 It's Sunday, March 28th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason. I'm DJ Grophy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week is Bruce Hood. He's chair of the Cognitive Development Center in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol in the UK. He was a research fellow at Cambridge and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and professor at Harvard. He's received many awards for his work in child development and cognitive neuroscience, and he's on the show to talk to me about his book Super Sense, Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Welcome to the show, Professor Bruce Hood. Hi there, DJ. Bruce, I consider your book Super Sense, Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Well, it's a really thought-provoking book about skepticism and belief, something I think skeptics should read, even though, you know, you're not trying to change believers' beliefs in the supernatural, nor are you trying to tell skeptics how to go out and change people's beliefs. You're instead what? Just trying to explain why people believe the unbelievable? Yeah, I think we need to understand where all this belief comes from. And as a scientist, I've always been fascinated in trying to explain human behavior. And so that's what really the book's all about. It's not really kind of putting all the evidence together to say, look, there's no evidence for the paranormal or supernatural. Well, why? Why do so many people believe, given the lack of evidence? And that to me is a really critical question. And there really are two schools of thought. Either people who are just kind of gullible or dumb and believe anything they're told, or, and this is my kind of contribution to the whole story, maybe it's something to do with the way that humans think. Maybe it's something to do with the way that our brains are wired to interpret information and really kind of try to make sense of phenomena all around them. And so as a developmental psychologist, rather than thinking people believe in the unbelievable because they're indoctrinated and like a lot of skeptics, I think, believe, or Dawkins himself has argued in the God delusion that religious belief comes from religious indoctrination. You instead say, no, there are evolutionary origins. We're all hardwired. Even skeptics are hardwired to believe in unseen causes. Yeah, it's a subtle difference. So no child is born to believe in Islam or Christianity. Those are culturally constructed narratives. Okay, those are the religions. But we tend to believe what we think is plausible. And every religion has a supernatural component to it. And that's what elevates them to a special status. So what I'm saying is that religions work or they propagate particularly well by kind of building on our inclinations, our propensity to believe things which there's no scientific evidence for. So that's the subtle difference. I mean, clearly, there is a role of storytelling in our culture. But I think it's just resonating with ideas and beliefs and assumptions about the hidden properties of the world that we naturally come up with. You just called it storytelling, but you mean indoctrination, right? There's a role for indoctrination in terms of explaining how people get the specific beliefs that they have. But the general propensity to have those kinds of supernatural beliefs you're saying comes from evolution. Yeah. So the argument is that the brain creates the mind, which we all have, that we try to understand things and make sense of them. We see patterns in the world. We see causes. We see things appearing to be related. And so we assume the presence of hidden properties, forces, energies, patterns operating when in fact there are none. So we're making misconceptions. And it's these misconceptions, which I think form the basis of adult supernatural beliefs. So to give you a tangible example, most people assume that the mind is separate to the body. Okay? Now you speak to a neuroscientist. They'll say, no, the mind is a product of the brain. Okay? It's part of them. We don't know how it is, by the way. I'm not saying we've explained how consciousness and minds work. Well, we're getting closer and closer, but you're right. It's the hard question. It's not completely figured out in cognitive neuroscience. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and we could get into discussion on exactly what the hard problem is. But for the person in the street, they generally assume that the mind is separate to the body, because that's their everyday phenomenological experience. You know, I decide that I want to have a drink of coffee, I pick up the cup, my mind may move my arm. But of course, they are also sensitive to the fact that the body changes and is separate to the mind. So they have what is technically called mind body dualism. Now, if you accept mind body dualism, then that means that the laws that apply to the body don't necessarily apply to the mind, because we know that bodies are physical things, and we think that minds are separate, that they're non-physical. So you can see how you adopt that position, then that allows you to entertain all manner of possibilities. Maybe the minds are not constrained by the same laws that work on our bodies. You know, they can exist after the body's gone. For the notion of an existence without a body is something which is intuitively plausible to the people. Because of mind body dualism. Do you think that mind body dualism is that like the basic supernatural belief? You know, a lot of skeptics and atheists think it's God belief, but maybe the belief in the self or the self as separate from the brain, you know, that I have a little humanculus inside of me, a little self inside of me ruling the roost kind of in charge. That's maybe the basic belief. I look at the history of the life of the great paranormal investigator JB Rine, and it was his, let's say, hope in mind body dualism proving it that led him down the path in ESP research. Because if he could prove ESP, then that would prove mind body dualism, which would imply the existence, the survival of the soul after death, and all of these other things that were very important to him to prove. So in a sense, that's like the basic belief. That's one of the basic beliefs. Absolutely right. And by the way, it's my next book. Yeah, absolutely. Great. So mind body dualism is something which is spontaneously emerging. Another one, which I would also call a basic belief, is the idea of causality. So we see things where we're causal determinists. Okay, we find it very difficult to think of random events or coincidental events. We see everything as having a synchronicity. So it's very hard not to lead your life like that because most of the time there is causal connections between things. And so we're very inclined to seeing things being connected in some way. And so we look for the forces and we try to control events in order to secure outcomes. So this is the basis of ritualistic superstitious behavior. That even secularists or some skeptics might engage in. So it's not just kind of believers in God or religion or ghosts or the paranormal that connect the dots that might not be there. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we can't stop ourselves doing it. It's just the way that our brains are designed to work. I mean, Skinner, the great American behaviorist, he actually wrote a paper about this in 1945 or 46 called the superstitious behavior pigeons. And he demonstrated that if you just throw out random events, the reward, every so often, even simple organisms like pigeons will start to shape their behavior into bizarre structures in order to try and secure the reward again. So we are seeking out structure and order all the time. And it's exactly the same mechanism that operates in rituals related to sports, events or dangerous professions. People engage in these things. And they actually work because they give the person a sense of control. And that's an important point. So they work but not because of some supernatural reason, but because they maybe make someone behave in ways that increase the likelihood of success. Not for supernatural reasons, but kind of a confidence thing. The luck factor gives them a sense of control. So the basketball player who has a ritual before he begins, he's not actually tapping into the cosmos and the power of God or the supernatural to help him. But his belief in that might increase the likelihood that he succeeds. Yeah, absolutely. Basically any life event, which is important, where you don't have control over everything with a degree of random variation, these are going to be exactly a sort of event where people start to engage in behaviors that give them the perception or the illusion of control. Now, if these life events are threatening as in a dangerous job, deep sea fishing or I don't know, maybe a policeman or something like that, or if it's something like we are gambling, you've got a lot of money riding on things, then people will find the lack of control stressful. So what you can do to inoculate yourself against that is engage in rituals, typically behaviors that in the past happened or were associated with a positive outcome. If not associated, at least kind of in proximity, they happened around the positive outcome. So maybe not actually connected causally in reality, but it feels like it. Exactly, because you're always looking for the antecedents. You're always looking for the context where something has worked in the past. So if you don't know how to control random events, then why not engage in a little bit of ritual? And it's not just believers who do this. I mean, we're all inclined to do it. I think I've probably talked about this before, but Charles Simone, the co-inventor or the writer of the Word program, the billionaire, he's so wealthy that he flies up on Soviet rockets to the orbiting space station. And if the reports are true, and I believe them, apparently the Russian superstition is to urinate on the back wheels of the bus before they're taken to the launch pad. And I love that story because it's just that even at the pinnacle of human scientific achievement, mainly base travel, and someone clearly is as logical and brilliant as Charles Simone, they still engage in rituals. Right. I love the irony that he endowed Richard Dawkins chair when Dawkins was at Oxford, the Charles Simone chair in the public understanding of science, and yet he's engaging in this unscientific ritual to increase the likelihood of nothing bad happening when he's going into space. Yeah. Well, you know, DJ, I've talked about this to colleagues and conferences, and it's remarkable that I find that a lot of my colleagues have rituals. You know, if we are applying for a grant or sending a paper off to a prestigious journal, they've got their little routines that they engage in. So it's not just the believers. It's I think it's a lot more prevalent than most people would imagine. The way I read you, Bruce, you're an equal opportunity skeptic. You're not just sticking it to religious believers or believers in really odd paranormal beliefs. You know, you're not just going after the easy targets. You're saying not only should skepticism be widely applied, but it should be widely applied because it's so widely needed, not just by the credulous and the gullible. But as you said, even your colleagues in psychology, et cetera, and you break down belief. I find this interesting in the book in ways that I think a lot of skeptics don't. You break it down into religious supernatural beliefs and secular supernatural beliefs. They're all supernatural beliefs, but you don't lump them all into the same kind of woo-woo category. So secular supernatural beliefs for you, that's psychics, haunted houses, et cetera. Do you find that the taboos regarding skepticism into religious supernatural beliefs, do those taboos motivate you to focus more on the secular supernatural stuff? I mean, is religious belief more interesting to you to study but controversial or instead things like why people believe in UFOs or have these basic superstitions in sports, belief in lucky charms, the stuff we were just talking about. What holds your interest more or is it all the same to you? Okay. So I made, as you rightly pointed out, I draw a distinction between secular supernatural beliefs and religious ones. And religious beliefs to me are clearly a cultural and that's why you have different religions and different cultures. But as a cognitive scientist, I'm interested in the universal. In other words, what are the same beliefs which are held by everyone throughout the world, irrespective of their culture? Now, I happen to think that there are going to be universal beliefs and that cultures will take them and then use them and apply them in different storytelling scenarios. And that's because they're all based on the common mechanisms. So I wasn't really a fear of antagonizing the religious groups that I focused on the secular supernatural beliefs. I wanted to look at those ones where the role of culture was not clear. And in particular, I'm specifically interested in the origin of these beliefs because I don't entirely buy the indoctrination story. I think that if you, you know, if you perform the Frankensteinian experiment of taking a group of young babies and raise them on an island that they would develop their own culture and then develop their own belief systems and they would look very similar to the ones that we have in the rest of society. Yeah, not doctrinally, but in terms of the belief in unseen causes. So it might not be, you know, naturally a belief in Jesus as a savior or Muhammad as God's prophet, but that there is some force looking out for you that you could call upon, etc. That similarity you're saying you'd see universally. Absolutely. I mean, William Golding in The Lord of the Fly predicted this exactly this scenario. I don't know if you're familiar with the story, but yes, there was a fear of the God in the forest. So yes, I think this is it. It's an attempt to control our environment. It's inferring a deeper reality to existence. So for example, we know that children, when they're reasoning about animals, for example, they assume there's a deeper inner property, which makes different animals members of a different species. Richard Dawkins actually just talked about this in his last book, which I think is it's not an irony, but he acknowledges what I'm talking about. He just underplays the role when it comes to religion. And he's right in that sense that religions are cultural. But I don't think he's given enough emphasis to the natural processes which lead to the generation and allow these beliefs to propagate. And that, for me, is the scientifically more interesting question. Well, that wasn't the book he wrote, but you're saying you're interested in the universals, the scientific reasons people have these beliefs generally, and not the specific reasons people have the specific beliefs. Yeah, I think that to me is a much more interesting question. Because then we can start to look at the mechanisms. You know, I'm a cognitive scientist. I want to know how we generate these, how does the brain, why does the brain do this? So I think that religion is a byproduct of the mechanisms which are natural reasoning mechanisms which try to kind of interpret and predict the world. I want to talk about what you do with the answer once you get the how or the why, once you understand that. But before that, I want to get back to this kind of secular supernatural belief that even skeptics engage in. So this belief in unseen causes or properties, you know, it does play out in the lives of even skeptics. I read, you mentioned Dawkins just now, I remember reading about how he valued a first edition of one of Darwin's books. Or in my case, I have some prized possessions like old photos of Randy during the height of his magic career or other magician's careers. You see that this is part and parcel to even skeptics lives. So, you know, someone goes up to a skeptic at the amazing meeting, you know, a leading figure and asks someone to sign a book as if that signature somehow imbues more value to a book. Now, incidentally, I know of only one skeptic who takes umbrage at the assumption that an author would want to sign a book, you know, only one of my friends says, no, I don't want anyone writing in my book, you know. So, but I think he's, he's not run of the mill. Most skeptics say, hey, I want Penn Gillette to sign this magic book, or I want Randy's signature. Hell, someone, no kidding, no exaggeration. At a conference last fall, someone asked me to sign a Bible. Now, the connection, I don't get that, but even skeptics see these unseen properties. It's a kind of superstition or is it magical thinking? So, here's the question. Not only is there anything wrong with that, but is there something good about that? Does it add to one's life, even a skeptic's life, if he or she engages in this kind of supersense thinking? Yeah, I think it's natural, and I think it's beneficial, and I think that to form significant emotional bonds with other people, we have to adopt what I call an essentialist stance. Essentialism is the belief that there's a hidden property which makes individuals irreplaceable. And I think that we naturally do this to others in our lives, and without that capacity, we would be psychotic. We would treat them as non-human, almost, just basically machines. And indeed, there are clinical syndromes, Capgras syndrome, for example, where people lack that emotional connection and they do infer that the other person is indeed a replicant or a very sophisticated robot. So, we're actually inclined to see other significant individuals as possessing some internal property that makes them unique and irreplaceable. And that also can transfer to their possessions and things to which they've had a lot of proximity. So, in the book, I've been developing this idea of a contamination notion, as if there is some sort of morality or goodness, or indeed the converse of that, the evil, that can actually inhabit objects. And that's what explains memorabilia, why we have to have the original. And we can do these thought experiments where you consider replacing every atom until eventually there's no kind of original material. And people are very uncomfortable about thinking about these things because they deep down they feel there's some other property and over and beyond the materialistic aspect of the world, which gives something its irreplaceable value. Even if there isn't, you're saying there's a benefit to believing so. So, even if the thought experiment is applied to a person, you know, so great sci-fi where every atom of a person is replaced, you know, the transporter in Star Trek or something similar, and someone is a replicant, has he or she lost something you said essential about who he or she is, that gets back to the old question about the illusion of the self. And even though these are illusions, you're saying they're useful illusions, they're vital lies, they're not just lies. Yeah, they're really critical and important. And the reason they're critical and important is because we have this notion of sacred values. So let's just talk about objects because I find they're quite fascinating because there's no real reason why we should prefer the original when you have an identical duplicate. You know, for example, even if an object is emotionally significant, it has a sacred value in the sense that you shouldn't fell it off. Okay. And in particular, if it's an object that a whole group of people think is sacred, it could be a Bible or it could be, I don't know, some temple or something like that. It doesn't need to be an object. It could be a structure or a place. Yeah. Or it could be, you know, Wrigley Field in Chicago or it could be, you know, some sports stadium where everyone wants to sort of have a piece of the turf or be buried or have the ashes scattered. These are places or locations or objects or material parts of the universe, which people imbue with significant value, a value which you shouldn't be able to own. And it makes it significant and irreplaceable by the virtue of the fact that it has some invisible property that it can't be duplicated. And that's why they have to be unique. And we need these sacred objects and sacred values because they bind people together in a sense of collective belief, if you like it, almost like a faith that this is something which by definition, you shouldn't be able to reduce down to some sort of cost benefit analysis. And then doing so is makes it profane, okay, not mundane. This is what the super sense is about in my opinion. It's one of the ways it's been recruited by a social mechanism to bind us together to infer that there is hidden dimension and hidden structure. And everyone who believes that is a member of the tribe. Anyone who doesn't is being sacrilegious and trying to just kind of talk about it in a rational, materialist way. But talking about it in a rationalist material way, that's something skeptics do. That's something you as a kind of a skeptic critical thinking psychologist, well, you do that, but you don't do it to explain away this stuff, just to explain it, kind of in your little society of smart people, you'll talk about where these beliefs come from, but you don't want to go out there and shake those beliefs from people because they're so useful. Does that imply that the truth is less important to you than the utility of the belief? In other words, if everybody gave these beliefs, it sounds like you're saying not only would we suffer individually, but heck, society would fall apart. Well, I think because I've made an argument in the book of these ways of thinking are intuitive, they're happening in children before we're telling them what to think. We don't have to talk about the magic of this or the vitality of an object. They're doing this spontaneously. So even if we progress to a, let's put our thinking caps on and think a couple of hundred years down the road where we suddenly have much better understanding of the way the brain creates these things, it's not going to stop. We're not going to evolve into a different species that doesn't think this way. We're always going to have this propensity. And as I've pointed out, actually, you find people in all walks of life, including scientists, holding onto these notions. And quite often it's because people don't articulate them or even consider them in the same way that we don't often consider the illusion of the self. We all kind of operate with this notion of a unified individual inside our bodies controlling it. Right. That's like the last sacred cow for even skeptics. You could get a skeptic to give up belief in God, maybe, or ghosts or any of that stuff. But if you talk about, well, and by the way that ghost that you think is inside of you, that self, even if they don't think it survives death, they think it is somehow separate from the brain. That's the last, well, I said sacred cow. That's the last belief people find so hard to give up. Well, that's what I'm going for next. But yeah. Well, I look forward to that read. Okay. Is there a hierarchy, Bruce, to these supernatural beliefs in terms of which ones work best? Or are they all the same basic kind of belief but just differently applied? In other words, is unfounded belief in God generally more beneficial than unfounded belief in psychics or UFOs or something? I mean, because obviously I could, you know, just make a list and see that some things harm more than others. You don't get into that question, though. So do you rank these beliefs? No, and I've deliberately avoided that. One, because I'm not an expert on religion. And also, I wouldn't know where to, I wouldn't know how to evaluate the evidence because, and this is exactly this sort of arguments that people have over time on the internet and on the discussion forums, is religion good or bad? And clearly, it's very easy to pick out the examples of where religion has been recruited as a justification for atrocities. But I wouldn't know how to weigh that up or balance that against all the other acts of humanity which have been done in the name of religion. I mean, I personally am not religious. I don't have an agenda for religion is what I'm saying. And I'd like to point out that not all supernatural beliefs are equally or innocuous. You know, for example, dousing is a supernatural belief. And earlier this year, I was involved in the expose of a company who had been selling equipment based on the principle of dousing. Right, the ADE 561. Yeah, ADE 651, yeah. Yeah, 651. So it's not just a guy in his backyard looking for, you know, water or something, not just a water witching, it's real lives on the line. Yeah, indeed. And every, and I still think this is a situation currently in Iraq, every checkpoint is equipped with these dousing rods effectively. And if you kind of give up checking cars, then clearly this is putting lives at risk. And people do think lives have been lost to this. There's certainly a hell of a lot of money's been made over it. So I think it's unscrupulous by these companies. And they've been using a belief system, which is that, you know, there's an affinity between certain substances that you can detect through, suppose it's pseudoscience, magnetic fields. And it sounds plausible. And when you demonstrate these things, they seem to work because of the idiomotor effect that maybe some of your listeners may know about. But basically, dousing has been explained by James Randi very convincingly as a con. In fact, he was the one to raise the initial alarm bells. And I find it just amazing that it takes a magician to bring this to the public's attention years ago, rather than consensus science just speaking out about it as a matter of fact. But so you're saying, though, the point you're making is that there is harm to some of these beliefs. I was asking if you have a hierarchy of them. And you're saying not really what you're mostly interested in is examining the origins of these sorts of beliefs. Yeah, it's the way that people use these beliefs to satisfy their own ends. That's when we can start to make judgment calls. So the nature of the belief, per se, isn't necessarily a problem. It's when people say, for example, I can contact the dead, give me $2,000 and I'll, you know, hold a say on it. Now that's your belief in the afterlife in itself isn't a problem. But then if you start then engaging in behaviors, where that belief substantiates that behavior, then that's clearly an example where it's being put to ill use. So the belief, per se, I don't think is the problem. It's the way that they are used by unscrupulous individuals to take advantage of what is a natural disposition in the majority of people. Well, let's dig into this a bit more. So you said the belief isn't itself a problem, but it's the harm that results if someone's taking advantage of another person's propensity to the beliefs. So fine. That's the righteous indignation that riles up a lot of skeptics. You get a group of skeptics together and they get really mad about Sylvia Brown or, you know, a faith healer, Peter Popov, something like that. You just said it's not the belief in the afterlife that's necessarily harmful, but the unscrupulous use of the belief in the afterlife by hucksters or charlatans. So it sounds like you're conceding, at least for you, that the truth doesn't matter as much. So if there's no evidence for the afterlife, who cares if people believe in it because it may benefit them as long as they're not being taken advantage of? I mean, is that your view? Yeah, I think I'll never be asked that question, but just considering it at the first pass, I think I'm probably agree with that, that people believe weird sorts of ideas. And when they impose this upon others, that's when I think we need to sort of, you know, ears prick up and start to pay attention to what's going on. I suppose the difficult thing is, of course, is that, you know, there will be situations where it's happening within a family. So for example, some people believe that you don't need to take modern medicine and if you do certain rituals, you'll be cured. And that's where a belief system of a parent is having influence on the children. And then we get into situations, you know, what is the role of society of stepping in there and influencing. So these are all nuances, these are all fine lines of distinction. I don't think we can take a very clear demarcation about what the right and wrongs and the role of society and the role of stepping in to prevent things. Well, that's that's where you, I think, offer a counter to the consensus view, I think, in skepticism, the worldwide skeptics movement that says, basically, the truth is what matters, you know, I don't care if these beliefs comfort you, I care about the truth, the truth at all costs, no matter how painful. No, we're not going to go to someone on his or her deathbed and say, oh, by the way, that superstition you believe in is untrue because that's kind of heartless. That's not humane. On the other hand, we, I think a lot of skeptics say, we'll speak the truth even if it makes people bristle, even if at a cocktail party, people are talking about an innocuous belief in astrology or a perceived innocuous belief in astrology. And we want to say, well, actually, I think that's BS, there's no evidence for it. And if you're going to believe that it limits your sense of autonomy and kind of designing your own life, et cetera, et cetera. So you're saying no skeptics, you're wrong about all of that. You shouldn't rail against belief just because it's untrue, only the belief that's harmful. Yeah. So I think that some beliefs are beneficial, even if they're untrue, even if they're untrue, absolutely. And it would be very hard to eradicate them in the first place, because I think they're inevitable. I think there's a whole realm of beliefs that even skeptics are not aware that they're entertaining. And yet they are. Right. Like my first edition comic books and signed books and all of that stuff, it's still, it's engaging in the same processes as a religious person, because I'm believing in unseen properties that aren't actually there. That's what I'm saying. And whilst religions have, I don't think they've consciously recognized doing this or deliberately have built upon them, they've just told stories which people find plausible because they fit with what they think is the natural structure of the world. They fit with their hard wiring. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why they work. People are also designed to believe what they're told. We tend to, Sam Harris has made this point, you know, we tend to prefer to believe what other people tell us, but we're not entirely global and we're certainly not blank slate. And the things that we tend to believe are the things which we think could actually be true. Bruce, if evolution is giving us all these beliefs because of these benefits, even evolutionary benefits, haven't we outgrown some of those benefits? It may have been useful to believe in unseen causes on the Serengeti or to be, you know, at the foot of a massive mountain and feel the numinous experience or something. But those things don't benefit us in the workaday world. Now, you know, the fight or flight instinct, for instance, you know, that's really served a purpose 10 or 100,000 years ago. But in your office, when your boss makes you mad, that fight or flight instinct is no longer so useful. So I wonder if these other hardwired, natural or instinctual beliefs, if they're wearing out their welcome. Well, I would say that, you know, as a species, we're an incredibly social animal, and I think we're always going to remain a social animal. And in that sense, if you think about the things which make us social, the concepts of love, disgust, retribution, all these things, if you start to dissect them and look at them, you can see, have supernatural components to love, for example, is considered to be a life force or an energy that can transfer that makes objects sentimental value. Discuss the hatred of a, of someone that is an outgroup member, you think about them as having some property that you don't want to be physically near them. So you have to keep a certain distance, which explains apartheid and behaviors. These are natural aspects and dynamics of social groups where, you know, we want to maintain a proximity or keep a distance or form affiliations or form allegiances. These all rely on mechanisms, which I think are part and parcel of the notion that there's a hidden property. There's something that can't be explained away. So I think it's inevitable. And whilst it's true, we are not kind of sacrificing goats and going to see which doctors as we were, you know, thousands of years ago, we are doing other behaviors and activities, which are equally as implausible, equally unsupportable. And you see them not only as persisting, but that they should persist because of the social benefits, you know, because that's who we are. And we're not going to get rid of it. Even skeptics aren't going to get rid of those kinds of beliefs. It sounds like you're implying that if skeptics succeeded their mission, which is to get people to accept only those claims, which are based on good evidence, not claims based on custom or authority or emotion, or if Dawkins had his way and everybody gave up their rigid monotheism or Randy and the JRF had their way and no one believed in psychics or ghosts or UFOs without evidence and we haven't found any evidence. Well then, it sounds like you're saying people's lives would be diminished if skeptics succeeded at turning the world into skeptics, then we'd somehow lose some of what makes us us. Well, first of all, I don't think that it's ever going to come about because I don't think you can dissuade people of beliefs that have been derived through processes of which are non-rational. Okay, so I think that I'm not concerned that they're ever going to be the case, but I'm not an apologist. I think that we need skeptics and I think the rise of skepticism in recent years has been really exciting and fascinating. We need them to point out the people who are selling the bomb detectors, to point out the people who are extracting money for kind of false mediums and that's fair game. And as I say, it's the individuals who use belief as a means to generate money or ends to their own means. And that's where skeptics have been extraordinarily successful and are continuing to point out the injustices that are going on. But I don't really think that it's going to be a case that we'll eradicate belief because, as I said, it's a byproduct of the way our brains work in the first place. And I also happen to think that it seems to be very useful in lubricating those social mechanisms which allow us to have this degree of connection that I've talked about with intimacy and forming groups. So yeah, I wouldn't say that it's a pointless exercise. I think any critical thinking is certainly to be valued and we need critical thinking. But I think we've got to know the nature of the beast that we're dealing with and that's one which is, I think, a natural and inevitable part of human reasoning. But if you consistently apply the kind of critical thinking we're talking about, won't it necessarily undermine or overturn all of these unbelievable beliefs that you're saying so benefit us? Well, except that a lot of the things that we, as I was saying earlier on, there's a whole realm of other beliefs. I mean, the ones that are most obvious are things like ESP and all the other sort of the secular, supernatural, the religious beliefs. They're the ones that everyone recognized. But I also say there's a whole other realm that I deal with in the book which are actually people don't even appreciate that they're actually equally as supernatural. So I think there's always going to be scope for these beliefs to exist. And they will just reemerge in every child. And so it's going to be a constant battle, but an entertaining one. Right, right. Before we finish up, Bruce, I'm curious where you think, let me put it this way, where do skeptics come from? If belief is so hardwired, if it's so natural, aren't skeptics kind of opposing their evolutionary heritage by being skeptics? Not necessarily. I think skeptics are another group. And I think that we both, we all entertain both ways of thinking. And that the difference between believers and nonbelievers is the extent to which education and background has allowed the more critical, rational way of thinking to control the press are intuitive ways of thinking. But these can reemerge other times of stress or illness or when the plane starts to jutter at 30,000 feet, suddenly you find yourself believing all manner of things control the outcome. So skeptics, I think, are another example of a social group who have found a common purpose in the way that they address, you know, the supernatural's power psychology, all these kind of aspects of behavior. And I think they too have their heroes and their sacred objects and a whole manner of things. You know, it might be the signed book of the Bible, as you said earlier on. Yeah, or getting a picture with Randy or something. Or Richard Dawkins, who in himself has now become a focus of adulation. He himself is kind of a rock star. I've been involved in putting on events with Richard Dawkins where the line for books to be signed literally goes around the building, you know, it's how they want to touch his hand that they want to shake. Yeah, touch the hem of his garment or something. And of course, he is a deeply humble person. He's a little chagrin by all of it. But I get the sense that he realizes we're social primates, and we have our hierarchies. And, and it's useful in organizing, my gosh, if you're going to try to respond to nonsense belief in society, it's good to have a role model of figure, a standard bearer like James Randy or Richard Dawkins or so many others have become over the last decades. Oh, absolutely. I think he's been a marvelous and galvanizing a general dissatisfaction and an alarm at the rise of irrational thinking. And there is one wonderful anecdote about Richard Dawkins. Apparently, when he was backstage in London, a couple of people walked by and someone, they had t-shirts saying Dawkins is God. He turned around and said, Oh, gosh, that means I don't really exist. Or that he doesn't believe in himself, which is hardly the case. Last question then. How does this play out in your own life? You're interested in explaining where these beliefs come from, how we're hardwired to have these beliefs, but you are a skeptic. You're a skeptic who is saying to skeptics that, well, I don't know that you're saying skeptics shouldn't rock the boat, but you're saying that skeptics shouldn't only rail against nonsense beliefs, but be a little more understanding about where the beliefs come from. Let me ask you, if you're in a cocktail party or you're, you know, hanging out with your fellows, someone tells you some outlandish paranormal or supernatural claim. Do you just quietly know in a private way that they're wrong, but you don't ever challenge them on that because you think, Oh, she needs that belief. He needs that belief. And I'm just going to let it persist. Well, my experience is that actually people are fascinated by what I do and what I write about. And I will usually evaluate the person and see whether or not they can take the truth. That usually, especially if it's something to do with someone who's recently died. And, you know, I've had experiences with people, relatives, who have had these experiences and they're convinced by them. And I don't try and take that away because that would be insensitive. And why would I want to, you know, disrupt my own family circle by becoming so critical at that point in time? But normally, actually, if it's something like coincidences or I love telling people, giving them thought experiments or giving them examples about some mathematics that they just find incredulous because they don't realize that, you know, these things are usually a lot more common than they imagine. So for most of the time, people are really disinterested to hear what I've got to say. But if it is something sensitive, involving the death of a spouse or a child or something like that, that I tend not to say anything for very good reason. This is thought provoking stuff, Bruce. I want to let our listeners know that you are going to be a speaker at this year's TAM, The Amazing Meeting, which is the James Randy Educational Foundation's annual critical thinking conference in Las Vegas. It's the largest event of its kind in the world. I'm really looking forward to having you there. And I appreciated our discussion today. Thanks for being on the show. Well, I'm really looking forward to the time. I've been looking forward to this for some time now. So I'm delighted to be speaking there. And thank you so much for having on the show, DJ. And now the honest liar explains what he learned about deception at the 1964 World's Fair. Here's Jamie Ian Swiss. What did I learn at the fair? I was 11 years old when the World's Fair came to New York City to Flushing Meadows, Corona Park in Queens. It was 1964. And by then I had been doing magic for four years. I was already performing sleight of hand magic and rarely left the house without a few small props in my pockets. And I read books about Harry Houdini, the great American escape artist and the most famous magician of all time. But what most interested me about Houdini was not his great escapes, extraordinary as they might be, but instead his success as a fraud buster, exposing phony psychic mediums in the age of spiritualism. The 1964 World's Fair was about the future, or at least the future as we were wishing for in a George Jetson kind of way. The most popular exhibit at the fair was the General Motors Pavilion, dubbed Futurama, in which sleek moving seats with tiny speakers built into the headrests glided by scenes of what life was to be like in the near future. At the Bell Pavilion, AT&T allowed visitors to try the world's first picture phone and found out that users didn't like it much. And at the White Owl Cigar Pavilion, I saw a magic show created by Mark Wilson, the star of the first ever TV magic series Magic Land of Alakazam, where I would have my first live experience of seeing a woman levitating up in the air above my head. I've never forgotten it. But for sheer and lasting impact, a window into my own personal future, none of my time at the World's Fair compared with the lesson I received at the exhibit of the International Business Machines Corporation. At the IBM Pavilion, 500 visitors at a time were hoisted 50 feet up into a giant raised ovoid structure. The IBM Eggsome called it to watch a film about computer processing projected onto nine screens. Elsewhere in the exhibit, you could see a computer that translated Russian text into English. And then in a section of small booths and entertainments, I came upon a remarkable machine. For one dollar, I signed my name on a punch card, remember those, which was then fed into a computer the size of an upright piano, a big upright piano. After a period of worrying machine noise and a burst of activity in which punch cards were moved this way and that from slot to slot, a stack of cards was delivered to me and each card bore a phrase that described an aspect of my personality. It was computerized handwriting analysis. Computers were an exciting subject in 1964, a dream becoming reality before our eyes. As the American Space Program had successfully launched its sixth space flight of the first Gemini module into orbit just two weeks before opening day of the World's Fair. If computers could launch men into space, certainly they could tell you about your personality, couldn't they? But maybe not. I didn't understand very much about computers, but I did have some grasp of the notion that the holes punched in the cards were in essence how we communicated with these machines. So if that was true and the card I was signing my name on had holes punched in it too, I couldn't help but wonder, how could the machine read my handwriting? The more I thought about it, the less I understood it. Now coincidentally, later that same year, my fifth grade school class took a field trip one day, two of all things, a computer facility. The rooms were clean and cold and very white and they were filled with gigantic machines, the power of which would within a generation be compressed to the size of a pocket calculator. As I were guide, two of us from room to room explaining what this machine did and how that machine worked and what this was for and that was about. Suddenly, before my eyes, we came upon what seemed to me to be the very item I had been continuing to wonder about for months. Either this was the handwriting analysis computer or it was something very similar, as best as my memory could reconstruct it. Except that virtually at the instant I was struck by this similarity, our guide announced in her helpful explanatory tone that this machine, unlike all the others we had seen so far, was not a computer. It was simply a machine that sorted punch cards and nothing more. What? Had I been the victim of some futuristic con game? Had the powers that be at the International Business Machines Corporation used their mastery of technology to scam me out of two weeks allowance money? Did IBM stand for illusions by bad men? I was shocked. What's more, I was outraged. And now I had no choice. My mission was clear. I had to go back to the World's Fair and find out if this was the machine that had claimed to analyze my signature. So the next time we returned to the fair, I told my parents I wanted to see the IBM Pavilion again. They were not on board with this program at all. We spent so many hours waiting online to get into the attractions. My parents thought it would be time better spent waiting to get into the new features that we hadn't seen before. But I was determined. I just had to have another look at that computer. If in fact, that's even what it was. My parents eventually relented and so we waited online again and at long last we came upon the alleged handwriting analyzing computer. There it was except that now I knew for certain that it wasn't a computer at all. Now I knew that this machine could not analyze anything because it wasn't even a computer. What it did instead was to simply distribute a random assortment of cards, each bearing a printed generalized personality trait to every person who signed a card and paid a dollar. What I did not yet know and would not learn for some years to come was that there was actually a double layered scam at work. Not only was the machine not a computer, not only could it not read the handwriting on the punch card, but in fact the personality traits printed on the cards comprised what is known in psychology circles as a universal cold reading. One of the cards reported that you are affable, courteous, and obligent. The traits on each card are personality characteristics traits which in fact apply to almost anyone, but which thanks to a psychological phenomenon known as the four effect, people tend to think apply only to themselves. Coupled with a related mechanism known as the Barnum effect, the tendency to find personal meaning in general statements, the technique is known generally as a universal reading, an ancient and basic tool of psychic readers the world over. But in order to be effective, in order to be convincing, such readings must be attached to some sort of process. If you simply provide these general statements, people are not emotionally primed to find the connections and significance that the psychic requires. It makes no matter whether the process is dealing tarot cards, reading tea leaves, examining the lines in your palm, reading your astrology chart, or signing your name on a punch card. As long as there is some kind of process involved, many people will find such readings convincing. Even though the simple fact is that our handwriting reveals nothing about our personality, no more than the shape of our heads or the date of our birth does, and every scientific test of graphology, just like every test of astrology, simply fails. Now as it turns out with the deliberate or incidental, the IBM ComputerCon was made all the more confusing by the fact that even though I couldn't conceive of the notion that a machine could read my handwriting, now get this. In 1964, IBM actually debuted optical scanning recognition elsewhere in the same building. Using a mainframe computer, the system could recognize a handwritten date within the past hundred years, provided by a participant, typically a birthday, and in turn the computer would spit out a news headline of that day. A professional con man could have done no better than to provide this perfect convincer for the handwriting hustle operating elsewhere in the same building. It was perfect misdirection, or as my friend Teller says, the little lie that sells the big lie, just like the hoop I saw the magician pass over the floating lady in the White Owl exhibit. Thinking back on it all now, the greatest magic in all of these events was of course the fact that human beings had created a machine that could recognize any kind of handwriting at all. The fake magic of the fortune telling ignored the real magic of the computer's new abilities. If this is so often the odd habit of humans, to find the trivial wondrous and dismiss the wondrous as banal. But recognizing handwritten numbers is a far cry from reading a signature, much less computing a handwriting analysis based on bogus pseudoscience. And while I didn't yet know that graphology itself was a scam, what I did now finally know was this, that I had been conned out of a dollar by a phony machine that claimed to be able to read and interpret my handwriting. I was mightily pissed off to discover that they had taken two weeks of my allowance money under false pretenses. Like Houdini, I was offended, and fired up with all the moral outrage an eleven-year-old can muster. But I was also gratified, content that I had gone full circle in my investigation, and in the end I had successfully penetrated the deception. Now, like Houdini, I was a scam buster too. So, what did I learn at the fair? I learned, at the age of eleven, that I was a skeptic. I guess I've been one ever since. This is Jamie in Swiss, and I am the honest liar. by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. Our music is composed for us by MA Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Contributors to today's show included Jamie Ian Swiss and Christina Stevens. I'm your host, DJ Glophee.