Pseudo Science
Chris, Nick and Fraser discuss why pseudo science crops up in some areas of life but others.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the miracle of Maasai barefoot technology. So Chris, let me present you with some facts. Maasai barefoot technology trainers which mimic the actions of walking barefoot, they improve posture, they alleviate lower back pain, they promote weight loss and they help firm up the buttocks. They are used by such luminaries as Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Paris Hilton and even better they only cost 250 quid a pair, right? So my question is to you is how many pairs should I sign you up for?
Speaker B:Yes, so I question your use of the word facts there but this does raise a very interesting question which is what constitutes a fact. I think you're probably right in that various celebrities wear them and that various celebrities believe that they have the properties that you sort of stated. Yeah well not just any celebrities by the way yeah so Paris Hilton. Yeah well quite, I mean perhaps you could use that as a correlate of things you shouldn't buy maybe as a... Okay
Speaker A:well you already seem down on these. Nick, I mean how many pairs would you like? I'd definitely
Speaker C:give them a go if you're just giving them away. Although I'm still struggling to see why a shoe is going to mimic the action of walking barefoot more than just walking barefoot but maybe I've
Speaker A:missed something in the marketing. Well I think that's sort of, I mean the thing is that it rolls, it's got a sort of a rolly type sole but I think it's more about that's what if you want to go you know walking through North London in your bare feet where you just can't really.
Speaker C:So that's why. I don't know it seems like I'd probably rather walk down a pavement than across the African savannah. I mean I'm less likely to tread on a scorpion or a rock or something aren't I? Just broken glass or an old kebab. Yeah the latter of which sounds quite nice actually.
Speaker A:Okay so it sounds like Chris that you're not keen on my idea of you know let's all wear
Speaker B:MB, I think they're called MBT. Yeah I think it's the extent to which you can provide empirical evidence that these things work. Now obviously lots of the companies that produce these types of devices, implements or other fitness fad related bits of equipment do produce evidence and they do do their own studies but I think the thing that fascinates me is what separates good evidence from pseudoscience and how you make a decision about that and why some areas like health and fitness just seem to be breeding grounds for lots of pseudoscience even when there is good controlled empirical evidence about the efficacy of various ways of exercising. Why some areas seem to be breeding grounds for pseudoscience and some areas like you know open heart surgery seem to be less susceptible to pseudoscience and people taking a risk on a fad or a celebrity endorsement.
Speaker A:Okay so well let's try and answer that then. Why are some areas more susceptible than others? We talked about how we wouldn't you know let a shaman or a crystal gazer do our open heart surgery but they might help us with some weight loss for example. What's the answer?
Speaker C:I'm not I think wait a minute we need to can we just let I think what we're not going to discuss we'll just assume that there are some things which are pseudoscience because the whole area of you know what exactly pseudoscience is it's something with a long history history but I don't think it's a very difficult thing to spot particularly if you're looking for it you know you know what pseudoscience looks like so we're going to kind of assume that there is such a thing as pseudoscience and it does seem to be quite influential in a lot of people's lives. I'm not even sure people don't use it for open heart surgery. I wonder if there are you know hospital chapels which people will go in to to pray you know before having an operation or whatever. You know I'm not sure I'm not sure that actually it's not a million miles away from from pseudoscientific attempts
Speaker A:to influence your your health is it? But nonetheless you make a good point but nonetheless there are certain areas for example fitness and and weight loss for example that do seem to be quite susceptible to these sorts of activities. Is it worth us exploring why that might be the case? Yeah well I wondered what Chris's
Speaker B:theory was? Well so from my point of view what I think there are a number of factors at play one is that the messages that or rather the what the genuine evidence does show is unpalatable to the to the market so if if the answer is actually you you need to do lots more exercise than you are doing and it's difficult and uncomfortable but somebody says actually I've got some evidence that shows you just need to wear some shoes then then that becomes a much more appealing thing and you're more prepared to to believe in it. I also think there's you know where the message is relatively straightforward and simple there there is a tendency for people to come into that that space especially where there's uncertainty around the evidence and provide certainty and specification so that they'll you know they'll say so what talk confidently about what it is you need to do and provide lots of detail and the detail itself and the confidence in itself is compelling and makes people react to it and listen to it and also it's the extent to which it is it is difficult to collect real evidence about something where there is an you know an absence of real evidence then pseudoscience will will fill fill the vacuum. Yeah I mean my I think the
Speaker C:my first thought here was that it's to do with feedback and the extent to which we can separate um the effects of different things so um with some like something like long-term health effects it is actually really really hard I mean even you know from a scientific point of view to isolate what the effects of different types of thing are now one of the things for example that we know we're very certain now that smoking is highly correlated with um you know with lung cancer but it took a very long time to find out because um you know it requires study of a population over quite a long period of time uh to spot these kinds of correlations and the um the correlation was spotted before the mechanism was really understood you know that actually people people noticed that smoking was highly correlated with lung cancer but there wasn't a mechanism there that that that that took longer to to uh to unearth um so my my feeling is that you know there is a there is you you might expect it to thrive in areas where it's just harder to gather scientific evidence as Chris was suggesting but I think that's to do with um probably an
Speaker A:issue to do with to do with feedback. I think it's a couple other by the way have you got a
Speaker C:cold at the moment Nick? I have yes I need some I need a homeopathic remedy. Yeah you need some
Speaker A:Masai Barefoot technology trainers. Yeah something like that. Um so look I think there's something else I think you chaps here Aleph Insights uh are too clever sometimes I think you're very intellectual but I think this is also to do with desirability and it's sort of what you were talking about in terms of simple solutions I think something you said something like that earlier on Chris is the way you see this prevalent weight loss is a good example is everyone wants or with western diet it's a lot of overweight people people want to lose weight um in fact they really want to lose weight because they want to be beautiful um and yeah I think it's to do with the desirability of what's on offer yeah but one of the things you said was that it's also a simple solution so it's desirable and simple as well I think it's to do with it's not it's not simpler than just not
Speaker C:eating cheeseburgers is it I mean that that's the easiest way to lose weight it is it is simpler
Speaker A:than that because it doesn't require any effort on your on your behalf yeah a bit cognitive effort yeah yeah so I think that's part of it as well these are desirable areas that we're talking about um I'm sure things like anything you do with sexual behavior as well or maybe being more sexually attractive or um yeah anything to do with the way you look what is there pseudoscience about
Speaker C:that I don't think I think no I think uh because it's the feedback is so immediate that there wouldn't be if I you know gave you a gave you a charm and told you if you wore that you would become more sexually attractive putting aside the placebo effect that you might suddenly behave more confidently um I don't think that it you know that that I could sustain that for very long as a business model because people would notice that it didn't work well there was a case sorry
Speaker A:there was a case a couple of years ago on on tv I think it was Jamie Oliver or some other some doctor or something some nutritionist um was talking about how I think the zinc um increases your sexual prowess or I'm not even quite sure what it what it did um and the next day and it was something to do with all you knew is you didn't need it so you just mentally switched off you needed the opposite a suppressant and and I think it was let's say zinc is found in I don't know almonds for example it's not but let's say it is um and suddenly the next day test goes well the next week test goes reported a three thousand percent rise week on week in in so so that was something that was to do with sexual performance or sexual health um anyway I'm going slightly off
Speaker B:track here Chris you wanted to say something um yeah no I was just going to say uh that um I think you know potentially we are doing humanity a bit of a disservice in that uh Nick talked earlier about placebo effects perhaps there is a bit of willing self-deceit going on that um people want the placebo effect from from whatever it is acting more confidently or um feeling feeling fitter and healthier um and they are prepared to not scrutinize the pseudoscience too too carefully in order to to get that placebo effect um and so there's a sort of a bit of self-deceit going on that if you really push somebody and you and you um and and this comes back to you know the importance of the decision if it were uh if it were immediately a matter of life and death at that point and you ask somebody to put their faith in the level of evidence that's provided for those shoes um they would probably think twice about it but for a less immediately um sort of important decision uh they're prepared to not really scrutinize it too heavily and and gain the benefits of feeling like they're healthier or um or better. I'm not sure about this um I think it comes down
Speaker C:to costs and benefits not not necessarily one or the other um and and with a lot of these things what you're being asked to do is relatively low cost let's put aside the shoes for a minute but things things like homeopathic remedies which have been shown to be completely ineffective and so on um it doesn't hurt really unless you're doing it instead of getting you know radiotherapy or something it doesn't hurt and I and I feel like that's probably the the the motivation behind a lot of these well you know things that are low level pseudoscience things like superstitions there's a kind of Pascal's wager element there Pascal's wager was the idea that you know actually given that what you potentially will get is a is an infinity of happiness in heaven you might as well go to church it's not you know it's not much of a not much of a cost compared to the potential benefit and I and I think interestingly even though Chris was saying you know if it was a matter of life and death well there are I mean you tend to find the most superstition in um in areas where there is uh life and death involved so you think of um things like I mean you know nautical traditions which are you know heavily laden with superstition um and in in the military as well you know there are a lot of little routines and and things that people will go through you know they still wear their body armor um and somewhere like uh NASA I was quite interested to find out uh recently that even in NASA which is you know pretty much a heavily scientific and technology oriented organization there's still a lot of little superstitious routines that they go through on the morning of a rocket launch so they all have eggs and steak for breakfast and then then they play a game of poker until the commander loses and then they get given a cake that they're not allowed to eat and so on and all these things that obviously don't have any impact on the uh on the the uh on the fate of the mission but but which nevertheless people like doing and I suppose they think you know what if we didn't do it if we didn't do it and it turned out you know that the rocket blew up then we'd all feel very cross with ourselves so I guess what we're talking about here is always as we are
Speaker A:I mean we've talked about um one of the reasons to do with I think was to do with the availability of data and measuring this stuff that is not always as measurable maybe is that one of the things we were saying I don't know but also as is often the case it seems to me that we're going back just to human psychology in the way we think and maybe it's not harmful if we're doing it in addition to logical stuff that we know that works um so is that it I think the the potential
Speaker B:danger though becomes uh to the extent at which from a psychological point of view the the extent to which not doing it creates agitation and you know poor performance uh if if you if you build up this set of dependencies and for some reason you're not able to do them on an occasion and and you're then left in a worse situation than you would have been if you if you never engaged in those activities in the in the first place um so I think there is a downside you know I mean largely yes it doesn't does it doesn't cost me anything to waver a single magpie as I as I always do um but if I if I built up a layer of sets of uh rituals and things that increased the cost and then for some reason I couldn't go through with those and crash my car as a result of anxiety that would that would be the reverse you know the reverse yeah I've heard that another magpie
Speaker C:thing is to hold your collar really when you see a magpie until you see another one now that strikes me as a massive investment it might be months you know well it's actually very dangerous yes so if you're driving an xgv you shouldn't be holding especially not with
Speaker A:both hands so actually so let's examine this any superstitions here that people do I used to do the magpie thing and saying good morning your lordship how's your leadership then I stopped doing that because I thought it was silly um but if we examine ourselves for a moment as it were
Speaker B:um any superstitions stuff that we do uh so um I play football and um I have a certain order of putting my um shin pads on um because that will mean that you're safe or that means yeah I mean it hasn't it hasn't actually having broken a number of bones and torn a number of ligaments playing football working it it doesn't seem to have um warded off the evil spirits but okay
Speaker C:I mean I obviously like uh when I say goodbye to my kids when I drop them off at school you know I didn't I wouldn't feel happy if I hadn't given them each a cuddle and a kiss that's you know it's not because not that I believe that that has any impact you know but I sort of do you know psychologically I kind of think I have to do that because if I didn't you know what would happen if you'd be worried oh I'd be worried about them all day okay so I definitely give
Speaker A:mine a kiss and a cuddle as well but just for that's because you like kissing cuddle reasons
Speaker C:yeah well what I'm saying is I'm not sure it's totally just that you know um I think I'd be more anxious about it beyond the fact that I'd be annoyed about not having had a kiss or a cuddle but um but yeah I mean I think there's a few things obviously we haven't really gone into the details of what we mean by pseudoscience but the um there we probably ought to distinguish between things that we come up with when we when we develop superstitions so superstitions evolve like Chris's chimpanzee example and and a lot of the things like I mean acting is another good example it's chock full of superstitions um because it's the same thing really you only get one chance to get it right yeah you know you've got it so so there is a lot hanging on in a sense that sort of the the magnitude of the potential benefits uh what if saying break a leg does work what if that one in a million chance that it does work well it won't hurt saying it you know compared to the kind of um you know deliberate trickery so fraud which is another it was the thing I was quite interested in when I was a kid because I did um uh I used to do quite a lot of uh magic I was quite into doing you know conjuring not not voodoo type things but you know just uh just sort of country tricks and um uh you know actually magicians were were in the forefront um of the fight against um sort of malicious pseudoscience particularly uh one chap called James Randi who I think is still alive um and uh because they could see how easily you could fool people and and I think this touches on perhaps what's the what are the underlying psychological effects uh when when you start seeing um superstitions and routines and things evolve and and my feeling is is that it's probably to do with our relentless search for law-like behavior in the world which um you know enables us ultimately enables us to control the world you know so that if we if if we discover that there's a connection between you know saying break a leg and the acting performance going well um you know that then that's inclined to continue we sort of you know we think okay that's good I can I can make it more likely that things will go well and and I and I feel I suspect that that's something to do with it it's the fact that we're always looking for causation so that we can so that we can um you know manipulate the world to our advantage and um you know a lot of the time uh you know we we form those beliefs in the absence of any you know there aren't controlled studies so a few bits of anecdotal evidence provided what you're being asked to do is not terribly onerous probably are enough to motivate people to to you know start incorporating superstition into their everyday life do you
Speaker B:think there's a reason why we're not able to um sort of ditch those superstitions when we when we don't believe in them anymore you know is there any kind of uh reason in terms of um why that why it would be a bad thing to ditch redundant behavior or heuristics I've got a
Speaker C:painting what you just asked reminds me of my cursed painting when I was in uh when I was about 11 or 12 I you know I was going through one of those kind of early teenage kind of slightly morbid phases and um I wasn't no I probably had sort of goth sympathies but I but I was never I never had the sort of degree of self-confidence to dress up uh like a goth um but uh anyway I was in the Prado in Madrid and I saw a painting by Bruegel which was called the triumph of death and it's just all these skeletons going around uh sort of herding people into horrible types of uh dying you know um ultimately a kind of memento mori to try and tell everyone you know this is the way you're going uh eventually uh anyway I liked it so I got a print of it put it up in my room and about a week later um the shelves fell down in my room I mean you know in exactly where I would have been sitting you know so a few weeks previously all the shelves fell off the wall at once and um the only thing that was still there was this painting sort of which I'd blue tacked up and I thought you know this is definitely a cursed painting but I can't throw it away it's still downstairs in a box next to those shelves that have fallen down well I see I can't throw it away I don't I can't put it up because then it'll bad things will happen but I can't throw it away either because then I'm convinced something even worse will happen so I'm basically I'm kind of stuck with this painting well there we go but I think the answer is your question is uh now the point do I believe that no but there's a slight chance you know there's a very slight chance uh I mean you know one in a billion chance that maybe there is some sort of connection you know you can't because obviously particularly in our business you know you really don't want people to go around thinking they're 100% certain of anything um now I really don't want this to be a license for people to think oh that's all right I can go around believing any old nonsense it still has to be based on evidence but this is
Speaker A:all to do with fear uncertainty and desire I think that's that's I think those are the primary emotions at work here um we need to wrap up but just one thing I mean in terms of superstitions and for years I didn't iron shirts okay um because when I was 17 I think I broke my arm um on on the same night um that I had first ever ironed a shirt okay yeah clearly there was a strong connection there so for years and years did you break your arm by getting it trapped in the ironing board unfortunately not if I had that would have been a really solid reason wouldn't it but um but the other thing I remember you know saying well I don't do the magpie thing anymore but eight years ago um when my daughter was born in her first year um she was had some health issues and we were in Brazil at the time and the only way to fix this we were reliably told by a local witch doctor essentially was to do through all sorts of bizarre rituals of and you know five minutes later I was holding her upside down over the front of the door doing doing um the sign of the cross and we had to go and get her baptized and all sorts of we had to get her exorcised essentially but um we just did it just because it was yeah it can't hurt and sure enough three years
Speaker C:later she was fine I think the the um no it is I think the to me it's sort of all of this behavior is an is a epiphenomena of of that kind of underlying it it's it's like the way that people love coincidences you know and because a coincidence is a situation in which you know some things things appear to be correlated and and the fact that it might have happened by chance doesn't really satisfy us and I think we we always want to go and find that cause of explanation because you know I think ultimately that is a very uh fundamental animal thing you you want
Speaker A:to learn about the environment so that you can control it okay let's wrap up there um it's it's good to know that the little prayer that I did just before that recording seems to have worked everything went all right nothing's gone wrong so thank thank good thank god for that um thank the flying spaghetti monster for that um so thank you chaps thank you as always um you've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast with Aleph Insights with Nick Hare and with Chris Wragg I'm Fraser McGruer thank you as always until next time goodbye
Speaker B:and I'm off to get some zinc rich almonds
