Skepticism and the backfire effect

Credulity takes all forms. It might be just a simple kind of wish thinking or it could be the kind of dangerous belief that keeps a person in an unhealthy situation. In either case, most credulity is essentially harmless. No one really cares if you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, or that Elvis is alive.
However, scientists have uncovered a tendency within humans to grab more firmly onto nonsense beliefs when shown evidence to the contrary. Apparently, we cannot help it. 

Nessy, or The Loch Ness Monster has never been successfully proven to exist
by scientist and yet, still people choose to believe.

The tendency is called the 'backfire effect'. And it takes the form of stubborn doubling down on those beliefs we see as being challenged by evidence, either presented to us by a friend, or via TV or radio or Internet.
For an illustration of this, we can think of the dark Scottish loch. Suppose we have a friend who believes in Nessy. However, suppose that there has been a scientific discovery that has allowed researches to come the depths of the loch and prove beyond doubt that there are no hold-over plesiosaurs in any of the lochs at all.
Our friend will say that, no matter what the scientists have proved, there's still probably something in there like Nessy. Reading this, we see how ridiculous it is to try to continue believing in Nessy after there has been evidence which proves that she's not there.
So the backfire effect shows that when our deepest convictions are challenged, regardless of the veracity of the evidence, but usually in the face of strong evidence, we cannot help but double down and strengthen our beliefs.
Scientists believe that it may have to do with embarrassment of being wrong, or perhaps from the fear that  a group that we do not want criticizing our beliefs. Whatever causes us to become defensive, it is one of the main reasons that skeptics try very hard to discourage credulity.
There is also a movement, usually in scientific circles that discourages people from taking their ideas too personally. It's fine to take the theory of relativity seriously, but taking it personally can cause a real problem.
If Dr. Smith says that he believes in the basis for relativity, and Dr. White proves some aspect of relativity wrong with math, Dr. Smith likely will not believe Dr. White's claim because of the backfire effect.
However most scientists don't behave this way. They understand that every day, new evidence is being discovered that can dynamically change the way they understood things previously. Can you imagine what it would be like if you had prominent scientists not talking to each other or coming to blows because one refused to believe a new discovery? It wouldn't make a very good advertisement for science.
This is why skepticism is such an important mental tool. When a scientist makes a discovery about the world, other scientists may disagree with the evidence presented, but they always reevaluate their convictions, in order to move on and progress.
There's no place for doubling down on theories that have been proved wrong in science and there is no room for it in the every day world.

Credulity and the end of the world

Natural credulity is often an innocent enough thing. And in most cases, it can be harmless. But what about when the natural credulity in certain people coerces them to act or think in a way that is directly harmful to them? How do we prove to these people that they are believing in dangerous ideas?
To more fully explore this issue, I'm going to set up a hypothetical situation, but one that has mirrored events in real life.
Let's imagine that a regular, blue collar man, about 40, comes into the public eye with the claim that the angel Gabriel visited him and commanded him to take dictation. This man has a book, which is the direct message from God and that he has been told that the world will end on October 27th, of this year. He rapidly manages to get his face on the TV and radio and the public get a lot of exposure to him. He further claims that people who do not believe in his message, will not be part of the elect on the final day and will be left behind to suffer in the mighty tribulations to follow.
Now, this isn't a very far fetched hypothesis. Men and women have made claims like these before. A mammal called Harold Camping predicted that the Rapture and devastating earthquakes would occur on May 21, 2011 with God taking approximately 3% of the world's population into Heaven, and that the end of the world would occur five months later on October 21. 

Wrong on all three counts and yet he still has followers! 

And here's the thing about my hypothesis: people would believe it. I remember the Camping affair and I noted how many otherwise rational and reasonable people nervously checked their calendars and watches leading up to this prophesied end of the world. Of course his followers believed wholeheartedly, despite no evidence to back up the ludicrous claim at all. Especially noticeable is the fact that Camping's previous prophecies had both been wrong.
So, how do we deal with this mentality? How do we challenge lunatic claims of this kind? As we now know, Camping and the hundreds of other such claimants throughout human civilization have all been wrong. Yet, I'm sure that in the next few years, another such mammal will make another such claim and despite the fact that no one has ever been right, people will believe it.
Natural credulity is born out of several different realities in humans. First, we are naturally fearful of the cataclysmic. The smoking towers in Manhattan at 9/11 was about the most apocalyptic thing I had ever seen, until Katrina and the tidal wave of 2004. Having been raised in a fundamental evangelical household, I was taught that the end times would be foretold by wars and rumors of war and of earthquakes and mighty weather. Imagine what people who were listening to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were thinking when they, too, witnessed these terrible events. 
So it is that we fear our own immolation and I think people generally hope that if they believe end times claims, that is will somehow save them from the fear and pain of a terrible death.
But I also think that natural credulity has its basis in a desire to belong. When a larger group believes something, even something as ludicrous as a end of the world prediction, people jump on the bandwagon in order to feel as though they are part of something larger than themselves.
Human behavior is a difficult thing to understand, in that—in almost every case—it seems to work in antipathy to the common good. Think about trampling people to escape a fire or the inability to move out of the way of a onrushing car.
So it is that
we need skepticism to help us when claims like the ones above are made. When the sky rolls back like a scroll and the face of the deity himself announces the end of the world to the entire planet, I might be a little more willing to believe it. However, until that time, we need to arm ourselves against the tendency toward natural credulity. The world isn't going to end and when it does it will likely be by the hands of some radical fanatic than by the predictions of a TV minister or cult leader.
Skepticism as a shield against these and other outlandish claims is the best way to proceed.

What in the devil is skepticism?

People often shy away from words like skepticism because, more often than not, they're really not sure what it means. In some cases they're pretty sure they know what it is, but have been advised or taught to abandon this natural inclination.
Skepticism, put quite simply, is the tendency to doubt a claim that hasn't got any visible or tangible evidence to back it up. My friend tells a funny story about a kid he went to school with who claimed that Ringo Starr was his father. When pestered for proof, there was none forthcoming. Why? Because it wasn't true, obviously. This is a pretty harmless realty among children, and sometimes adults. People who claim that they went to see Led Zeppelin's last concert but have no tickets to prove it, are likely to be believed if they're old enough and you know that they went to a lot of concerts in their early years.
What's the difference?
Is there a chance that Ringo maybe got a fan pregnant? Certainly. Is there a chance that you could prove the paternity? Sure. But when a kid says that Ringo is his real father, there's just something about the claim that makes it hard to believe. Something not quite jiving with the way we know the world works. It's not reasonable, perhaps, but we doubt it.
That is skepticism.

"Hic Rhodus. Hic salta"
Here is Rhodes. Jump here.

In one of Aesop's Fables is the tale of an athlete who boasted of an amazing long jump that he performed on the Island of Rhodes. He pestered many people with this tale, telling all who would listen and likely annoying many of them. Finally, one of his listeners, weary of the tale and the tellers famously tells the athlete "Here is Rhodes. Jump here."
Skepticism is a natural tendency. It most likely developed as a way to protect us during the infancy of our species. We could surmise that it became necessary to doubt the claims of other humans to keep from being robbed or clubbed and eaten. However, the tendency toward skepticism, in humans doesn't mean that it is universal and it certainly doesn't mean that natural skepticism cannot be overruled. We all know someone who believes in or supports conspiracy theories. Taken at face value, some of these theories seem to have some veracity. But they rarely hold together under rigorous scrutiny. As such, it becomes necessary for people who want to continue to believe these theories to dampen down their own natural skepticism.
These credulous humans then become a dumping ground for any ludicrous claim from any charlatan. I know a man who otherwise was a sterling example of a human that spread about an email that had a video that showed it was not a plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 but a heavy duty missile. This friend is a scientist, and so I was a little aghast that he would even consider sending this about to do anything more than ridicule the preposterous claim, but his only comment was that it was 'interesting to consider'.
I liken this kind of credulity and abandonment of the critical faculties as well as the squashing of skepticism to the prank that is sometimes played in schools where one friend says to the other "Look, the word gullible is written on the ceiling" to see if his friend will look. Harmless fun, but what about when you have fully functioning and otherwise typically developed human adults absorbing nonsense and holding it to be golden law?
Well, the point of this blog is to open a discussion about what skepticism is, how it has been largely abandoned by people and how you can exercise it like an atrophied muscle and get it back.
It should be clear that skepticism is one of the main portions of our critical faculties that we will need moving forward in a world rife with "alternative facts" (whatever the heck those are, other than lies) and 'fake news'.
The next time you hear something on the radio or read something on the Internet or watch something on TV, be sure to doubt it until you can verify the claim with hard—or as I like to call it, empirical evidence—before you take it as perfect and true.
As the late, great Christopher Hitchens once famously wrote, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."