Planet Science

Daniel Finkelstein has some pointed things to say about cognitive dissonance in The Times today. His piece has nothing to do with the paranormal - it's about attitudes and outcomes in criminal justice. But I've often thought that there's a strong parallel.

Something stuck in my mind long ago from the case of the Birmingham Six, who were jailed for life in the 1970s for the IRA pub bombings. Lord Denning, a crusty and opinionated old judge with a strong West Country accent, headed the court that rejected their appeal, and he said as follows:

If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further.

Even then I thought this an extraordinary statement - it seemed odd that a figure with such power over other people's lives could inhabit such an idealised world.  As we know, the Birmingham Six were cleared twelve years later, when the police were shown beyond reasonable doubt to have beaten the men to confess, casually invented evidence, and suppressed exonerating facts - as had been strongly suspected at the time. It's not as though it had never happened before. But Denning found it inconceivable that the police could ever lie. The idea of such a thing would have wrecked the fabric of his existence.

Finkelstein raises the Central Park Jogger case. A man named Kharey Wise was one of the gang of teenagers convicted of beating and raping a young woman in Central Park in 1989. Some ten years later he befriended another New York rapist in jail, and this man eventually fessed up to having done the deed. His DNA was linked to the crime - none of the teenagers' DNA had been. Their confessions were inconsistent, and the District Attorney moved to overturn the convictions. However the original prosecutor and the police would have none of it. They convened a panel that concluded the police had nothing wrong, and argued that the teens must have at least initiated the assault.

The same sort of thing happened with the case of Timothy Evans, whose wife and child were found dead at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, West London. Evans was hanged in 1950 for the crime. Other bodies were then discovered in the house, and it became obvious that Evans's fellow tenant John Christie was responsible. But it was years before the legal establishment could accept that it had got it so grotesquely wrong, and kept insisting that Evans was the murderer.

Finkelstein comments:

It is commonly thought that we have theories and that they are tested by the facts. The opposite is true. We have theories and then we strive mightily to fit the facts into them, ignoring those that don't quite work or reinterpreting them if we have to. The more we have at stake emotionally, the more pressing this task becomes.

This is a pretty good description of the basis of conspiracy theories, like the need some Muslims have to blame Jews for the events of September 11.  It also underlies much of the resistance to paranormal claims.

The point is, cognitive dissonance is a fundamental fact of human nature. But many people think there is a place where we can go where this rule does not apply, a place called Science, which is conceived to be a perfect ordered world governed by replicable experiments and predicted outcomes. Like Denning, its inhabitants can't imagine a world where anomalies, exceptions to the rule, are possible, and no less real for being hard to pin down.

Yet in the end, the law got it right in the case of the Birmingham Six, and Denning's rosy worldview was shattered. (I wonder how he dealt with it). More evidence, and a common sensical view of it, prevailed in the other cases as well. It didn't involve overturning any cherished legal principles, but rather of applying the law in a more focused and nuanced way.

It will be the same with psychic experience. It's not science which is the problem - on the contrary, we understand psi and accept it thanks to the scientific efforts of parapsychologists and psychical researchers, just as we know about cognitive dissonance thanks to the work of psychologists. The problem is the illusion that science is an independent tool, a referee free from bias and prejudice, and not what it manifestly is, the creation of human minds, and vulnerable to emotional needs.  The story of this century will be one of scientists starting to understand and accept the limitations of Planet Science, and doing so precisely through scientific methods - a process that parapsychology will play a large part in.

Comments

[Tony M]

Great post as usual and I agree with your point.

But I have to say that I always interpreted Lord Denning differently. I don't think it was cognitive dissonance. I thought he simply didn't care. thought he felt the mistreatment of six people was a small price to pay to maintain public respect for the police.

Your version is kinder.

[Filip vd]

great post,
the link to the article is missing though.
greets,
Filip

[Robert McLuhan]

thanks Filip, fixed now

Tony, so Denning was cynical not naive. It's a bad world...

[Mark]

I agree with most of what you say, but I do not agree that it is an illusion that, "science is an independent tool, a referee free from bias and prejudice." I believe that it is true that science is free from bias and prejudice. Even if it is a human creation (I don't even necessarily agree that it is a human creation, although our terms used to describe our particular vision of this process are creations - think of it like math...is math created or is it discovered...I believe it is discovered.......sorry for going off on a tangent) the problem is people bringing their congnitive dissonance into the process of science and trying to change the rules of science to fit their theories. If and when the scientific method is applied properly, it is free of all bias.

[Magnetic Helix]

I am an astrophysicist and I'd like to say my opion on the bias and prejudices in science.

Science is always an human endevearor. Completely objective and unbiased science exist only in people's imagination. With science we just try to be objective as possible, but it does not always succeed. We just have to live with this and do our best.

I think that science is only free of bias when we have very well tested theories where we know exactly in which context they work. For example we know that Maxwell's equations can denscribe macroscopic electromagnetic phenomena perfectly (and they actually work well with relativity too, but mathematical formalism is different). But when we are talking about new discoveries and theories, things are quite different.

I give you an example from my own field: astrophycial plasmas. The theories concerning plasmas in astrophysical settings are awfully messy, speculative and variable. The physics itself (magnetohydrodynamics or MHD) is quite well known and clear, but it's application is a very different thing.

For example lets look at the solar dynamo theory. (More information on the dynamo theory for those who are technically inclined: http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2005-2/).
People usually agree that there is a dynamo phenomenon in the Sun, but there is this a huge debate how it really works and we can't run simulations with real paremeters. One of my colleques, who is an expert on solar convection, said that it is still not possible to run convection simulations using real physical parameters because of various numerical instabilities, but "we are optimistic that these simulation can show something of value".

And these are the people who run massive parrallel simulation in supercomputer clusters.

Some time ago I was in scientific conference about dynamos and turbulence. There were two elderly english professors who someone called "anti-dynamo people". They had the same kind of extremely arrogant and dismissive attitude toward dynamo theory as hard core skeptics have toward parapsychology.

We can be never sure of anything when we are working on the fronties of science - and I am just talking about mainstream science.

But it is lot more fun to be scientist when science is messy :). Absolute certanties are for mathematicians. Like they say: “Physics is to mathematics as sex is to masturbation.”

[Robert McLuhan]

Does this imply that at a certain stage of advancement our understanding about the physical universe is going to get more and more fuzzy? Is it something we have to learn to live with? Or will it resolve into certainties when it's better understood?

'If and when the scientific method is applied properly, it is free of all bias.' - But who decides what is a proper application of science? There are obviously differing views between parapsychologists and sceptics in this regard. Who is right, and who adjudicates?

[Mark]

Well, okay Robert, ya got me there. Reason should ultimately decide what is the proper application of science, but reason does not make decisions, people do. So maybe I should say that if we had some way of making sure that reason was adhered to and of ensuring that we have enough information with respect to a certain phenomenon, then science would be perfect. The fact that this is very unlikely in any situation means that we can only try to eliminate any unreasonable thought as best we can and hope for the best. The fact that we can never be certain about whether or not unreasonable thought will creep up in a scientific experiment is a problem with how us imperfect humans are - it is not necessarily a problem with the scientific method.

[Robert McLuhan]

I'd agree with that. Also it's possible to work towards a convincing protocol, as Hyman's involvement with the ganzfeld and remote viewing work suggests. Another example is the staring experiments, which sceptics like Wiseman have contributed to. Eventually it should be possible for both sides to agree on an approach which is robust and credible.

There's more of a problem with interpreting the results, as the disagreements over meta-analyses suggests.