Statistics
Among those Americans who care enough about politics to have registered themselves with The Democratic Party and intend to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary elections, 7 percent think that Barack Obama is a Muslim (CBS Poll). I find it very difficult to interpret this sort of information. In particular, I am curious how stable this judgement is among the 7 percent. Suppose each person who responded that Obama was Muslim was asked a further question concerning why the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race, and then given the chance to revise their answer to the initial question. Of course in order for this not to be a clue that they had answered incorrectly, each question in the poll would have to be followed with a similar question about the presuppositions or entailments of the response provided. In this way the poll would become deeper, in the sense that it would elicit people to provide opinions they had been forced to integrate in some albeit minor way with other beliefs they possess. Would the percentage differ at all from 7 percent? We might be optimistic that it would drop substantially or pessimistic that it would drop not at all. I initially started writing this with the optimistic view in mind—surely, I thought, these 7 percent have provided a snap response, perhaps fooled by the existence of the question in the poll into assigning a higher probability to the chance of Obama being Muslim than they would otherwise (here it is important whether the question was a request to identify Obama’s religion or a request to answer yes or no to whether Obama is a Muslim, but the CBS report does not provide this information). Moreover, I optimistically thought, a little prompting for some inference to the best explanation ought to help them out here—the best explanation for the media not covering Obama’s religion in any significant way would certainly be that he is not Muslim. But then I remembered recently reading a very interesting paper by Tom Kelly called “Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization”, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy [PDF], which has the following abstract:
Suppose that you and I disagree about some non-straightforward matter of fact (say, about whether capital punishment tends to have a deterrent effect on crime). Psychologists have demonstrated the following striking phenomenon: if you and I are subsequently exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on the question, doing so tends to increase the extent of our initial disagreement. That is, in response to exactly the same evidence, each of us grows increasingly confident of his or her original view; we thus become increasingly polarized as our common evidence increases. I consider several alternative models of how people reason about newly-acquired evidence which seems to disconfirm their prior beliefs. I then explore the normative implications of these models for the phenomenon in question.
The particular psychological evidence to which Kelly refers does not immediately bear on the question I am considering here, but it is clear that the evidence suggests a quite broad pessimism about our capabilities as epistemic agents. After all, this evidence shows that prior belief can swamp the proper assessment of new evidence, while in the case I have suggested I was initially optimistic that people would revise their beliefs simply by further reflection, with any new evidence restricted entirely to the presuppositions of the secondary questions (for example, that the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race). So perhaps we should be pessimistic, not merely that the number would stay at 7 percent, but that the auxiliary questions would entrench the confidence of the 7 percent in their false beliefs.
Now I am no epistemologist or cognitive scientist, but I have a theory about what explains these phenomena, and it is that as humans we are too quick to invoke potential explanations and too slow to evaluate all of our evidence in the way suggested by standard theories of confirmation. Or to put it using a different metaphor, we weigh potential explanations too heavily and the evidence itself too lightly. Or again, we prefer to have all our phenomena explained by a weakly supported theory than to have most of our phenomena explained by a well supported theory. Think here of our penchant for conspiracy theories [PDF]. It strikes me that I could quickly think of a host of potential evolutionary explanations for this, but then I would have exhibited the feature of human psychology I have purported to describe to an exorbitantly ironic degree, rather than the merely blandly ironic degree at which I currently stand. (Note that this would have the benefit of giving an evolutionary explanation for why people want to give evolutionary explanations for everything under the sun. I leave it as an exercise whether this circle would be virtuous or vicious). So instead I offer a nice example of the way we proliferate explanations endlessly: Why do reporters use the code ”- 30 -” to sign off their articles? (See Mark Eli Kalderon’s posts on the topic here, here, and here).
Of course this is all beside the point. Election ballots do not come with prompts to revise your beliefs in optimal ways, they simply come with names and checkboxes. Obama? Sounds dangerously like Osama, I’m not going to vote for him, now let me see, John McCain, now there’s a good American name, he invented the Big Mac didn’t he? Tick.
August 16th, 2007 at 4:34 am
I think you’re right that people prefer bad explanations to no explanation – just look at the history of religion – but can’t this be seen as a good thing? Feyerabend?
Regarding Obama, well, and you get to this point at the end, his name sounds like the Muslim/Arab name Osama. And what you don’t mention is that widely-attended-to sections of the Amerikan media have been putting this incidental fact at the forefront of their coverage of Obama’s presidential bid since the get-go. There is more circumstantial data that I think makes it a not-so-crazy assumption. Firstly, many black Americans are Muslim; Amerikans I think tend to associate being black with being Muslim. Of course, Obama isn’t black, but certainly paints himself as such. He has joined a black church, which may be tantamount to being Muslim in some Amerikans’ eyes. Let’s throw in some more information: Barack Obama has a funny name, like Muslims. Let’s throw in the fact that Barack Obama’s father, from whom Barack gets his name, was himself born a Muslim. Reading this post, I was obviously immediately implicitly informed that Obama wasn’t a Muslim – but I actually found myself wondering if you weren’t wrong. Then I realised I was getting Obama confused with the Muslim senator from Detroit, Keith Ellison, a black Muslim convert whose name doesn’t sound Muslim.
August 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am
I’m not sure that the history of religion should be interpreted in this way, because I am not sure whether explanation is the key to religious belief. I see this as a very important question, for the same reason as Philip Kitcher and H. Allen Orr do.
Feyerabend certainly celebrated our ability to creatively generate myriad explanations and thought we were typically too quick to suppress rivals. I’m not so sure he would have endorsed our preference for weak totalising explanations over strong partial ones.
While it is true that more black Americans than white Americans are Muslim, it is also true that more black Americans than white Americans are Christian. I’d be interested to see the actual figures here, which I can’t find on a completely cursory glance, but I would be very surprised if the actual percentage of Muslims among black Americans were more than 5%. I don’t know though what sort of comparison you had in mind when you said that “many black Americans are Muslim”. My thought though is that someone making the judgements you are suggesting would have to be completely ignorant of the long and rich history of black American Christianity, in order to weigh the chances of Obama being Muslim so highly.
The media coverage point and the fact that his father was born a Muslim are interesting, and both news to me, or at least I had forgotten the second. To the extent the first is right, this would go a long way to explaining the 7 percent. But then my perplexity simply extends to the media.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Very interesting post!
There is a known bias where people tend to interpret evidence in light of their own previously established beliefs. It’s known as the confirmation bias. Given some observation, people tend to square it with some belief they have, or they attribute its cause to some belief they have. I think what Kelly says in the abstract sort of illustrates this. And it also has to do with what you point out in your theory.
Mark – “can’t this be seen as a good thing?” one problem might be, if you settle for a bad answer, you’ll be more likely to resist evidence for a better answer, when it comes.
“My thought though is that someone making the judgments you are suggesting would have to be completely ignorant of the long and rich history of black American Christianity, in order to weigh the chances of Obama being Muslim so highly.”
Yea. I don’t think most Americans associate being black with being Muslim. If anything, it would be with being Christian. Other factors may be at work, but the name alone seems enough to explain the 7 percent.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Ah, confirmation bias, I should have mentioned that, especially since I frequently use it as an example in my philosophy of science classes! Almost at random, here are some further interesting things I have turned up.
Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, in Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1998, pp. 175-220.
Jack Beatty, “Cognitive Dissonance”, in The Atlantic, 24 July 2007.
Peter Carruthers, “Review of Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science by Edward Stein and Rationality and Reasoning by Jonathan St. B. T. Evans and David E. Over”, in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 49, No. 1, March 1998, pp. 189-193.
“Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, And Philosophy”, in On Philosophy, 11 July 2007.