’t have. If you were Hitler, you would have been Hitler. I’m not sure how useful it is to practice empathizing with Hitler, but realizing that nobody makes themselves can be a useful exercise when trying to overcome hatred.

What about the doom and gloom of discovering you have undesirable genes? Knowing that you aren’t free to rebel against your genetic trajectory saves you the time and pain of pursuing that goal anyway. I was never going to beat Michael Phelps in a swimming race. Ever. So I will spend my time in other ways, doing the things that I am good at. As WC Fields said, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again, then quit. There is no use being a damn fool about it.” It’s not (entirely) my fault that I am not the best swimmer, and Michael Phelps would be lying to console me that I can do anything if only I work hard enough.

Paradoxically, it is the acknowledgment that we don’t have free-will that makes us the most free. Unlike 99% of the rest of humanity, I have two copies of the APOE allele 4 gene. This means that I have a 50% chance of getting Alzheimer’s by the time I’m 85. This percentage increases exponentially the longer I age. Silver lining? I am now further incentivized to do the things I should be doing anyway: getting regular exercise, eating a healthy diet, aspiring to be a lifelong learner, and reminding myself to stay grounded in the present moment. In this case, it is my lack of self-governance that defines who I am, and thus empowers me to be the person I want to be.

If all else fails, you can also just keep pretending to have free will. That is what I’ll do as soon as I hit “Publish”. We might have no choice but to believe we have free will. That’s why it serves as the basis for our judicial system, our relationships, how we parent our kids, and how we see ourselves. It might be too ingrained in our biology for us to just dump it for a new philosophy. Besides, believing that you can be whatever you want to be can be a good excuse for getting up and trying.

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Can suffering be beneficial? If you believe that the answer is a resounding “no”, then you are in good company. Suffering underlies the very worst moments in our lives; moments we spend considerable effort trying to forget. If your answer is a hesitant, albeit judicious “yes”, then you might have been the victim of such an experience, but you view it as one of the most meaningful and pivotal moments of your life.

There are many ways in which we find meaning in suffering. We might search for silver linings, turn bad into good through altruism, or claim that everything happens for a reason and is part of a greater plan. Stan van Hooft explains this idea in his 1998 essay, The Meanings of Suffering:

“Given the ineliminability of suffering from our lives … a central project of human thought is to make it bearable or acceptable, and one of the most common ways of doing this is to show it to be good in some way. If suffering were seen as a positive event or force in our lives, we would be better able to endure it.”

This sentiment does not originate with van Hooft. The problem of suffering has been pondered for millennia. Aristotle (4th century BCE) claimed that it was essential for the development of virtue. The Buddha (5th century BCE) taught that suffering could be overcome in his Four Noble Truths. Heraclitus (same period) viewed suffering as an essential part of human life and necessary for a person’s growth and development. 

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Despite the accumulated work from the greatest thinkers in human history, most of us can’t shake the deep-seated intuition that suffering is something that should not happen. It is an aberration of how things should be, and thus demands explanation. Take traumatic events, which challenge our default view that life is fair, stable, and predictable. In response, we incorporate these events into our global meaning framework, sometimes by finding meaning in the event itself. 

One study examined the personal disaster stories of Hurricane Katrina survivors. They discovered that viewing the hurricane as an “act of God” (35%) was just as common as viewing it as an “act of nature” (36%). Additionally, they found that those who experienced the most hardship were the most likely to understand their experience as an act of God.

In general, religion comes in handy when we need to make sense of something that is otherwise inexplicable. Senseless tragedies can be seen as a test of our faith, a punishment from the gods, or a necessary cost for future prosperity. Through resolving uncertainty and providing closure, using religious explanations of daily occurrences has been shown to enhance well-being. It might come as no surprise that the positive correlation between religion and happiness is one of the more robust findings in the literature.

Absent religious meaning, many of us still look for the underlying purpose behind suffering and claim that it occurred for the greater good. If you are desperate to avoid invoking God, you might say that “the universe has a plan” instead. This style of thinking is called teleological reasoning, and it happens when we explain phenomena by appealing to their underlying purpose, rather than their material cause.

Teleology can creep into our language through common cliches. I once embarrassed myself in front of an academic whom I admired and was nervous to meet. In an attempt to impress her with my knowledge, I waffled on for minutes trying to string together at least one coherent thought about our common interests. All I could muster was a word salad. Dejected, I walked out of her office reassuring myself that the partnership “wasn’t meant to be.”1

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Teleological reasoning appears long before we learn to incorporate cliches into our vocabulary. Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom (2015) gave kids and adults teleological and nonteleological explanations for a range of life events and asked them to choose which explanation was most helpful for understanding the event’s cause. The younger the participant, the more likely they were to find the teleological explanations compelling. 

Why do we do this? After all, it doesn’t change what happened to us, nor does it help us solve any of the problems that come with significant life events. But it can change how we think about situations that are out of our control. It can be very difficult to admit when you are powerless. The allure of thinking in terms of superstition is that it gives us the sense that we can somehow influence the course of random events. We knock on wood to avoid the undesirable and blow out birthday candles to bring about the wishful.

Teleological explanations are convincing because they appeal to humans’ intuitive understanding of intentions and actions. Research has shown that the more likely you are to consider others’ intentions, whether it be through paranoia or empathy, the more likely you are to find intention and purpose within your own life. We are agency detectors. Other research has shown that we are more likely to invoke God when explaining events that otherwise lack an agent. 

The latter study provided participants with a vignette about a family that is picnicking in a valley before the water level begins to rise due to a nearby broken dam. In one condition, the water only ruins their lunch; in the other, it drowns the entire family. They also varied whether the dam failed spontaneously, or was destroyed by a malevolent dam worker. They found that participants were more likely to invoke God when the dam broke spontaneously (i.e, a chance event) than when it was destroyed by the evil dam worker (i.e., caused by an agent). 

The participants were also more likely to use supernatural explanations when the outcome was extreme, (i.e., when the family drowned) than when it was simply inconvenient (i.e., when their lunch was ruined). Other examples abound. One study found that prostate cancer survivors become more religious the worse their prognosis. Another showed that parents become more pious when their child is diagnosed with cancer.

In other words, God thrives not in times of plenty, but in times of pain. When the source of our suffering seems extraordinary, inexplicable, and undeserved, we can’t help but feel that someone or something is behind it. God is an easy target to blame for such incidents, but he can also serve to bring order to chaos and supernatural meaning to senseless tragedy.

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There are three foundational components to meaning in life: coherence, purpose, and significance. Life is coherent when we can make sense of it; purposeful when there is a reason to be living it; and significant when our sense of importance transcends the trivial or momentary.

Our need for coherence might have co-evolved with our pattern-recognition abilities. It is what allows us to establish predictability onto the world in a way that confers a survival advantage on humans. Our explanations aren’t always true, but at least we’re always looking for them. 

Our need for purpose anchors our future goals in mind and thus can guide our actions in the present. Our goals can range from getting an early start to our day (a constant struggle of mine) to our considerations for the future of humanity (e.g., climate change advocacy). As far as we know, humans are the only animal with the capacity to consider the far future and act accordingly.

Our knack for finding coherence and purpose helps us to perceive significance in events that felt significant. We don’t comfort a friend whose house just burned into flames by saying, “These things happen”. Besides being quite unhelpful, it assigns a significant event with a mundane cause, namely chance. Instead, our friend will gradually make sense of this tragedy on his own. When circumstances improve, he might even come to appreciate the event as a pivotal moment in his life and claim that it ‘happened for a reason’.

Promiscuous teleology satisfies each of these components. It provides coherence when naturalistic explanations are unsatisfying or unavailable. It provides purpose when it orients us toward our long-term goals. It provides significance by connecting and positioning oneself within the overall plans of the universe or higher power. Thus, teleology can play a pivotal factor in restoring meaning that was otherwise lost during a tragedy. When someone asks, “why did this happen to me” after a natural disaster, they aren’t looking for a meteorology report.

Meaning is found in significant events because it is these events that most urgently demand explanation. Intense emotional experiences are remembered as more meaningful and are thus featured more prominently in the narrative of our lives. One group of researchers asked participants to reflect on significant life events within the last year and asked them to judge how meaningful the experience was. Their results showed that emotionally extreme events, positive or negative, were perceived as the most meaningful. Thus, it is the intense emotional experiences that most define who we are. This might be part of the reason why we aren't always hedonistic, but we also seek out unpleasant experiences such as running marathons, watching horror movies, or caring for children.

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The pull towards meaning can also motivate people to become more altruistic. Psychologist Ervin Staub (2003) has coined the term ‘altruism born of suffering’ to describe how this desire to help others occurs not only in spite of suffering but because of it. It is more common for people to help others after being victimized than to exact revenge on the perpetrator, perhaps because 1. revenge is a costly way to gain closure, and 2. once closure has been obtained through revenge, there is no further meaning to be derived from the experience. 

In contrast, devoting one’s life to altruism by helping other victims provides an inexhaustible source of purpose, and brings meaning to the experience that is cohesive with the rest of our lives. This terrible thing needed to happen for me to be who I am today. It is central to who I am. I wouldn't change a thing. I am reminded of Viktor Frankl’s account of Jerry Long, who became paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident:

"I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn't break me. I am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible."

In other words, when we are unable to change the outcome of a life event, we change our attitude towards it instead. I broke my neck, it didn’t break me. Trauma can shatter our assumptions about our world, but they can be repaired. We can scour for a silver lining, invoke God or other mysterious forces in the universe, weave the event into our lives in a way that is in line with our goals, or turn bad into good by helping others. Sometimes naturalistic explanations are not enough. Sometimes circumstances call for unwarranted assumptions about the world. But when scenarios that are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and disruptive come out of the blue and rob us of our sense of certainty, direction, and meaning, sometimes, we are better off being wrong.

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References

Banerjee, K., & Bloom, P. (2014). Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events. Cognition, 133(1), 277-303.

Banerjee, K., & Bloom, P. (2015). “Everything Happens for a Reason”: Children’s Beliefs About Purpose in Life Events. Child Development, 86(2), 503–518.

Frankl, V. E. (2017). Man's Search for Meaning: Young Adult Edition: Young Adult Edition. Beacon Press.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2000). Extracting meaning from past affective experiences: The importance of peaks, ends, and specific emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 577-606.

Gall, T. L. (2004). Relationship with God and the quality of life of prostate cancer survivors. Quality of Life Research, 13, 1357-1368.

Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Blaming God for our pain: Human suffering and the divine mind. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 7-16.

Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531-545.

Murphy, S. C., & Bastian, B. (2020). Emotionally extreme life experiences are more meaningful. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(4), 531-542.

Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: an integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological bulletin, 136(2), 257.

Ramsay, J. E., Tong, E. M., Chowdhury, A., & Ho, M. H. R. (2019). Teleological explanation and positive emotion serially mediate the effect of religion on well-being. Journal of personality, 87(3), 676-689.

Scott, M. J. (2022). Reasons Things Happen for a Reason: An Integrative Theory of Teleology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(2), 452-464.

Sommer, K. L., Baumeister, R. F., & Stillman, T. F. (2013). e construction of meaning from life events: Empirical studies of personal narratives. In The human quest for meaning (pp. 343-360). Routledge.

Spilka, B., Zwartjes, W. J., & Zwartjes, G. M. (1991). The role of religion in coping with childhood cancer. Pastoral Psychology, 39(5), 295-304.

Staub, E., & Vollhardt, J. (2008). Altruism born of suffering: The roots of caring and helping after victimization and other trauma. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78(3), 267-280.

Stephens, N. M., Fryberg, S. A., Markus, H. R., & Hamedani, M. G. (2013). Who explains Hurricane Katrina and the Chilean earthquake as an act of God? The experience of extreme hardship predicts religious meaning-making. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(4), 606-619.

Van Hooft, S. (1998). The meanings of suffering. Hastings Center Report, 28(5), 13-19.

What is humanity’s place in the universe? Can we even claim to have one? Religion answers existential questions like these by putting humans at the very center. We are God’s greatest creation, and thus his main preoccupation. Science answers them by telling us that we really don’t have a place in the universe. In Stephen Hawking’s words, 

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

It is in this cosmic insignificance that scientists derive their spirituality. The vastness of the universe inspires awe in everyone who looks up at the sky and attempts to understand it.

On their face, these answers couldn’t seem more different. But they actually share an important feature: They both miss what truly makes humans special.

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In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch pushes back against parochialism, which he defines as our tendency to mistake appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws. Religious explanations are parochial because they are anthropocentric. They put humanity on a pedestal because, compared to all other life on earth, it feels like we deserve to be there. 

Secularists scoff at this naïve anthropocentrism, but then make the same mistake in the opposite direction by being anti-anthropocentric. Their conception of humans as “chemical scum” bleeds into how they perceive themselves as humans. You may have heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say something like: 

How can we assume that the gap between our species and space aliens is any less significant than the gap between humans and chimps? After all, the 1% difference that separates humans from chimps has endowed us with culture, philosophy, science, art, and technology. What does that mean for the aliens who are 1% more intelligent than us?

Compelling as this argument may seem, it is just as parochial as the theists’. That is, it misconstrues our cosmic insignificance as a universal principle. We are certainly smaller than we think, therefore we must also be stupider than we think. This has been called the principle of mediocrity, which claims that there really is nothing special about humans. 

But humans are endowed with something special, something that has infinite reach within the laws of nature: we have unconstrained access to knowledge, and the means to transmit and build upon it.

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Knowledge begins with empirical observation. If we seek an explanation, we will make guesses about what caused the observation. At this phase, our guesses are only conjecture - we still have to test them. Through examination and criticism, new explanations will emerge, leaving the false components behind, and retaining the parts that have yet to be proven wrong. 

Language allows us to distribute this process across individuals. It isn’t only the individual’s responsibility to figure out what is true about the world and how it works. If you hold a belief that contradicts reality, someone’s eventually going to notice. Once noticed, false ideas become irrepressibly hard to ignore. New explanations will then be tested for their ability to make accurate predictions about the world. It is through this cooperative and iterative process of conjecture, criticism, and testing that explanations are selected for their accuracy. Call it ‘survival if the truest’.

For criticism to work, it has to be paired with fallibilism - the recognition that, just like everyone else, we are capable of being wrong. Our beliefs will not always be valid, nor will our criticisms of others’ beliefs. We are just as likely to attack an idea that we don't like as we are to believe an idea that we do. If we are unable to admit this, then we will be stuck with the same wrong opinion that we had yesterday. Indeed, every belief that you have ever updated was a direct result of the awareness that you can get things wrong, and through that awareness, you can identify errors and correct course. 

When we correct a false assumption about the world, we often solve more problems than we intend to:

• The tilt of the Earth’s axis was originally proposed as an explanation for the Sun’s angle of elevation, but it eventually became an explanation for the changing of the seasons.

• Gunpowder is a byproduct of Chinese alchemists’ attempt to create the elixir of life.

• While developing his theory to study the nature of mathematical proof, Alan Turing inadvertently created the definitive theory of universal classical computers.

Knowledge has this property of applying itself across multiple domains. This is what Deutsch calls ‘the reach of explanation’.

Reach doesn’t only arise by happenstance, but also by design. Much like how a bird’s eyesight doesn’t stop working once it flies away from its ancestral environment, human reason doesn’t stop working once we ponder questions that were irrelevant to our ancestors. We are not limited to the problems that evolution equipped us to solve. Otherwise, it would be impossible for us to understand the unfathomably small, such as the structure of atoms, or the illimitably large, such as the vastness of the universe. 

The reach of our explanations is bounded only by the laws of physics. Therefore, anything that is physically possible can be achieved given the requisite knowledge. Take an example from the book:

Imagine an empty cube of space about the size of a galaxy with nothing but stray hydrogen atoms. Deutsch argues that, given the right program, a universal constructor should be able to convert these stray atoms into heavier elements until we end up with something like an intergalactic space station. This universal constructor can either be a machine that can create anything, or a machine that can create a machine that can create anything.

The kicker is that humans already know how to turn some matter into other matter, so we could be the universal constructors in this scenario. I’m not sure why we would choose to spend our time in this way, but who knows, maybe our descendants will get bored one day.

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Despite the pessimists, misanthropes, and parochialists, the truth is optimistic. Humans are far from typical.

The coldest temperature in the universe exists not in the deepest outer space, but was created by humans here on Earth. Physicists were able to reach 450 trillionths of a degree celsius above absolute zero (-273 °C), the point at which the atomic particles in an object stop moving entirely. The darkest parts of space only reach about 270 °C.

Or take the notion of ‘spaceship earth’, the idea that our biosphere is perfectly suitable for humanity, and that living anywhere else in the universe would somehow be fundamentally impractical. What the proponents of this idea fail to recognize is that humans have already terraformed the Earth, which is perilously hostile, hence why 99.9% of species have gone extinct over history. None of these species - besides humans - were able to manipulate their environments to their needs, nor could they even think to try. I’ll say it again - Humans are far from typical.

Only until we learn to distinguish between hard and impossible problems can we grasp the full scope of humanity’s potential. Everything in nature has an explanation, and explanations can be utilized. Faster-than-light communication is out of the question because it is constrained by the laws of physics. Anything slower than that is within reach.

Any creature that has the ability to observe phenomena, iterate through explanations, recycle the good ones, and discard the bad ones, can exploit the laws of nature to fit its needs. This doesn’t necessarily mean we are headed toward some impeccable Utopia. Deutsch’s three laws of the human condition are that problems are inevitable, but they are also solvable. Solutions beget new problems, which can be solved in their turn. This imposes an impassable barrier to progress, but it also enables its indefinite pursuit.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the contents of this book. Missing from my review is: what separates a good explanation from a bad one, how morality can (and can only be) derived from reason (turns out you really can get an ought from an is!), the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e., the “Multiverse” as featured in now almost every Marvel movie), the objectivity of beauty, the importance of fallibilism, the role that memes play in humanity’s success, and other topics. This is probably my favorite book of all time, so I sincerely hope that some of you will check it out. You can do so by clicking the image below.

I was only 4 years old at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which makes me one of the lucky ones. I remember absolutely nothing from that day. I played with my Simba stuffed animal as my parents followed the broadcast live and made calls to my grandfather who was in the city at the time. And yet, the events of 9/11 don’t feel any more a part of my life than do the tragedies before my time. None of my memories from that day are my own, but rather they were passed down second-hand from my parents.

Eventually, I desired a deeper understanding than what my parents could provide. At this point, I’m in my preteens, equipped with an insatiable curiosity, but without the tools to filter reliable information from misinformation. And so I went down the youtube rabbit hole attempting to learn as much as I could.

“Jet fuel doesn’t burn that hot?”

“This guys says that buildings don’t fall that way.”

“I guess that smoke cloud does look a bit like the devil.”

At the time, youtube’s algorithm was built to lead its viewers to extremist content. It might have been unintentional, but there were no systems in place to moderate what video plays next. It doesn’t matter where you started; you would be recommended an Alex Jones video soon enough.

Luckily for me, this phase didn’t take too much of my time, nor did any of the conspiracy theories stick. I was probably around 10-13 at the time, so the most odious interpretations were a bit over my head. I eventually grew out of my obsession, realizing that the magnitude of the attacks will forever be incomprehensible, even for those who witnessed them firsthand. It is perhaps this inability to comprehend extreme events that lead us to project meaning onto them.

Reflecting back on this phase, I’m taken aback by how elaborate the 9/11 conspiracy theories (CTs) were. Conspiracism used to be a sport. It was almost hyper-analytical - with believers reading into every detail and discovering convoluted patterns that weren’t actually there. Conspiracy theorists made earnest attempts to defend their ideas and sometimes could even stump their interlocutors. It almost makes me nostalgic.

Conspiracism has gotten lazy. With the vast number of information outlets offering different variations of the same story, the consumer is able to pick and choose which narrative they accept as the truth. Anything that disagrees with their chosen narrative is met with claims to be “just asking questions” and scattershot accusations of “Fake News.” Nowadays, conspiracism is more about doubting the mainstream narrative than it is about creating one of its own. It is conspiracy theory without the theory.

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Does that make this era the golden age of conspiracism, or the previous? There are notable peculiarities to both. In their book, A lot of People are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum distinguish the new age of conspiracism from “classical conspiracism.” Here is a summary of how the two are different:

The case has been made that new conspiracism is more corrosive than classical conspiracism. Classical conspiracism’s goals were mostly internally oriented. Whether it be loneliness, uncertainty, or lack of control over one’s life, the theories were used to fill some sort of psychological hole within its adherents. This underlying goal of ameliorating psychological discomfort kept the conspiracy cults small and insulated; they only occasionally had effects on the rest of society.

New conspiracism presents far more externalities. Not only is it epistemologically deranging, but it seeks to undermine the very meaning of truth. It views journalism as curated pandering, universities as indoctrination camps, and medical institutions as corporations concerned only with profit. 1 Ironically, new conspiracists - and especially those on the right - love touting the phrase "facts don't care about your feelings", yet they disregard every truth that contradicts their own.

Further, new conspiracists view error correction not as evidence of integrity, but of corruption. When the CDC switched its position on mask-wearing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were castigated as utterly incompetent and unworthy of public trust. It’s hard to imagine what the CDC should have done instead. Should they not make recommendations for developing pandemics? Conspiracy theorists scrupulously document such mistakes - while ignoring the accuracies - until our institutions appear completely broken.

Finally, what sets new conspiracism apart from classical conspiracism is that while tearing down every established narrative, no concrete one is offered in its place. Conspiracy theories are no longer beliefs about current events, but condemnations of targeted figures. Only the most gullible of the far right actually believe that Hilary Clinton is orchestrating a satanic pedophile ring. Most others just play along because it feels “true enough” and provides another way to say “I hate Hilary Clinton.” In a way, conspiracy theories are no longer beliefs at all, but something more instinctual.

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Conspiracy Intuitions

In their 2022 paper, “Introducing Conspiracy Intuitions to Better Understand Conspiracy Beliefs,” Researchers Russell Roberts and Jane Risen distinguished conspiracy beliefs from “conspiracy intuitions.” Conspiracy beliefs are firmly held beliefs about stories that generally involve powerful individuals. Conspiracy intuitions, in contrast, are mere suspicions that the truth about some event is being kept from the public, potentially for nefarious reasons.2

Conspiracy intuitions are not beliefs, but rather anti-beliefs: a bitter refusal to be pinned down to any explanation of events. This can be seen through the use of strategic disclaimers (i.e., “I’m no expert but…”), moving the goalposts (i.e., “fine, but can you explain this???!”), and claims of “just asking questions.”

In another sense, conspiracy intuitions resemble pre-beliefs. It might be the case that all conspiracy beliefs are born as intuitions, with some developing into fervently held beliefs, and others stagnating in the intuitive phase. For example, conspiracists have a demonstrable tendency to believe in mutually contradictory conspiracy theories, such as the belief that Princess Diana was both assassinated but also alive and hiding. The underlying intuition is that the truth behind the beloved Princess’s death is being concealed.

Our new age of conspiracism is perhaps driven more by conspiracy intuitions than they are conspiracy beliefs. They are an ejaculation of one’s political opinions, tribal loyalties, and outgroup resentments, all the while bypassing obligations toward explanation and justification. New conspiracy theories need not burden themselves with an investigation or even a consistent narrative. Narratives that seem “true enough” are enough.

Thus, we live in the age of ephemeral albeit viral conspiracy theories. In Roberts’ and Risen’s words:

“prevalence of conspiracy beliefs, their connection to ordinary and automatic features of human cognition, their sensitivity to experimental manipulation, and the fact that their hallmark feature is suspicion rather than certainty, all point to the importance of recognizing conspiracy intuitions as a kind of liminal mental state between doubt and belief that often precedes capitulation to full-blown conspiracy theories and functions as fertile ground for their acquisition.”

In short, classical conspiracists reason from their intuitions; new conspiracists reason with them.

Twitter: @ryanbruno7287

Mastodon: @ryanbruno@mstdn.social

In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel argues that there is a dark side to meritocracy. He focuses mainly on the academic setting because that is where his expertise lies, and because that is where the problem is perhaps most pronounced.

He opens the book with a few well-known anecdotes about how parents have paid thousands and sometimes millions to get their kids into prestigious universities. The “Varsity Blues Scandal” is an infamous case, where 33 parents were accused of spending over $25 million to fraudulently inflate test scores and bribe college officials. They even paid for fabricated sports profiles and had their children’s faces photoshopped onto pictures of other people playing sports.

The problem with merit is that merit itself has become so sought after. That is, by implementing meritocracy, we inevitably create perverse incentives to get ahead and make it look like we deserve our success, even when we cheated every step along the way. Therefore, when parents pay exorbitant amounts to get their children admitted into prestigious universities, they aren’t just paying for the diploma, but for the status signal that their child earned it.

Though back-door admissions are morally abhorrent, they only account for a small percentage of those who get into university. Yet, more students at Yale come from the top 1% than the bottom 60%. A greater percentage of those who get accepted enter through the side door via some affiliation with a given university.

The majority of students get in through the front door, but even this is not completely meritorious, for it is the result of one’s position in life. Opportunities aren’t distributed evenly throughout the population. Urban communities often suffer from underdeveloped schooling programs, and their students are almost never prepared to continue their education, nor are they made aware of the possibility. 

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It is perhaps front-door admissions that are the most pernicious because the unfairness is harder to spot. Because people who get into prestigious universities typically work incredibly hard to get there, the illusion persists that hard work always goes rewarded. This misses the fact that not all of us are put in a position where we are able to strive toward high professional ambitions. Some of us can only strive to put food on the table.

Similarly, not all of us are put in a position where our hard work will pay off. Our fate is not determined only by grit, resilience, and tenacity, but by luck, chance, and circumstance. Lebron James’ success, for example, is not only due to his athletic ability, but because he lives in a world that values basketball players. Lucky for Lebron, not so much for people like me.

Misconceptions about the winners and losers of meritocracy persist because we conflate our aspirations with reality. We know that the most competent people should be in the most powerful positions, so we assume that those at the top have earned their spot, and those at the bottom just aren’t working hard enough.

Throughout the book, Sandel challenges claims that “Meritocracy would work if only…” For example, a common solution to the problem of inequality is to provide aid to those who need it. This is generally a good thing, but in a meritocracy, it puts the onus on those who qualify for assistance to make the case that their situation is not their own doing, but a result of their helpless circumstances, lack of agency, and inability to act responsibly. We are basically compensating people to admit that they couldn’t have done better for themselves even if they tried.

Not only is meritocracy worthy of skepticism, but the very concept of merit is almost never useful. Nothing is achieved through merit alone. Policies should be made with this in mind if we are aiming for a truly equitable society. But until that happens, I encourage everyone to read this book. A lot of our problems would be solved if people thought through their political beliefs as Michael Sandel does here. Through reason and the myriad examples he provides, Sandel shows that even the most benign and benevolent of political philosophies can end up doing more harm than good.

People are typically skeptical about nonhuman animal sentience and often underestimate their capacity to suffer. We deny the minds of those who are most dissimilar or unfamiliar to ourselves. This not only affects how we treat those individuals, but it also provides post hoc justifications for how they are typically treated. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. History provides copious examples of the mistreatment of those who don’t meet these criteria.

Racism is the unequal moral consideration of other races, because they look different. Sexism is unequal moral consideration based on sex, because of sex differences. Speciesism is unequal moral consideration based on species membership, because, well, you get it. 

Though these forms of discrimination are unique in their effects, their belief structures are strikingly similar. Throughout this article, I will focus on animals, because that is what the article is about, but pay attention to how most of the arguments apply to other forms of prejudice as well. I’ll bold the font to make these instances easier to spot.

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Speciesism and the meat paradox

Why are we susceptible to speciesist thinking? And why does it have such a profound influence on our behavior?

Us humans pride ourselves on our intellect, ingenuity, capacity for cooperation, and our unique ability to escape the perils of nature. And we should. These are all wonderful qualities for an animal to have to ensure its survival. They are among the many reasons humans came to dominate the world. But our pride in these abilities can go too far and lead to a preference to be distinct from all other animals in almost every way. In some contexts, the term animal might even be taken as derogatory. I don’t remember the last time I was flattered to be called an ape, or a pig.

Despite our beliefs about animals, most of us aren't callous to them. Unless we are brought up in an environment where cruelty to animals is normalized, we genuinely seem to care for the well-being of animals, at least when they are in our immediate proximity. Not many people smile at the sight of roadkill. 

Yet, when animals are not within our immediate proximity, we deem they're suffering a worthwhile trade for our consumption - a necessary evil. This contradiction has been called the meat paradox. That is, we enjoy eating meat, but experience discomfort (i.e., dissonance) when the meat is linked to the death of an animal.

Why does the meat paradox persist? 

One major reason is that we deny animals the capacity to suffer by denying their minds. Indeed, when people are primed with the concept of meat, they are more likely to view animals as mindless.

One study by Leach et al. examined how people update their beliefs after being primed with signals that nonhuman animals have minds. An early contention one might have with the methods is that we cannot know whether the signal is accurate. That is, we cannot know whether the signals used in the study are actually a sign of consciousness or if they only suggest consciousness. This is a valid criticism. It is notoriously difficult to study animal minds.

But this includes humans. To be clear, we cannot prove that anyone besides ourselves is having a subjective experience. Consciousness is not something that can be proved (yet). In other words, we underestimate animal minds because we can. “You can't prove to me that that pig is conscious.” To which one could reply, “You can’t prove to me that you are either.”

But we can look at whether our beliefs are in line with the available evidence, which is what Leach’s study did. Specifically, they looked at people’s prior beliefs, then presented them with cues about their veracity. Then the participants provided their updated beliefs. 

This paradigm made it possible to predict what the updated beliefs should be based on the probability of the signal’s accuracy. The perfect human should have beliefs that are perfectly proportionate to the likelihood of those beliefs being true. Using Bayes’ theorem, we can compare how this perfect human would update their beliefs with how the participants updated theirs.

Similarly, they tested how we update our beliefs about animals after being primed with cues that they don’t have a given capacity. The study looked at two groups: meat eaters and those who abstain from meat. They also looked at how these groups made judgments about animals that are typically raised for food, and animals that are typically kept as pets, as well as how we make these judgments about other people.

They found that meat eaters and vegans alike underestimated animal minds even after being primed with evidence of their cognitive capacities. Likewise, when they received cues that animals did not have minds, they were unjustifiably accepting of the idea. Stated differently, we are overly skeptical when told that animals have minds, and overly credulous when we are told that they don’t. The participant’s prior beliefs about animals had a significant effect on how they updated them. This is called the anchoring effect, i.e, our prior opinions can influence we make decisions and how far we update our beliefs. This work shows that for one reason or another, we all collectively underestimate consciousness in nonhuman animals. 

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Why do we underestimate animal minds?

Whether it’s an innate predisposition or learned throughout development, our favoritism toward human minds - and our discounting of other minds - boils down to speciesism. How we categorize others plays an enormous role in how we view them. To connect this back to other forms of prejudice, consider how early western colonists viewed other races as categorically different from them. So too with nonhuman animals.

Among the most common antecedents of prejudicial attitudes are similarity and familiarity. Both of these factors influence how we categorize animals and hence determine their moral value. For example, in most contexts, we associate chicken with the food and not the animal. When others say they are going out to get the chicken, we don’t expect to hear cawing when they come back.

Similarity

Consider how we treat dogs and pigs. Though pigs and dogs are far more similar than they are different, we treat dogs like family, and pigs like, well, ham.1 Both pigs and dogs share similar sociality and intelligence, for example, but they differ in their familiarity and self-relevance to humans. Dogs also have the advantage of evolving with humans for the past 32,000 years, so they know how to cue their emotional states to us. They have developed an inner eyebrow muscle and, debatably, can even smile at us. The similarity bias is most pronounced when we compare mammals’ moral worth with the moral worth of nonmammals, like reptiles or bugs. In general, we empathize with mammals due to our preference for the similar over the dissimilar.

A key reason we see animals as dissimilar is that sometimes they do seem pretty mindless. It is important to recognize why they seem this way. Most of the minds we encounter in day-to-day life can communicate back to us. When the ability to communicate is absent, we assume that the ability to think is also absent. Imagine that, like humans, pigs could convey their thoughts to us through speech. It would certainly be harder to slaughter them as they are begging for mercy.

Familiarity

We also prefer that which is familiar to us. For example, we perceive familiar faces as more likable than unfamiliar faces. This is what underlies the proximity principle i.e., we prefer those who are closer to us over those who are more distant. This is why animals that we see every day get preferential treatment over those that we see more sparsely. 

It is hard for dog owners to eat dog meat because the interchangeability is too salient. We might imagine the dog on our plate switching places with the one on our lap. Conversely, it is relatively easy to cut into a steak because cows are not as present in most people’s day-to-day lives. 

The arbitrary terms we have for meat make it doubly unlikely that the corresponding animal will come to mind. In other words, we can eat steak or pork without thinking about cows and pigs.

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Dissonance

People are afforded moral rights mainly on the basis that they have minds. When our actions are laden with moral conflict (e.g., when we are reminded of the link between the meat on our plates and the animal it came from), we justify them through mind denial. The feeling of discomfort this instills is called dissonance, which is a feeling that we are very much motivated to avoid. This is why cognitive dissonance is a common cause of a host of thinking errors, such as motivated reasoning, delegitimization, and strategic ignorance. Therefore, we are inaccurate in our perceptions of animals not because we are stupid, but because we are motivated reasoners.

We are especially likely to engage in motivated reasoning when we are directly responsible for the harm inflicted. Our role in factory farming feels abstract because the harm we inflict is indirect, separated by several steps before the meat hits our plates. This also allows us to share the responsibility with everyone involved in the raising, killing, selling, and serving of the animal.

When the negative consequences of animal agriculture become more salient, we become less inclined to eat its products. It might even trigger disgust, causing us to lose our appetites. Consider vegans who abstain from meat for ethical reasons versus those who abstain for dietary reasons. The former are much more likely to view meat as body parts, and thus more likely to be disgusted by meat. In other words, disgust rooted in ethical abhorrence is stronger than disgust rooted in meat itself. 

This idea holds in a study by Brock Bastian and colleagues, where they found that “the attribution of mind is associated with reduced edibility of an animal, increased perceptions of moral worth, and increased negative affect associated with its consumption.” 

Besides mind denial, a commitment to eating meat can reduce the negative affect associated with dissonance. Not only does the food we eat provide us with sustenance and pleasure, but it also brings us together and provides us with a way to celebrate our cultures. Culture has long provided justifications for injustice. After all, “everyone is doing it.” 

Pointing out cultural justifications for inequity may be seen as a desecration of cherished values, or even as discriminatory. People are understandably defensive over their cultures and are motivated to preserve them at all costs, which can actually be admirable. Many indigenous peoples go through great efforts to preserve their language. And that is beautiful. But some cultures still practice slavery, and that is less beautiful. 

It is the same with meat eating, but in this case, our biases are even stronger. It is harder to subject animals to suffering than it is to humans. Not only that, but given that meat eating is almost ubiquitous worldwide, the desire to uphold it as a cultural practice is also ubiquitous. The battle against speciesism is steep, as most of us aren’t even sure that it’s worth fighting for, or that the battle even exists. Progress cannot be made through specious arguments and ignorance, but through recognizing the feeling of dissonance and addressing it.

Conclusion

Much like dogs and pigs, the different forms of prejudice are far more similar than they are different. Not only is the psychology of prejudice pervasive, but it is also remarkably simple, consisting of just a few components. They’re also pernicious and deterministic of our behavior. Unlike most forms of prejudice, we have yet to overcome speciesism. Only through recognition of this fact can progress be made.

Throughout history, we have conducted cruel experiments on animals and even tortured them for fun (seriously). Descartes likened all nonhuman animals to automata, even though he was famously loving to his dog. We have made progress over the centuries, yet we still kill 40 billion land animals (so, not including seafood) per year for consumption. The lives of these animals are often unbearable.

Progress has been made, but we have a long, long way to go. The first step is to get people on the same page that there is in fact a problem. Previous generations have made radical progress in overcoming the horrors of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and almost every other form of prejudice. Maybe it’s our turn to make radical progress. Future generations might be disappointed in our complacency if we don’t.

Twitter: @ryanbruno7287

Mastodon: @ryanbruno@mstdn.social

References

Bastian, B., & Loughnan, S. (2017). Resolving the meat-paradox: A motivational account of morally troublesome behavior and its maintenance. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(3), 278-299.

Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. R. (2012). Don’t mind meat? The denial of mind to animals used for human consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 247-256.

Batt, S. (2009). Human attitudes towards animals in relation to species similarity to humans: a multivariate approach. Bioscience horizons, 2(2), 180-190.

Beardsworth, A., & Keil, T. (1992). The vegetarian option: varieties, conversions, motives and careers. The Sociological Review, 40(2), 253-293.

Castano, E., & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2006). Not quite human: infrahumanization in response to collective responsibility for intergroup killing. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90(5), 804.

Gradidge, S., Zawisza, M., Harvey, A. J., & McDermott, D. T. (2022). Farmyard animal or best friend? Exploring predictors of dog vs. pig pet speciesism. People and Animals: The International Journal of Research and Practice, 5(1), 11.

Harmon-Jones, E., & Allen, J. J. (2001). The role of affect in the mere exposure effect: Evidence from psychophysiological and individual differences approaches. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 889-898.

Leach, S., Sutton, R. M., Dhont, K., Douglas, K. M., & Bergström, Z. M. (2023). Changing minds about minds: Evidence that people are too sceptical about animal sentience. Cognition, 230, 105263.

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