“I THINK people in this country have had enough of experts,” declared politician Michael Gove in the run-up to the UK’s June referendum on membership of the European Union. Gove, a prominent Leave campaigner in the US TV series House of Cards, was backed by fellow campaigners in his anti-expert stance. And despite dire warnings by economists, bankers and others, over half of those who voted opted to leave.
The warnings of the Remain camp – aka “Project Fear” to the Leavers – may now turn into fact. After the vote, sterling plunged to its lowest level against the dollar in 31 years, the UK’s stock indices fell, and many firms put building and hiring plans on hold. Social and political instability are rife – with a spike in race hate crime and prolonged chaos in Parliament.
Perhaps a new book, Denying to the Grave by public health specialists (a father and daughter team) Sara Gorman and Jack Gorman, can help us understand why facts and statistics fall on deaf ears time and time again.
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They start by putting things in perspective: lifetime odds of dying from heart disease in the US are 1 in 5, while the odds of contracting Ebola from Thomas Duncan, the only person to die of it in the US in 2014, were 1 in 13.3 million. Yet public hysteria lead to African Americans and Africans visiting the US being “shunned, abused… even beaten”.
And genetically modified crops and nuclear power still fill the public with fear. Yet in 2012, 1 in 8 deaths worldwide was caused by air pollution, aggravated by our reliance on fossil fuels, according to the World Health Organization, never mind the effects on climate.
“Why do smart people make decisions and adopt positions with no basis in fact?“
Then there are vaccines. While vaccines can and do save lives, many parents worry about immunising their children. The authors write that “we make decisions about the health of ourselves and our families based on emotion rather than on the analysis of the scientific data”.
There are many reasons for rejecting scientific evidence, but for the authors “stupidity is not one of them”. Intelligent people, they say, make seemingly irrational decisions but it isn’t for lack of information – at least, not most of the time.
Why do smart people make decisions and adopt positions with no basis in fact? Denying to the Grave lays out many theories, including conspiracy theories, charismatic leaders as heads of anti-science movements, our own unshakeable belief in our beliefs (the so-called confirmation bias), a tendency to incorrectly infer causal links, fear of complexity, and poor risk perception.
The book is thoughtful, exploring the psychology, neurobiology and evolutionary roots that underpin some of our decision-making, which can make adaptive behaviour maladaptive.
So, what is the sure-fire recipe for getting a message across? First, activate the brain’s emotion centre, the amygdala, using inflammatory and emotional words and images, which also trigger strong hippocampal memory. This will inhibit the prefrontal cortex, the orchestrator of reason and emotional control in the brain. It turns out that first impressions are everything: once primed to make a decision by an emotional appeal, subsequent appeals, even if emotional, fail to dislodge the original one.
Charismatic anti-science leaders are good at this. Often portraying themselves as “lone wolves” standing against power, they tap into this emotional brain. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs need to “get there first”, say the Gormans.
Emotion and denial
Of course, some of the public mistrust of experts is justified. Conspiracies do happen. The tobacco industry and some of its scientists are a case in point, for years denying links between cigarette smoking and cancer, with devastating consequences.
What is most clear, however, is the role of emotion in the denial of facts – and the inability of educators and scientists to grasp this. The problem with science is that quoting p-values at the public just does not wash emotionally.
“The problem with science is that quoting p-values at the public just does not wash emotionally“
This is where a new book by . Cutting through to the heart of the problem, Calling the Shots straightforwardly wields emotion, but shot through with science. It tells the story of a little girl with leukaemia whose family were looking forward to a break after months of treatment. Their relief is shattered when they find their 3-year-old has been exposed to measles at the hospital. The patient had contracted it in Disneyland, where an outbreak infected 169 unvaccinated people.
Reich also provides a thought-provoking insight into the cultural and sociological forces controlling how Western parents behave and think, with a historical perspective on vaccination and its twin, the anti-vax movement.
She shows the variety of societal conflicts, notably the clash between informed consent with its emphasis on individual choice, and community health and wider social responsibility. A minimum proportion of any population must be vaccinated for immunisation to confer immunity on everyone – the herd – including those who cannot be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised or too young.
This means that children who go unvaccinated because their parents deem the risk too great benefit from others taking the minuscule risk. This “free-riding” is mainly the preserve of the educated white elite. As Reich notes, “none consider how their children might present risks to others – particularly to children with fewer resources or less access to care”.
Intense “expert” parenting means those mothers and fathers micromanage every sphere of their children’s lives to reduce individual risk. But by creating “gated communities” to reduce risk, not vaccinating also prevents their kids from interacting with kids from other classes and races.
But Reich does not shy away from the vaccines that have gone wrong – like the 1955 incident at the Cutter Laboratories when two defective batches of polio vaccine lead to five deaths and 40,000 minor adverse effects.
Both books focus on health, so it’s hard for them to entirely succeed in giving scientifically minded readers a grasp of the process of making seemingly illogical decisions in such areas as Brexit. After all, countering emotional misinformation is far from simple. And the books are written from a US perspective, while the issues are clearly global.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, some are wringing their hands with Bregret, astounded that their votes had real repercussions, while others are stuck in disbelief. As the Gormans note, while emotional decision-making is part of our humanity, the trick is to imbue it with evidence.
Denying To The Grave: Why we ignore the facts that will save us
Oxford University Press
New York University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline “The matter with facts”
