Before any of this, one thing needs saying: I’m not presenting myself as somebody immune to it. I’ve owned a lucky shirt. I’ve knocked on wood.
The difference between me and the people in this book is that I’ve never let irrational thinking kill anyone. That bar, depressingly, turns out to be higher than you’d expect.
Why does the line between superstition and belief matter?
Because it’s the whole line, and almost nobody draws it in the right place.
People imagine a boundary between rational persons and irrational ones, with themselves comfortably on the correct side. That boundary doesn’t exist. Almost everybody carries beliefs that wouldn’t survive examination, and most of them are harmless because nothing has been built on top of them.
The lucky shirt decides nothing. It costs nothing. If I wear it and things go badly, I don’t adjust anything except possibly my choice of shirt. The beliefs in this book are structurally identical and consequential. Somebody has decided what treatment to take, who to trust, which family members to stop speaking to. The reasoning isn’t worse than mine about the shirt. The consequences are enormously different.
Why do intelligent people believe absurd things?
Because the belief is doing a job that has nothing to do with evidence. It explains something painful that otherwise has no explanation. It supplies membership of a group that takes you seriously. It offers control over a situation where you have none, the most powerful of the three and the least discussed.
Intelligence doesn’t protect against any of that. What intelligence does is improve the quality of the justification. A clever person constructs a better defense of a conclusion they arrived at for reasons that were never argumentative in the first place. This is why credentials in the audience change so little. The reasoning is downstream of the need.
Why is evidence demanded so selectively?
One pattern recurs throughout the book. The same person will demand peer-reviewed evidence for the safety of a medical treatment, and accept a blurry video of keys apparently sticking to somebody’s arm as definitive proof of magnetism. They’ll dismiss decades of development as untrustworthy while completely trusting anonymous posts and videos by people whose scientific credentials consist of having done their own research.
From outside, that looks like hypocrisy. It’s not, and treating it as hypocrisy guarantees you’ll get nowhere. The standard of evidence is being set by which conclusion is wanted, and the person applying it experiences no contradiction at all, because they’re not running an evidential process. They’re running a social and emotional one that borrows evidential language.
The book on this: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe is 18 chapters through flat earth, medical delusion, secret societies and the rest, looking at what the belief is doing for the believer.
Does debunking change what people believe?
Mockery hardens the position and removes you as somebody they might listen to later.
Usually it fails, and that changed how I write about the subject. Direct contradiction from outside the group confirms something the belief already contains: that outsiders are hostile and can’t be trusted. Every fact you present is evidence for the thing you’re trying to disprove. That doesn’t mean saying nothing. It means recognizing that the argument isn’t where the work happens. What moves people, in the accounts I’ve read and the cases I’ve watched, is almost always a relationship that stayed intact long enough for them to have somewhere to go when the belief stopped serving them.
What moves people, in the accounts I’ve read and the cases I’ve watched, is almost never a decisive fact.Share on X
What do you do when somebody believes something dangerous?
Some of these are dangerous, and the medical ones are the clearest case. A flat earth belief costs the believer very little. Somebody’s cousin is out fifty dollars on a laser. A belief that a proven treatment is poison and an unproven one is a cure decides whether a person is alive in two years, and it frequently decides it for their children as well.
I don’t think mockery has any role there, and not on grounds of politeness. Mockery hardens the position and removes you as somebody they might listen to later. It’s the least effective available response and it’s enormously satisfying, so it’s the most common.
| Response | What happens |
|---|---|
| Mockery | Hardens the position and removes you as somebody they might listen to later |
| Debunking from outside the group | Confirms the belief that outsiders are hostile and can’t be trusted |
| Asking what the belief provides | Shows whether explanation, belonging or control would have to be replaced |
| Checking what is built on top of it | Separates a harmless belief from a consequential one |
| Noticing your own version | Removes the idea of a clean line between rational and irrational people |
| Staying in contact | Gives the person somewhere to go when the belief stops serving them |
My take
Mockery feels good and does nothing for someone who believes something dangerous. Facts thrown from outside the group confirm what the belief already says about outsiders. Keep the relationship intact instead, so the person has somewhere to go when the belief stops serving them. Ask what the belief is doing for them. A lucky shirt costs nothing. A belief that a proven treatment is poison can cost a life.
What works against false beliefs?
Ask what the belief is providing. Explanation, belonging, or control. The answer tells you what would have to be replaced.
Notice your own version. Everybody has one. Mine is a shirt.
Check what you’ve built on top of it. That’s the question. Whether the belief is true isn’t.
Don’t debunk from outside the relationship. It confirms the thing you’re arguing against.
Stay in contact. The people who come back are the ones who had somebody to come back to.
The lucky shirt is still somewhere in a drawer. I don’t believe it works and I haven’t thrown it out, and holding both of those at once is roughly the human condition.
Superstition is where my tour of the indefensible starts, with my own lucky shirt. Each chapter takes a category of belief, where it came from, why it’s wrong, and my honest reaction.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories, Current Directions in Psychological Science (via PubMed Central)
- Covid-19 vaccines do not make you magnetic, Full Fact
