Nick Wiggins: This is Nick Wiggins, welcome to the first episode in the 2017 series of Future Tense. Our guest today is Antony Funnell.
Antony Funnell: Thank you Nick.
Nick Wiggins: Occupation?
Antony Funnell: Broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Nick Wiggins: Your special subject is the rise of ignorance and what the future will be like in a world of dumb. Your time starts now. What do we call a person who has an opinion on everything, but no evidence with which to support those opinions?
Antony Funnell: The new President of the United States.
Nick Wiggins: Could you be more specific?
Antony Funnell: Ignorant.
Nick Wiggins: Correct. In 21st century society, who is entitled to an opinion?
Antony Funnell: Anyone.
Nick Wiggins: And on what subject matter are they entitled to express an opinion?
Antony Funnell: Everything.
Nick Wiggins: Who voices opinions about everything?
Antony Funnell: Everyone.
Nick Wiggins: Correct. What is the study of ignorance?
Antony Funnell: Could I have that question again, please?
Nick Wiggins: The study of ignorance, what is it called?
Antony Funnell: Um, the study of ignorance…let me see…hmm, the study of ignorance. Yes. Well…ignorance…hmmm….
I've often thought that if a superior alien species ever visited Earth they'd be in for a double shock. First they'd be surprised at how much we individual Earthlings seem to know about anything and everything. And then, after they'd had a little giggle, they'd realise that most of us are just making it up, that much of what people say these days is based on nothing concrete at all.
Some people now call it the 'post truth' world, but Stanford University's Robert Proctor is more likely to call it the age of agnotology.
Robert Proctor: Agnotology is the study of ignorance, it's also the cultural production of ignorance, sort of in the same way that biology is both life and the study of life. And I had been thinking in the 1980s a lot about how powerful industries defends their products—chemicals, asbestos, tobacco, whatever—with science, with a type of science that is deception, is a form of deception. They'll say we need more research, the facts are not all in, there is uncertainty, room for doubt. And I'd noticed this as a strategy, and my history of science colleagues were not really looking at this. We tend in the history of science to look at the greats, the Newtons and the Einsteins, but people weren't looking at how science could actually be used as a form of deception or even that the call for more research, that there is doubt, that we need more research, that that could be used as a form of delay or inaction. And this was really a new type of sociology of science.
So I asked a linguist colleague of mine, Iain Boal, if he could coin a term that would designate the production of ignorance and the study of ignorance, and we came up with a number of different possibilities. Originally we spelt agnotology with an a, 'agnatology', and we got some protests from people who studied jawless fish, the agnathic fish, and so our science looked a little bit like the study of jawless fish, and so we put an o instead of an a and it became agnotology, the idea being that we are studying the logic of ignorance really, how ignorance is produced, and the ethics of ignorance, the geography of ignorance, the politics of ignorance, why ignorance can be used as a strategy to maintain certain forms of power.
So ignorance functions in all these different ways, and people weren't studying it, everyone was studying knowledge ad infinitum, but no one was studying ignorance, so that's why I thought it would be good to have a term for this and more people looking into it.
Antony Funnell: So agnotology it is. And Professor Proctor has few doubts that it has a robust future.
His idea is that rather than just simply complaining about things like fake news and ill-informed comment, if we want to try and arrest the spread of ignorance in the future, we have to first understand it. And central to that understanding, according to Robert Proctor, is an awareness that ignorance is often deliberately manufactured.
Robert Proctor: I taught as an instructor in the biology department at Harvard many years ago in the 1970s, and that was a time when the tobacco industry was funding millions of dollars' worth of research at Harvard Medical School, and some of the more radical medical students started complaining that Harvard could be hazardous to your health. The cigarette industry was creating goodwill, kind of 'witness farm' sympathisers at major universities all around and this was kind of diabolical and people seemed to think the money was not tainted when in fact what they were doing was they were funding alternative causation. The cigarette industry becomes the leading funder of things like radon as a cause of cancer, and asbestos as a cause of cancer, and genetic theories of cancer and immunologic theories, basic biochemistry. They are invited to help plan Nixon's war on cancer in 1971, which is one reason the main cause of cancer in the modern world, tobacco, was ignored in Nixon's war on cancer.
So I started noticing that there were all of these trade associations that made as part of their entire denial campaign 'we need more research'. It was very clever because they were able to capture the high ground of liberalism or open-mindedness, saying 'don't close your mind and say that cigarettes cause cancer, you should be open to other causes—viruses, genetics—as part of alternative causations'.
Antony Funnell: And that type of tactical use of ignorance as a weapon, that's still something that we see within our public and political debates today, isn't it.
Robert Proctor: Yes, it's huge. Any time you have a dangerous substance, people will find scientists to say that there is not enough evidence, that we need more research, that it's an open controversy. We see that with the NFL concussion question where they used the tobacco playbook to say, you know, concussions really aren't that bad. Or we see it in the sugar industry which has been using the tobacco playbook for many years to say it's not sugar that causes obesity, it's fat, it's something else. The cigarette industry blamed stress, so many of our modern theories that stress causes harm or that cholesterol causes heart disease, the leading researchers developing those theories were funded by cigarette makers as a kind of heat shield to take the blame off of cigarettes and put it on to something else. And this is now used in dozens and dozens of areas. Any producer of a product that's harmful is able to harness scientists to say, well, maybe it's not so bad for you.
Antony Funnell: And what sort of social conditions have to exist within a society for that type of agnotology to work best?
Robert Proctor: Well, I think part of the blame goes in our ideas about media and responsible journalism. If journalists think that the essence of every story has to have two sides, then basically you can end up balancing truth with lies. And so part of this is about responsible journalism where you have to realise that sometimes there is only one side, it's not a two-sided coin. And just to air equal time for one view that's true and one view that's fraudulent can lead to the public into some kind of hopeless despair.
So a big part of it I think is to critique this journalistic balance routine, it sometimes called, as if you have to get a quote from the Koch brothers every time you want to say something about global warming. Again, I think it's confusing of controversy, there are controversies about what to do about many things, but there is often not a controversy about whether in fact we are being harmed.
Antony Funnell: And yet that idea or that ideal of the balanced debate is often put forward in a laudable way as a solution to ignorance and the problem we have with facts within society at the moment.
Robert Proctor: Yes, that's part of the problem, people equate open-mindedness with a kind of indecision almost, or firmness with a kind of closed mindedness, when in fact some things are just true. You know, the Earth is not flat. And to say there are two sides of that is just a fabrication and can be very dangerous.
[Audio: Q&A debate re: climate change]
John McIntyre: I've borrowed the term from anthropology. It was Bronisław Malinowski who identified what he called phatic speech, a kind of talk in which people established solidarity merely by an exchange of words.
Antony Funnell: John McIntyre, senior journalist with the Baltimore Sun.
John McIntyre: You get this when someone says, 'How are you,' while walking past and without stopping to listen to any answer. It's just an acknowledgement that I know you, you exist, we are colleagues, there's no point in going further after we have simply established this. And we have phatic conversations about the weather, not as if there's anything actually we can do about it but we talk about the weather and we establish that we have a common ground of experience, even though in effect it doesn't really amount to anything.
Antony Funnell: And that's what's happened now to much of our journalism, says John McIntyre, it's become 'phatic'. It's become so truncated and abbreviated and clichéd, that although it still has the pretence of being about the exchange of useful intelligence, it's often more about ritual and belonging than it is about genuine news.
John McIntyre: It doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't really have any impact on us, it just exists to give us the sense that we are among that the glorious body of the well informed.
Antony Funnell: So in a journalistic sense, a good example of that are the news headlines that often appear on a crawl at the bottom of a news program that tell you very little. They are so abbreviated in many instances that it's impossible to know what they mean, and yet they are put up there as news headlines.
John McIntyre: Well, I think it's not just the crawl, I think it's pretty much all headlines because the ugly secret…and this is one that I think reporters in particular are not keen to understand, is that many people who simply read the headline think they have a grasp of the information contained therein and proceed without actually looking at the text.
Journalism has always been scattershot. We have all these stories in newspapers broadcast online, and we know that they are not going to appeal to everyone. We tried to catch as great an audience as we can, but we know that there is lots of stuff that we call news that doesn't really interest people, and sometimes they just develop a superficial understanding of what we've written, and that counts as being well-informed people.
Antony Funnell: When you look around do you see more of this phatic journalism in certain outlets than in others, or is this pretty widespread?
John McIntyre: Well, I think it has always been widespread, but I think particularly in online journalism there's this barrage of information that is contained in six or eight words of a headline and you scan this television screen or this website and you get this impression that there is all this information and that you are informed, while in fact you have at most a kind of sketchy understanding of anything that's going on anywhere.
Antony Funnell: So in a sense it gets in the way of communication, as I understand your argument, because it's adding to that general noise that is out there that makes it harder for us to concentrate on story, say, in the journalistic sense.
John McIntyre: There is I think now with this tremendous expansion that the internet has brought on, there is more and more noise and there is less and less actual reliable, verified information for you to get your hands on.
Antony Funnell: John McIntyre from the Baltimore Sun. And if you've learnt nothing else today in our look at the growth of ignorance, you at least now know two new terms; agnotology and phatic journalism.
This is Future Tense, new ideas, new approaches, new technologies, the edge of change. I'm Antony Funnell
Illusory truth video: Research has shown that if you are repeatedly exposed to the phrase 'the body temperature of a chicken', that's right, 'the body temperature of a chicken', even if no useful information is given about the body temperature of a chicken, you are more likely to judge as true this statement; 'the body temperature of a chicken is 34 degrees Celsius'. It's not by the way, it's actually closer to 41. But this finding highlights an important aspect of our psychology that plays a huge role in how we see the world. The things we are exposed to repeatedly feel more true. The way this seems to work…
Antony Funnell: And the power of repetition is something we've long known about.
It was Joseph Goebbels, after all, who once said: 'A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times become the truth.'
Today psychologists call it the 'illusory truth' effect. Assistant Professor Lisa Fazio from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Lisa Fazio: Psychologists proved what advertisers likely intuitively knew already, and what we've been looking at is kind of why these effects occur and what other boundaries of when the effects occur or don't.
Antony Funnell: Tell us about the research that you did specifically in this area because you were looking at whether or not this effect was changed if a person knew a fact to be true beforehand, before the incidence of repetition.
Lisa Fazio: Most of the previous studies had looked at these plausible but unknown facts where people didn't really have any prior knowledge to use to judge whether the statement was true or false. We were interested in what happens if you do have some of that knowledge, what if I give you a statement that you should, based on your prior knowledge, know is false? Do you still fall victim to this illusory truth effect and think it's more true if you hear it twice than if you've only heard it one time?
Antony Funnell: And your findings were?
Lisa Fazio: Yes, so what we did, we did the study just like before where participants read a bunch of statements, then they read some repeated statements, some new statements, and we found that even if you had prior knowledge, you still thought that the statements were more true when you heard them twice.
So, for example, if we only included participants who were able to tell us that a kilt was the skirt that Scottish men wore, they still rated the statement 'a sari is the skirt that Scottish men wear' as more true when they heard it a second time as opposed to only hearing it once.
Antony Funnell: So what do we put that down to, why would that be the case do we think?
Lisa Fazio: Yes, we think it has to do with this effects of fluency. So when you hear something for a second time it's much easier for your brain to process it, and that kind of ease of processing is interpreted as fluency, and we tend to interpret that fluency as truth.
So there are studies showing that statements in high contrast fonts are thought to be more true than statements that are harder to read in low contrast fonts, statements that are kind of written simply in common language are more true than statements that are written in complex grammar that's hard to decipher.
Antony Funnell: So given that we are processing so much information on an ongoing basis throughout the day, we take short cuts, do we, in terms of processing that information. And so if the information is packaged in a simple way and in a repetitive way we are more likely to take it up as being correct. Is that what you're saying?
Lisa Fazio: Exactly. And most of the time this is a really good strategy, it saves us a lot of cognitive effort, and just out in the world, things that you encounter more often are more likely to be true than things that you only run into one time. So in general the strategy works really well, but it can cause issues when you are dealing with someone trying to persuade you, as in advertising or politics.
Donald Trump: Right now we are not strong, believe me. Make America great again, we're going to make America great again…and my theme is make America great again…we're going to make America great again.
Antony Funnell: So, the message so far in our look at the rise of ignorance is that not only can it be manufactured, but we as individuals can also be personally at fault for our lack of genuine knowledge. In other words, we shouldn't always blame others for the rise in ignorance, we should sometimes look within.
David Dunning: Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect is actually a whole family of effects, but the main one and the one that people are most interested in is the fact that incompetent people don't know they are incompetent. Actually you can scratch that, they are not in a position to know they are incompetent. That is, they lack the very skills they need to be able to recognise just how poorly they are doing.
Antony Funnell: And who better to explain the implications of the Dunning-Kruger effect than David Dunning himself, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Over-confidence, says Professor Dunning, is often a barrier to true understanding.
David Dunning: The issue with a lot of us is that ignorance doesn't reveal itself in terms of 'gee, I don't know the answer'. Actually what we find is it's astonishing how often people don't know an answer or won't admit that they don't know an answer. Ignorance reveals itself by having the wrong theory, the wrong fact, the wrong approach. So what people do is they are comparably following approaches or answers they think are right, even though they are 180 degrees wrong. So that's what we mean when people are more misinformed than they are uninformed. It's not that they don't know things. They know things. It just happens that those things are wrong.
Antony Funnell: And we all engage in this, don't we, it's not just an ignorant few out there.
David Dunning: That's right, this is a condition that visits all of us sooner or later. That is, no one is immune to this. Some people might have a more flamboyant version of this problem at times, but sooner or later we all have pockets of incompetence that we don't recognise. We don't recognise the boundary between our expertise and our ignorance, that remains invisible to us, and that remains invisible to all of us, it's just a part of the human condition.
There are times when it is functional to be overconfident or portray overconfidence. When doctors are trying to diagnose a patient they try to be careful, they explore alternatives, they have doubts, they are very careful, they are cautious. But when it comes time to convince a patient that, okay, this is the disease and this is the regime you should follow, then it's in the doctor's interest to be confident because more times than not the doctor is going to be right and the patient is going to be better off if they follow what the doctor says. And they are more likely to follow a confident doctor than an unconfident doctor. The doctor still has to be wary and watch out because maybe they are wrong. So at some level they should be cautious, but at some level they also have to portray confidence to make sure another person is going to do what's best for them.
Antony Funnell: One of the things about ignorance that you've highlighted is the fact that from a very early age we as human beings ascribe intentions and functions and purposes to objects and events, and oftentimes they turn out to be false. Just explain that whole scenario to us and why it's problematic.
David Dunning: What's interesting is I mentioned before that people tend to be more misinformed than uninformed. And part of that is that our psychological architecture, if you will, is set up to make certain mistakes or to have certain bias is in their interpretation of the world. And one of the biases that we have…and you can see this in very young babies, is we sort of view the world as intentional. That is, when things happen it's because some person or something out there wanted it to happen. And that may be very true when we are dealing with humans. Humans have intentions, and part of successfully navigating our human lives is figuring out what those intentions are. But people ascribe intentions to the weather, they ascribe intentions to chance events, they ascribe intentions to things that are mistakes rather than what was something that was done on purpose.
And so what people will tend to do is they will take a piece of wisdom or a 'bias' that is useful in one area but overextend it into areas where it shouldn't be extended. In some sense sometimes that's what wisdom is, knowing when you have to stop with that bias because you've left the area where it's actually helpful.
Antony Funnell: We can see that with politics, can't we, that we operate in a world in which we have a subjective world view, and because of that we ascribe certain beliefs that we have from our previous experience to new scenarios, don't we.
David Dunning: I think that's right, and often what you see in an election is basically a contest between worldviews in which either both the worldview might be wrong, either a worldview might be an over-exaggeration…one worldview might be more right than the other worldview, but essentially what we have is a competition between worldviews. And what's interesting if you take a look at social life these days, it seems that what is happening less and less is we are talking less about our different world views to find out what other people think and how they might be able to change our minds, so people seem to be more encapsulated in little societies that really are their worldview. And it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the future given that people have much more opportunity to do that encapsulation.
Antony Funnell: So we often don't recognise our ignorance in situations, and we over-compensate where it comes to our expertise. Is this being made worse in a world in which a high value is put on personal opinion and the expression of opinion?
David Dunning: Well, I think it actually goes beyond that, that is we live in a world now at our fingertips where we have a wealth of information, and that information can add to knowledge, we can find out things about our health or about politics or about economics, it can help us make wiser decisions. Or we can find information that is going to confirm prejudices or biases that we already have. And what we find interesting in our own work is sometimes the competition, if you will, or the source of distress and disagreement that you see in the political realm isn't a disagreement about priorities or isn't a disagreement about worldview or isn't a disagreement about values, it's a disagreement about fact. People literally believe that there are different facts on the ground in terms of what's going on in the country and in the world.
So, for example, most Republicans in the United States think that Obama has been an economic disaster. All economic indicators, including the stock market, have gone down, whereas Democrats will believe the reverse, but there are some indicators like poverty that are not going up or have just recently gone up in the United States. So that's a tougher type of disagreement to resolve.
Antony Funnell: David Dunning. In summary then, ignorance isn't necessarily about being uniformed, it's also about being misinformed and our willingness to stay misinformed. And with politics we allow this to happen in large part because of the allure of political rhetoric.
And if you want to understand the power of rhetoric, just think of American politics and of the ability of this man, an outsider with very little experience of government, who seemed to come from nowhere and to win high office by creating an army of unthinking almost fanatical admirers through the power of his speech and the grand things he promised.
Barack Obama: This is our moment, to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that out of many we are one, that while we breathe we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people; yes we can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States.
Patsy McCarthy: Rhetoric is about the art of persuasion. And now we have many people from all directions, especially politically, persuading us of many different messages. So it's much more difficult for people to find, if there is one, an absolute truth when they go searching for it.
Antony Funnell: Patsy McCarthy is an adjunct professor in the Creative Industries faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, and a student of the power of rhetoric.
Patsy McCarthy: Ironically, when Aristotle first posited that the Athenian gentlemen needed to study the art of persuasion in order to protect their own land and rights in a time of no lawyers, Socrates spoke up very strongly and said (and he was a man who believed in absolute truth) that this might be a thing that could lead to trickery on the public.
Antony Funnell: And we know that if you look at, say, politicians in Germany, they train not to use rhetoric deliberately, don't they, because of their history with Adolf Hitler and the effect that his rhetoric had on the German population.
Patsy McCarthy: Well, I suppose so. I mean, it is just the art of persuasion, as Aristotle said. So I suppose what you're saying is they try not to use extreme rhetoric. And we say there's a difference between persuasion and propaganda, and I guess that the main difference of that is that propaganda tries to block out any other message, whereas a good rhetorical perspective could give you a balanced argument but still bring you out on the side they want you to accept.
Antony Funnell: Why do we rely so much on feelings, particularly when we are looking at people who are trying to persuade us? You often hear people listening to a debate who are swayed by a speaker because they get a good feeling about that person, not necessarily because of the detail that he or she might put out, the policies or the facts that they might present. Why are we so persuaded, in an age of enormous education, by those kind of gut feelings, do you think?
Patsy McCarthy: Well, perhaps it's a positive that we are such human beings, and often those of us who are more educated, we go by the feeling but we find the rationalisations then to confirm the feeling and perhaps that is a better way to go than the other because at least we are not being cold about our approach and we keep the humanity there. I'm trying to be optimistic but yes, ignorance obviously in a world that becomes more and more full of information, in a way it grows, because even when you are more educated you begin to realise how much more you do not know.
Antony Funnell: Agnotology the study of ignorance and the deliberate creation of ignorance. That was Adjunct Professor Patsy McCarthy.
My thanks to co-producer Karin Zsivanovits and sound engineer Steve Fieldhouse. I'm Antony Funnell, this is Future Tense, until next time, cheers!