Daniel Loxton. Skeptic. Volume 26, Issue 2, Spring 2021.
As we enter into our second year of the fight to control the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that misinformation continues to threaten millions of lives. I believe this developing crisis holds critical lessons for the future of skepticism. To bring these lessons into focus, I’d like to begin by considering a far more apocalyptic pandemic from centuries past: The Black Death.
In October of 1347, ships from Eastern ports brought a terrifying, unknown disease to the harbors of Italy. Authorities were quick to confine sick and dying sailors on board their vessels, but the disease still came ashore, where it swiftly annihilated 30 to 40 percent of the population.
The Black Death was the worst pandemic the world had known in 800 years. It was an unprecedented, catastrophic disruption to medieval civilization. It wasn’t just a plague; it was a major depopulation event. The plague altered the society, the economy, and even the ecology of Europe, re-wilding so much of the continent that we can physically measure the effects of the plague from pollen deposits.
Much of the pandemic playbook we’ve used during COVID was conceived during the Black Death. After the initial outbreaks, most places had warnings about what was coming. They tried their best to prepare for the threat. Many organized central health authorities, created emergency plans, and dedicated vast resources to protecting their people.
By definition, they were working with medieval levels of medical knowledge, but they actually knew enough—or they would have, if they were dealing with a different disease. Despite the prevailing idea that bad air caused disease, the people of Europe did know about contagion, and they knew what to do about it. They had learned how to manage contagious diseases such as leprosy: keep sick people isolated from healthy people. That’s what they tried to do.
Italian cities closed their walls and borders. They first turned away, and then isolated the sick. They quarantined ships from offloading cargo or crew. (This is where we get the word “quarantine”: from the Italian word for 40, or 40 days of isolation). They led massive public hygiene campaigns.
All of their efforts failed. The plague spread to every city and town, claiming rich and poor, righteous and wicked, clever and foolish alike. People fled, or prayed, or looted the riches from abandoned mansions. Others partied to their graves, stumbling drunk and hysterical past bodies rotting in the streets.
“So many died that all believed it was the end of the world,” said one man who buried his five children with his own hands. Society broke down completely. There was no rule of law, “for the plague struck so suddenly that at first there weren’t enough officials and then there were none at all.”
Around a third of the people in Europe died in four years. In some places, the death toll reached 50 or even 70 percent. In places struck by the deadlier pneumonic form of the plague, hardly anyone survived.
Emergency measures failed because health authorities simply did not have the information they needed, information that would remain unknown for centuries, through countless waves of plague. No one even suspected that bubonic plague was carried by rats and fleas. Without that knowledge, the best advice was useless.
Medieval people were told to “mix little with people… it is best to stay at home until the epidemic has passed.” One church leader sensibly warned, “In pestilence time nobody should stand in a great press of people because some man among them may be infected.” Also, “it is good to wash your hands oft times in the day.”
Unfortunately, neither individual precautions nor official safety measures offered any protection. Infected rats climbed down the ropes of quarantined ships, slipped into locked down cities, and carried fleas into socially distanced homes.
The failure of rationalist responses to the plague left the field open for supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories. Of course, many people interpreted the plague as a punishment from God. What other cause was big enough to explain destruction on such a scale?
The people prayed desperately for mercy that never came. The most extreme was the “flagellant” movement. The flagellants were violent fanatics who stripped down in town squares to whip their own skin to shreds. Great crowds of these zealots travelled from town to town. They called on the people to save themselves from God’s wrath by purging themselves of sin—and purging their communities of God’s enemies. As bad as all this was, it was about to get worse.
In various places, an old rumor resurfaced: epidemics were caused by enemies who poisoned the drinking water. In some places suspicion fell upon beggars and outsiders. In most places, with the encouragement of the flagellants, suspicion fell upon the Jews.
At that time, there were Jewish quarters in many European cities and towns. When they were accused of poisoning their neighbors, authorities arrested Jewish suspects and interrogated them under torture.
As later happened during the witch hunting mania, victims were tortured until they agreed to tell the stories their interrogators demanded. They falsely “confessed” that the Black Death was a vast Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christians. According to this torture-based fiction, every Jew in Europe was in on this genocidal plot—every man, woman, and child above the age of seven. All were guilty. All deserved to die.
Hearing this now, it seems obvious that this story shared a basic flaw with modern conspiracy theories: the plot was too big and too evil to exist in real life. Even at the time, critics pointed out that hypothetical poison attacks “could not have been solely responsible for so great a plague or killed so many people.” And why would anyone want to?
The Pope himself argued that the accusations couldn’t be true. The story didn’t even make sense! As the Pope pointed out, “throughout many parts of the world the same plague… afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” In Europe, Jews drank the same water as their neighbors, and died of the plague like everyone else. The Pope, Clement VI, ordered Christians “not to dare… to capture, strike, wound, or kill any Jews” under pain of excommunication.
None of that mattered. People believed the well-poisoning rumors—and they acted on their beliefs. Murderous mobs rose to attack Jewish communities and kill every person they found. Some of their innocent victims were impaled or drawn and quartered. But the scale of the killing was too large for individual executions. Most victims were killed by the only technology of mass destruction available: fire.
Whole communities of Jews were herded into their homes and synagogues and the buildings set on fire. “Once started, the burning of the Jews went on increasing,” recalled one account. Genocidal violence spread from town to town like wildfire… or plague. Soon it burned everywhere Jews could be found.
As another chronicle described, “The whole world brutally rose against them, and in Germany and in other countries which had Jewish communities many thousands were indiscriminately butchered, slaughtered and burnt alive by the Christians.” There were massacres in hundreds of towns and cities. Few escaped. All resistance failed.
In one town, it took six long days to burn all the victims. In other places, prisons were specially built for mass burning. In others, whole crowds were flung together into vast flaming pits. One account describes this last scene of incomprehensible horror: “And when the wood and straw had been consumed, some Jews, both young and old, still remained half alive. The stronger of [those watching] snatched up cudgels and stones and dashed out the brains of those trying to creep out of the fire….”
The Black Death and COVID-19 Conspiracies
Can we learn from this terrible story? Does this have relevance today, as we confront COVID conspiracy theories, systemic racism, and the storming of United States Capitol Building by conspiracy theorists? I think it does.
Let’s consider these three domains of response to the threat of the Black Death. (1) The rationalist response: plan and prepare; take every precaution possible based on the best available information. (2) The religious response: supplication for divine mercy. (3) The conspiracy theory response.
We should not be surprised that people turned to conspiracy theories during a time of calamity. This essentially always happens during epidemics, especially with novel and frightening diseases. It happened with AIDS, and with SARS, and now it’s happening with COVID.
We could predict that conspiracy theories would be a typical response to pandemics based purely on the psychological research into conspiracy thinking. It turns out to be easy to make people more receptive to conspiracy theories in an experimental setting: all you have to do is to make them feel uneasy, uncertain, or scared. A mere reminder of risks beyond our control—such as “whether I am exposed to a disease” or “whether my family members suffer or not”—increases our openness to conspiracy claims.
Some psychologists propose that this is a subconscious defense mechanism to regain a sense of control—that it’s more comfortable to think about shadowy evil forces than the unpredictable threats of daily life, because an enemy is at least specific. An enemy can be outsmarted, exposed, or defeated.
Third Domain Explanations
This three domain model makes a useful lens for understanding human events, even though these domains are fuzzy and overlap one another. Humans have always known that there are events and forces beyond our control, such as earthquakes, weather, or the changing of the seasons. We have tended to intuit these as the domain of the gods. We may accept these forces as inevitable, or we may beseech the gods—but we do not expect to command these forces ourselves, using our own power.
Then there is the practical realm of natural things. Here we have agency to bring about change. We can seek knowledge, solve mysteries, take action, counter threats, design solutions.
Then there is a third realm—a realm which is considered beyond the ordinary, but not necessarily beyond reach. Sociologists have sometimes defined this realm as “dually rejected”: “Beliefs, practices, and experiences that are not recognized by science and not associated with mainstream religion.” This is the subject matter for “skeptics” under the tradition of “scientific skepticism.” And yet, we do not have a good umbrella term for this domain.
“Paranormal” is most often used as shorthand, but this category includes many claims that are not “paranormal” in a technical sense. For example, most conceptions of Bigfoot would not be “beyond scientific explanation.” Likewise, many conspiracy theories, pseudoscience claims, and denialist movements are not paranormal (although they may contain paranormal elements).
The claims in this X-files domain have some “this-ness” in common, but it’s hard to specify exactly what that is. For now, let’s differentiate the rationalist domain from its spookier mirror image by loose contrast:
Ordinary / Extraordinary
Mundane / Mystical
Knowledge / Intuition
Science / Pseudoscience
Natural / Magical
Explained / Mysterious
Visible / Hidden
History / Conspiracy
Beliefs in this X-Files realm are often described as “fringe claims”—oudandish beliefs clustered at the lunatic outlier end of human thought. I’m going to argue that the “fringe” umbrella term is critically misleading. As it turns out, fringe claims are not very fringe. In fact, the opposite is true: weird beliefs are a normal, central, almost universal aspect of human affairs. They are as thoroughly woven through society as creativity, prejudice, or love.
The prevalence of weird beliefs has been discussed for centuries, though rarely fully appreciated. Older umbrella terms include “impostures,” “humbugs,” “paradoxes,” and the memorable book title, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This last one gives us some clues about the true nature of this beast. “Paranormal claims” in the wider sense are: “extraordinary”; unproven or demonstrably false; and, popular. So-called fringe beliefs are actually popular mass culture—a phenomenon of crowds.
If you’re alone in thinking you have telepathic conversations with your dog, you’re merely delusional. This becomes a paranormal belief when other people agree with you.
Historical Lessons
It’s often fruitful to view paranormal claims from the perspective of history. Many paranormal mysteries effectively solve themselves if you trace their origins and put things in chronological order. It becomes clear, in many cases, that they had a specific origin in time and then evolved in a feedback loop with Hollywood and pop culture. When you repeat that exercise a number of times, another thing becomes clear: new claims are constantly emerging and mutating, but paranormal belief in general is kind of a “steady state” thing. Paranormal beliefs are always common, always popular, and always kind of the same.
For example, think of Marley’s chain rattling ghost from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That image feels very 19th century. In fact, it’s virtually identical to a ghost story told in Ancient Rome, complete with ratding chains. The belief in haunted places is so ancient that its origin is lost in time. It’s likely that ghost stories predate written language by thousands of years. Ghosts, monsters, fortune tellers, divining devices, spirit mediums—these ideas all go back to antiquity, and are found all over the world. They are evergreen parts of human culture.
Conspiracy theories are no different. When researchers analyzed a century of letters to the New York Times, the details changed often—but the frequency of conspiracy claims remained roughly constant. Paranoia springs eternal!
The Black Death’s well poisoning rumor had unusually terrible consequences, but it was not remotely novel. There was a similar rumor almost two millennia earlier during the Plague of Athens: they felt their enemies the Spartans must have poisoned the drinking water.
The study of paranormal history also reveals something else rather striking: while paranormal claims are always popular, always located near the center of human affairs, there is always a true fringe of genuine outliers—skeptics who just don’t buy this stuff, but for some reason think it’s important anyway. It’s hard to overemphasize how weird these people are! Debunkers pop up throughout history, but they’re always rare. They too are doubly rejected.
Paranormal believers invariably consider debunkers to be persecutors or fools; disbelievers tend to think debunkers are perversely obsessed with unseemly trivia. Why would anyone care about stuff that doesn’t even exist? It’s frequently been argued that it’s shamefully wasteful to study the paranormal when the world has so many real problems of pressing concern. And so, skeptics have often apologized in advance for merely talking about paranormal claims. “I confess to being a little ashamed” to write an expose of a popular fake psychic, said the ancient Roman skeptic Lucian of Samosata.
In critiquing homeopathy in 1842, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. asked doctors and scholars not to “smile at the amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest members of the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has ever said or done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the honors of critical martyrdom.” Carl Sagan anticipated in 1974 that, “The attention given to borderline science may seem curious to some readers. The usual practice of scientists is to ignore” paranormal believers, “hoping they will go away.” Sagan begged the indulgence of readers because he “thought it might be useful—or at least interesting” to consider their claims “a little more closely.”
Haunted Humanity
I’d like to argue that it’s well past time to look at fringe claims a lot more closely. I’d like to reject altogether the notion that studying weird things is a shameful waste, and turn that on its head: I submit that the study of fringe beliefs may be one of the greatest outstanding tasks for our civilization.
In making that claim, I’d also like to challenge some of the rhetoric of my own field. I contend that we are not witnessing a “rising tide of irrationality.” Nor are we ever going to win a war against false beliefs. Science advocacy and critical thinking can improve peoples lives, but they will not make paranormal beliefs go away. The paranormal isn’t like a war, or like any other acute emergency that has a beginning, middle, and end. Paranormal beliefs are chronic—like crime, disease, alcohol, or fire. They’re as endemic to humanity as generosity and greed.
Consider renaissance skeptic Reginald Scot, who wrote a stunningly modern expose of the witch hunting mania in 1584. His book The Discoverie of Witchcraft correctly condemned all witchcraft claims as “false and fabulous.” He correctly explained that witch hunters were accusing, torturing, and murdering poor old women who were as innocent they were vulnerable. He correctly predicted that the witch trials would stand forever as a monument “to the everlasting, inexcusable, and apparent shame of all witchmongers.” Few listened. Scot was considered a heretic who rejected the simple facts of consensus reality. Witch burnings continued for another century and a half. Moreover, humanity’s capacity to believe in witches continued long after the trials ended.
In the 1980s, belief in witchcraft exploded back into the popular imagination in the form of the Satanic Panic—a conspiracy theory that barely repackaged witch covens for modern sensibilities. One survey in 1994 found up to 70 percent of Americans believed that Satanic Ritual Abuse cults truly were abusing children. Extensive investigations eventually made clear that these cults did not exist. Not a single claim ever panned out. But this shameful debacle has not prevented witch belief belief from resurging yet again—right now, in the form of QAnon!
A December 2020 survey found that 13 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of Republicans agreed: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” Millions more stated they were unsure. Only 38 percent of Republicans said this Satanic cabal claim was false! QAnon claims that supposed Satan worshippers torture children to extract a magical youth potion from their blood! This is an obvious continuation of very old witch folklore.
Reginald Scot was clearly correct that people in his day were so immersed in supernatural folklore about ghosts and demons that “we are afraid of our own shadows” and even a “right hardy man” could feel his hair stand on end when passing a graveyard in the night. But Scot was mistaken to think all such “illusions will in short time (by God’s grace) be detected and vanish away.” They did not vanish away. We are still thoroughly haunted, four centuries later. Up to 58 percent of Americans still believe places can be haunted by ghosts!
At any given time, numerous weird beliefs are shockingly popular and widespread. Various surveys over the past two decades have found that about quarter of the American population believe people can move objects with their minds; another quarter believe that some UFOs are alien spacecraft; about 40-50 percent accept ESP; another 40 percent believe in demonic possession. This is hardly an outlier lunatic fringe; these are substantia/ minorities that clearly place these ideas in the mainstream of American thought. And yet, this barely scratches the surface. In some cases, more people believe a “fringe” claim than believe the “mainstream” facts. For example, since the 60s, consistent majorities have believed that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. About 80 percent support alternative medicine. Almost 60 percent believe in Atlantis.
The survey data for paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are surprisingly patchy, but the general picture is clear: individual beliefs rise and fall with fashion, but almost everyone believes weird things in general—even when we exclude articles of mainstream religious faith. When asked about 7 to 10 typical paranormal claims, such as “ghosts are spirits of the dead” or “Bigfoot is a real creature,” sizable majorities consistently “agree” or “strongly agree” with at least one of those claims. Typically between two thirds and three quarters of people agree with at least one paranormal claim from even a short list.
Majorities of people also accept one or more conspiracy theories. One 2013 survey found that 63 percent accepted one of just four then-current conspiracy theories. A pioneering earlier survey found that almost everyone accepted at least 1 of 10 conspiracy theory claims. Only 6 percent of participants rejected everyone. The reality is clear: when we talk about “fringe believers,” we’re actually talking about most people. It’s easy to predict that a long enough survey list would reveal almost everyone is believer in something. Believers are mainstream; skeptics are the outliers. “Fringe” beliefs are normal. And yet, this truth seems difficult to hold in one’s mind.
I believe that widespread biases prevent society from taking paranormal beliefs seriously. First, a lot of those beliefs are goofy in content. Nonbelievers struggle to comprehend how any sane, intelligent person could think the Earth is flat, for example. We also tend to overlook the collective prevalence of weird beliefs, and instead consider individual claims in isolation. It’s easy to dismiss a belief as “fringe” if it is held by a small minority, such as the roughly 5 percent of Americans who believe the chemtrails conspiracy theory.
The goofiness and relative rarity of a belief such as chemtrails reinforce a powerful natural bias: false consensus. Everyone tends to assume that most normal, decent, intelligent people believe what we believe. That assumption is a major blind spot for every society. It’s why one side always feels blindsided by U.S. Presidential election results. Nor are skeptics immune. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions: they don’t stop working when we give them names. It takes focused mental attention to (partially!) compensate for bias. Overcoming bias isn’t some level we can unlock; it’s a practice we can apply… to some topics, some of the time, when we’re making an effort. As it happens, we do not spend much time examining our tendency to underestimate the spookiness of the human experience. I think we probably should.
Consequential Beliefs
The illusion that weird beliefs are marginal has allowed society to ignore them most of the time. We lapse again and again into complacency. The problem is that marginal beliefs don’t always stay that way. Consider Sagan’s famous warning:
I worry that… pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
How does this passage read in the light of COVID conspiracy theories and the storming of the U.S. Capitol? Sagan urged us to be ready. We weren’t. Society dismisses irrational beliefs until they become impossible to ignore. By then, it’s too late. COVID conspiracy theories began on the margins, but now pose a serious threat to our ability to control a global pandemic. Similarly, it’s hard to ignore far right conspiracy theories now, after the mob attack on the Capitol Building—but QAnon was festering for years before it attracted serious attention.
When unproven or false beliefs suddenly prove consequential, there’s often a scramble for understanding from mainstream thinkers who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing. How can so many people believe something so bonkers? The answer is simple: people believe bonkers stuff all the time—and we act on those beliefs. We always have. We’re always going to. And that shapes world events.
Consider the existence of the Unites States. It’s well known that the colonies declared their independence in response to efforts from the British administration to levy new taxes and exert increased control. It’s also well known that the Founding Fathers had philosophical interests in individual freedom and new conceptions of government. It’s less widely appreciated that the Declaration of Independence was built on a conspiracy theory! American revolutionaries were alarmed, not just by what the British were actually doing, but by what they imagined the British were secretly plotting to do. They saw the new laws as “glaring evidence of a fixed plan of the British administration to bring the whole continent into the most humiliating bondage.”
Samuel Adams claimed “the plan of slavery seems nearly completed.” If Americans didn’t fight back, Washington said, the British would “make us as tame and abject slaves as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Jefferson agreed: British abuses “too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” Jefferson said. “We are threatened with absolute slavery,” warned Alexander Hamilton. That plot was the “offspring of mature deliberation,” he claimed. “It has been fostered by time, and strengthened by every artifice human subdety is capable of.”
Or, consider the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler promoted the conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—a hoaxed document that was fully debunked in the 1920s but still believed by anti-Semites today. The Protocols pretended to record a secret Jewish plan to achieve “absolute despotism” over the entire world. Hitler claimed The Protocols were authentic. He said they revealed the true “nature and activity of the Jewish people and… their ultimate final aims.” The Protocols helped justify the oppression and murder of Jews in Germany and around the world.
False beliefs routinely shape global events. There is no end of cases. In Nigeria in 2003, a conspiracy dieory claimed that “modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and… HIV.” This scare caused a polio epidemic across 20 countries—and paralyzed 5000 people. In 1999 and 2000, the President of South Africa claimed that the CIA and U.S. pharmaceutical companies were engaged in a “conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes AIDS.” He claimed HIV deniers were unfairly targeted by “modern propaganda machines,” and denied his people access to life-saving medications. Experts estimated that this conspiracy theory cost 330,000 South African lives by 2008—and infected 35,000 newborns with HIV.
Facing Reality
It’s a fact of history: conspiracy theories and medical misinformation can be pretty important. But can’t we just ignore the wacky, harmless stuff like ghosts and Bigfoot and the Flat Earth? I’ve argued for years that there are many good reasons to study weird beliefs beyond the question, “How dangerous are they?” But if “potential for danger” is the measure we’re looking at, consider these two things: First: serious belief in any paranormal claim usually entails believing evidence is being suppressed by malicious actors; Second: the best predictor of who will believe any new conspiracy theory is whether they already believe any other conspiracy theory.
Psychologist Rob Brotherton sums up the implications in his book Suspicious Minds: “the details don’t seem to matter much. If you know a person’s attitude toward one conspiracy theory, you can predict his or her attitudes toward other conspiracy theories with a fair degree of certainty, even when there is no obvious connection between the theories.” For example, if you’re convinced that NASA is concealing the Flat Earth, you’re primed to also believe that COVID is “fake news,” an engineered bioweapon, or somehow both. This is how we get the bizarre bedfellows of QAnon, in which wellness influencers adopted white supremacist talking points in an effort to root out Satanic witches. We can assume with confidence that the mob at Congress included people who were radicalized through “harmless” prior beliefs.
What can we do about all that? I’d like to make some suggestions. First, we should get serious about the paranormal. It is a big deal, and it is not going away. Neither is religion. We’re never going to get to Scien-topia. If our species lasts another thousand years, there will be people on Mars who think the Earth is a hoax because their psychic said so.
To understand why, let’s go back to those three domains: the mundane, the divine, and the realm of paranormal weirdness. It’s normal for people to intuit and occupy all three domains at the same time. In general, it’s perfectly comfortable for people to accept scientific facts based on evidence, religious beliefs based on faith, and paranormal claims based on mystery and personal experience. After all, science is completely compatible with the sentiment, “we don’t know everything.”
The fact that we can believe all these things at once isn’t a bug. Weird beliefs are built right into our operating system. This goes beyond the cognitive biases that help explain “how thinking goes wrong.” The truth is that our greatest strengths as a species predispose us to perceiving worlds that don’t exist. Think of the cognitive superpowers that underlie so much of human achievement: curiosity; pattern recognition; perception of connections; inference of cause and effect; imagining hypotheticals; learning from past experiences. These abilities allow us to discover the real world through science—and also to conjure up alternative worlds of possibility, pseudoscience, and paranormal belief. What did it take to land rovers on Mars? We imagined a future with Mars landings, and we believed enough to make it come true. We are a species built on dreams. Dreams and storytelling.
We need to work harder to understand the stories humanity tells itself. We should multiply our efforts to study and understand paranormal beliefs. That work is barely started, and it’s important. We’re talking about an understudied major facet of the human condition, with serious implications for politics, medicine, and the whole of society.
We need a robust community of focused, rigorous scholars of weird things. We need the ongoing capacity to track new developments in the ecosystem of belief, refine our understanding, and ensure continuity of knowledge from one generation to the next.
We need many more people working together much more closely. My dream? For every major university to have a department devoted year round to the critical study of paranormal, pseudoscientific, conspiratorial beliefs. There are certainly enough beliefs to go around! The situation since the 1970s is like putting one person in charge of the bureaucratic backlog at some vast federal agency, and then telling them that paperwork is a shameful waste of time.
Step two is to refine and improve the service skeptics already do: sharing the best available facts with people who want them. Every year, millions of people seek out information about conspiracy theories, paranormal claims, pseudoscience, denialist movements, and scams. Simply making reliable information available is a legitimate and important public service.
Of course, it’s a better and more useful public service when we remove unnecessary barriers that prevent people from accessing the information they need. In health care, for example, practitioners worry about systematic barriers to care, such as racism, cultural insensitivity, poverty, or the stigma of addiction. Here’s the bad news: the skeptical literature is generally rife with barriers, to an almost absurd extent. To begin with, we’re a lot more rude than we realize. Even when we’re not gleefully ranting and railing against “wingnuts” and “idiots,” it’s difficult to find skeptical material that isn’t at least somewhat insulting to paranormal believers—which is to say, insulting to almost everyone, and specifically the people who could most benefit from the information we have to share.
We erect further barriers when we package our information within a generalized worldview the public does not share. Paranormal believers and people of faith can and do appreciate the wonders of science. They can benefit from information about scams and pseudoscience. They’re happy to improve their critical thinking skills and science literacy. They are not interested in disrespect. Nor do they want to be converted! When people seek information about, say, vaccine safety, the last thing they want is to be upsold atheism or partisan politics. This should be obvious to anyone, because none of us want our science sources to sell us their religion or politics either. If they tried, we would simply stop trusting those sources.
The True Challenge
I’m going to wind up with the wildest frontier for skeptics of paranormal claims. First we study and solve mysteries; then we share what we have learned with people who want it. Those are works in progress. The next step is much, much harder: sometimes there’s a need to intervene in popular belief. Sometimes there’s a need to change people’s minds—about something like pandemic safety measures, for example, or whether it’s a good idea to overturn democracy.
Here we are still on square one. Square zero. In fairness to skeptics, no one is very good at this, because it’s very hard to do. We’re up against human nature: it’s incredibly difficult for any of us to change our minds about anything. We’re engineered not to. Powerful unconscious mechanisms actively work to prevent it. This, of course, is cognitive dissonance theory. Many skeptics have some familiarity with this idea, but I think the implications are not fully appreciated. Nor are we always aware of the convergence between experimental psychology and fields that attempt to change minds or behaviors (self-help, talk therapy, advertising, addiction treatment, and so on).
Briefly, normal people with healthy self-worth believe they are good, smart, decent people—and they will automatically downgrade their opinion of any fact or person that threatens to make them feel otherwise. This is a problem for skeptics, because “this idea is wrong” comes loaded with a self-image challenge: “I am wrong.” The more wrong an idea is, the more it challenges us: “If my belief is wicked and stupid, that implies I am wicked and stupid.” That’s a very serious threat to self. Our unconscious mental processes will not take that lying down. Our defenses kick in, without us even realizing. “I am smart and good; therefore this idea is sound after all—and the person challenging my belief must be wicked and foolish!”
This is a doozy of a thing to contend with. It’s why modern addiction treatment often attempts to moderate behavior through nonjudgmental Motivational Interviewing techniques. It’s why mediators struggle to coax that unreasonably hostile spouse to find any shred of middle ground. It’s why oppressors often remain proud of their participation in brutal dictatorships. It’s why people will reject their own party’s policy if they’re told it came from the other guys. And it’s why paranormal believers are usually unmoved by strong evidence against their beliefs.
Here’s the thing: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. That isn’t in your power. What is in your power is a decision: “Am I going to build fences around the water—or should I open up the gate?” You can’t make someone believe you, any more than you can make someone love you. But it’s pretty easy to ensure they do neither! When we approach believers with condescension or ridicule, we put minefields and barbed wire between them and the information we’re asking them to consider.
So here’s my takeaway: “paranormal believers” are most people. They aren’t the weird ones. We can’t expect them to listen if we pretend that they are. We cannot hope to change anyone’s beliefs about anything without taking them seriously as bright, curious, normal people who are worthy of empathy and respect. As Carl Sagan understood, “The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs.” Since it is literally true that the future of our species hinges on belief, I submit that this is something to bear in mind.