Why we stick to false beliefs: Feedback trumps hard evidence

People's beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

Ever wonder why flat earthers, birthers, climate change and Holocaust deniers stick to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

New findings from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people's sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong.

Developmental psychologists have found that people's beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive in response to an opinion, task or interaction, than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

Their findings, published today in the online issue of the journal Open Mind, shed new light on how people handle information that challenges their worldview, and how certain learning habits can limit one's intellectual horizons.

"If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don't, you're less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know," said study lead author Louis Marti, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley.

This cognitive dynamic can play out in all walks of actual and virtual life, including social media and cable-news echo chambers, and may explain why some people are easily duped by charlatans.

"If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information," said study senior author Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Specifically, the study examined what influences people's certainty while learning. It found that study participants' confidence was based on their most recent performance rather than long-term cumulative results. The experiments were conducted at the University of Rochester.

For the study, more than 500 adults, recruited online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, looked at different combinations of colored shapes on their computer screens. They were asked to identify which colored shapes qualified as a "Daxxy," a make-believe object invented by the researchers for the purpose of the experiment.

With no clues about the defining characteristics of a Daxxy, study participants had to guess blindly which items constituted a Daxxy as they viewed 24 different colored shapes and received feedback on whether they had guessed right or wrong. After each guess, they reported on whether or not they were certain of their answer.

The final results showed that participants consistently based their certainty on whether they had correctly identified a Daxxy during the last four or five guesses instead of all the information they had gathered throughout.

"What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident," Marti said. "It's not that they weren't paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren't using most of what they learned to inform their certainty."

An ideal learner's certainty would be based on the observations amassed over time as well as the feedback, Marti said.

Read more at Science Daily

'Alternative Facts' Have Plagued Science for Decades

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, used the phrase "alternative facts" earlier this year during a "Meet the Press" interview, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration. While the phrase is newly infamous as a result, the phenomenon that it describes has a long history in both politics and science, according to an analysis presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Public radar tends to be up for demonstrably false or implausible claims made by politicians and their spokespeople, but researchers say many people were duped in the past by alternative scientific "facts," and that the problem persists today.

"My main message is that, just as we need to be on the lookout for false or misleading information about politics and pop culture, we also need to be on the lookout for false or misleading information about science," Kevin Elliott, who conducted the analysis, told Seeker.

"Living an hour away from Flint, Mich., I'm especially cognizant of the ways that the lead industry tried to downplay the hazards of lead almost a hundred years ago in order to promote the use of lead in drinking water pipes and in gasoline," said Elliott, an associate professor at Michigan State University and the author of the book "A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science."

He and others contacted by Seeker focused on four general areas where alternative facts concerning scientific matters have been especially prevalent and damaging: the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the manufacturing industry and climate change.

Tobacco

In the 1950s American tobacco producers created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, whose purpose was to cast doubt on independent scientific research that was increasingly showing the harms of cigarette smoking, said Erik Conway, a historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who co-authored, with Harvard's Naomi Oreskes, the book "Merchants of Doubt."

"They did this by funding critiques of academic or government science," Conway said, "by funding research programs designed to blame other activities for smoking's health effects, and even by publishing their own 'scientific' journal to have an apparently independent venue to publish their misleading studies in."

"They were successful in fending off tobacco regulation this way for nearly 70 years."

The effort led to what was later called "The Tobacco Strategy" by Oreskes and Conway. The strategy, she explained, involved creating uncertainty about the science behind smoking and health, stating that health claims were exaggerated, arguing that medical innovations and technology could solve any related problems, and emphasizing that there was no need for government interference.

Conway said that the tobacco industry even created "Bad Science: a Resource Book," to help other industries understand "how to play the game."

Drugs

Sergio Sismondo, a professor at Queen's University who has long studied the drug industry, told Seeker that certain players within the pharmaceutical industry "have supported and promoted alternative facts to cloud issues about how effective and safe certain products are, and about the structure of the drug industry as a whole."

As examples, he mentioned a diabetes drug that was introduced in 1999, even though "internal documents already showed that the drug carried heart risks." Sismondo said that several years later, in 2007, the company making the drug "engaged in a quick campaign to cloud the issue."

More generally, he shared that every decade or so, a university's drug development center publishes a figure for the cost of developing a prescription drug. The most recent from 2014, he said, was $2.6 billion.

"The research is supported and then promoted by the drug industry, which uses figures like that to justify high prices, long patents and more, but the figure is grossly misleading, because it rolls in various costs that could be seen as marketing and other business costs," Sismondo said. He added that the figure also focuses on new molecules at the center of research efforts, when actually many companies incur "much lower costs when they repurpose molecules."

Manufacturing

Problems related to the promotion of misleading or false claims extend to some manufacturers of other products too, Elliott said. For example, he said the known health hazards related to asbestos and vinyl chloride, in addition to lead, were withheld from the public so that the manufacturers "could promote false information about the safety of their products."

Like the tobacco industry, these companies became experts about "manufacturing doubt" over scientific evidence challenging the safety and health risks associated with their products. David Michaels, former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, addressed the subject in detail in his book "Doubt Is Their Product."

A recent instance involved German automaker Volkswagen, which Elliott said cheated on emissions tests by installing a device in diesel engines that could detect when a test was being administered, and could change the way the vehicle performed to improve results. The device, he explained, allowed the company to sell its cars in the U.S. while its engines emitted pollutants up to 40 times above what's accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency. The automaker last month admitted guilt and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties, reported CBS News.

Climate Change

Elliott, Oreskes, Conway and many others believe that "The Tobacco Strategy" continues to be followed by big oil companies in response to science concerning climate change. Heather Douglas of the University of Waterloo prefers the expletive "bullshit" instead of "alternative facts," since the phrase popularized by Kellyanne Conway "suggests a possible equivalency between one set of facts and another, and this is just not the case," she told Seeker. "Fact-checking by the media and tracking down sources readily reveals what is reliable and what is not, and the suggested equivalence is illusory.

"There are lots of things to disagree about in the realm of climate change — what are the regional climate projections, what energy policies should we adopt to mitigate the problem, etc. — but whether humans are a substantial cause is no longer one of them."

Polls and regulation concerning smoking of tobacco products indicate that most people now believe smoking cigarettes poses health risks. A Pew poll last year, however, found that nearly three-quarters of American polled do not trust that there is a large "scientific consensus" among climate scientists on human activities being the cause of client change. In response, Erik Conway said, "No one wants to believe that he or she, personally, is helping to destroy the world's ecosystems, and unlike smoking — a personal choice that can be reversed — no one in the industrialized world can stop emitting, because we're trapped in an infrastructure that leaves us no choice."

"So we live in denial instead," he said. "That's one reason the denialist message resonates so powerfully."

The Problem May Be Getting Worse

Although problems associated with misleading or false science are nothing new, several factors appear to be drive the current use of "alternative facts." One is the political climate, particularly in the U.S., Elliott said. "It's possible that our hyper-partisan political climate and our polarized use of social media has made us all more susceptible to accepting questionable scientific claims when they appeal to our political preferences."

Douglas agrees. She said that "the echo-chambers of social media exacerbate the problem of bullshit."

Genuine disagreement among scientists is an important, inherent part of the discipline, and is critical to the evolution of scientific knowledge. It can therefore be challenging to distinguish legitimate scientific debate from statements made by those who continue to follow "The Tobacco Strategy" or similar deceptive tactics.

"We need to look at who supports different facts," Sismondo said. "When one side of a disagreement is supported primarily by (self)-interested parties, whether directly or indirectly, that should lead us to discount that side. We can never completely discount challenges to accepted facts, but we should also recognize that sometimes the challenges are motivated by greed. These challenges can nitpick away at accepted knowledge, but often this nitpicking is scientifically frivolous."

Read more at Discovery News

Boy's Fatal Meningitis Treated With Home Remedies

The parents of a toddler who died in 2012 of meningitis are on trial for giving their sick son home remedies instead of seeking medical help. David and Collet Stephan of Alberta, Canada, are accused of failing to provide medical care for their 19-month-old son Ezekiel.

The court heard testimony earlier this week that the parents treated the boy with home remedies such as olive leaf extract and whey protein, according to the CBC, in an effort to boost their son’s immune system during the illness.

Eventually a nurse told the couple that Ezekiel likely had viral meningitis and that he should see a doctor immediately. The parents instead took their son to the nearby city of Lethbridge to visit a naturopathic alternative medicine practitioner. They increased the number of holistic and natural remedies they were giving the child, saying that if he didn’t get better they would take him to the hospital. Sadly, they didn’t get the chance; the toddler stopped breathing the next day, and only then did the Stephans seek medical help.

Ezekiel Stephan did indeed have viral meningitis, which began as an untreated lung infection and got progressively worse. The boy died five days after being admitted to Alberta Children’s Hospital.

Illusions of Improvement

Why didn’t the Stephans seek medical attention sooner? One reason is that, according to statements they made to police, Ezekiel seemed to be responding well to some of their treatments. Psychology, however, offers an explanation for why the parents may have made this fatal mistake.

The perceived improvement in their son following the various treatments was an illusion. It is what statisticians call “regression to the mean,” in which two variables — in this case, ingredients given to the child and the child’s health — appear to be correlated but are not. People tend to seek (and parents tend to provide) treatment when the symptoms are at their worst. But just because symptoms subside soon after a substance is ingested doesn’t necessarily mean that it helped.

Why? Because the severity of symptoms may come and go on their own with or without any treatment. During any prolonged sickness some days will be better than others, even if the condition is getting progressively worse.

A toddler, of course, cannot give feedback on how he or she is feeling and the parents had to rely on their own subjective interpretation of his behavior. Since the Stephans believed—and wanted to believe—that they were helping him, they had a strong emotional and cognitive bias in interpreting any calming as signs of his recovery.

Ironically the eclectic nature of the treatments they gave him may have sealed his fate: Even if one or more of the home remedies were helping him, there would be no way to know which ones worked, and whether some of the ingredients may have had dangerous side effects or even counteracted the benefits of the others. This is why drug researchers work to isolate and identify active ingredients in medications: to determine which substances work and in what effective doses.

Read more at Discovery News

Girl's Suicide Blamed Unproven 'Wi-Fi Allergy'

A British mother claims that her teenage daughter killed herself over her allergy to her school’s Wi-Fi signals.

According to The Telegraph, “A mother claims a Wi-Fi allergy killed her daughter and is accusing an Oxfordshire school of failing to safeguard children against the physical effects of wireless technology, an inquest has heard.

Jenny Fry, 15, was found in woodland near her home in Chadlington, on June 11 this year after texting a friend telling her she would not be going to school and intended to kill herself. An inquest heard the teenager was intelligent and organised but that her life had been made a misery due to the prolonged effects of a condition known as electro-hypersensitivity (EHS).

Jenny’s mother, Debra Fry, said her daughter suffered with tiredness, headaches and bladder problems as a direct result of wireless internet connections at Chipping Norton School.”

Debra Fry’s claim that that her daughter could sense—much less was made ill by—electromagnetic waves and fields (EMFs) has found little or no support in the medical community.

The World Health Organization, for example, concluded that “well controlled and conducted double-blind studies have shown that symptoms do not seem to be correlated with EMF exposure… these symptoms may be due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions as well as stress reactions as a result of worrying about believed EMF health effects, rather than EMF exposure.”

Nonetheless, concern over the effects of EMFs (via power lines) have been around since the 1970s, and resurfaced in the past decade as cell phones have become ubiquitous. Indeed, there is a burgeoning market for so-called “EMF shields” that can be inserted into cell phones that allegedly block harmful electromagnetic waves (though consumer groups say there’s no evidence they are effective).

In May of this year, Berkeley, Calif. became the first American city to pass a measure requiring that cell phones be sold with a health warning about the exposure of users to radio frequency radiation.

Despite no credible scientific evidence that EMFs and cell phone radiation can cause cancer, some people claim that they can actually sense or feel the presence of radio waves. Signals pass harmlessly through our bodies all time, and always have. All our lives—and even before we were born—we have been surrounded by television, radio, and other waves.

High-energy cosmic waves including particles called muons pass through us all the time; as a Space.com article noted, “About 10,000 muons pass through our bodies every minute. Some of these muons will ionize molecules as they go through our flesh, occasionally leading to genetic mutations that may be harmful. At present, the average human receives the equivalent of about 10 chest X-rays per year from cosmic rays. We shouldn’t be alarmed by this, since it is just part of the natural background radiation under which humans and our ancestors have been exposed to for eons.”

Dr. Harriet Hall, a blogger for the consumer protection website ScienceBasedMedicine.org, notes that “the symptoms that ‘EMS’ patients report are real, but there is no evidence that they are caused by EMF exposure. In provocation studies, patients were unable to tell when they were being exposed to radiofrequency emissions, and they reported the same symptoms regardless of whether the devices were turned on or off.”

In other words no one is suggesting that the people who believe they have EMS are not suffering from real symptoms, but instead that they are misattributing what is causing those symptoms. A rash, for example, might be caused by an undiagnosed allergy, sensitivity to laundry detergent, or something else but be assumed to have its origins in unseen electromagnetic waves.

Despite Fry’s mother’s claims, it’s not clear why her daughter killed herself (or even that she intended to); she was clearly emotionally troubled and just because they both believed that she was sensitive to EMFs (and that the symptoms she described were attributable to that) does not mean she actually was.

Even if sensitivity to Wi-Fi had been demonstrated, Mrs. Fry’s assertion that “Wi-Fi killed my daughter” is a stretch. Many people suffer miserably from seasonal allergies, but it would be difficult to prove that pollen, for example, in any way “caused” a sufferer’s suicide.

There also seems to be some confusion about what drove her to suicide; a news article in November reported that Jenny was “still deeply upset” following the suicide of a close friend a year earlier, and barely mentioned EMF sensitivity.

Read more at Discovery News

Homeopathy's Shaky Science Gets Boost From New Law

Last week in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a new law was enacted that regulates practitioners of homeopathic medicine. The Ontario Homeopathy Act provides a mechanism for homeopaths to self-regulate in a similar manner to doctors and nurses.

The Act states in part, “Subject to the approval of the Lieutenant Governor in Council and with prior review by the Minister, the Council may make regulations, (a) prescribing standards of practice respecting the circumstances in which homeopaths shall make referrals to members of other regulated health professions; and (b) prescribing therapies involving the practice of homeopathy, governing the use of the prescribed therapies and prohibiting the use of therapies other than the prescribed therapies in the course of the practice of homeopathy.”

Homeopathy was invented around 1796 by a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed—contrary to modern pharmaceutical knowledge—that medicines become more effective the more they are diluted. Homeopathic solutions are often so literally watered-down that they don’t contain a single molecule of the original medicine or substance: the patient is drinking nothing but water. Nonetheless many patients swear by the treatments and believe that they have been cured of both minor and major diseases through homeopathic treatment.

Homeopathy: Consistently Ineffective

Homeopathy has been extensively studied and researchers have concluded that it does not work. In 2010 the British Science and Technology Select Committee conducted an examination of whether homeopathy has any medical or scientific validity; its report concluded:

“Given that the existing scientific literature showed no good evidence of efficacy—that further clinical trials of homeopathy could not be justified…. The Committee carried out an evidence check to test if the Government’s policies on homeopathy were based on sound evidence….The Government acknowledges there is no evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect (where a patient gets better because of their belief in the treatment.”)

Just last month the Australian government’s National Health and Medical Research Council assessed the efficiency of homeopathy for treating health conditions. It reported:

“This assessment was based on: an overview of published systematic reviews by an independent contractor; an independent evaluation of information provided by homeopathy interest groups and the public; and consideration of clinical practice guidelines and government reports on homeopathy published in other countries…. “Evidence on homeopathy was collected by identifying systematic reviews which evaluated the effectiveness of homeopathy in treating health conditions in humans. In total, 57 systematic reviews were identified that contained 176 individual studies. Studies were only considered by NHMRC if they compared a group of people who were given homeopathic treatment with a similar group of people who were not given homeopathic treatment (controlled studies).”

This use of control groups was important to help verify that any effects found were due to some active ingredient in the homeopathic solution and not, for example, a function of the placebo effects. The expert panel’s conclusion was both clear and devastating to homeopathy: “Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective. Homeopathy should not be used to treat health conditions that are chronic, serious, or could become serious.”

Read more at Discovery News

How to Get Silicon Valley’s Anti-Vaxxers to Change Their Minds

There’s been a lot of shaming and blaming of the anti-vaccination crowd in response to the Disneyland measles outbreak (even we did it). And when we released our investigation of vaccination rates at Silicon Valley preschools, people were justifiably angry: Every unvaccinated kid at those schools threatens the greater community’s protection against disease. But yelling at anti-vaxxers won’t change their minds—which is what we need most to prevent more outbreaks. That begs the question: What can turn them around?

After writing about how vaccinated people got measles in California, I read the comments posted about it on Facebook. Among the anti-vax commenters, there were a few science-hating, vitriol-slinging, homeopathy-hawking kooks. But the vast majority were…reasonable. Take this person, for example:

Someone strong enough to get the vaccine (and thus be conferred limited immunity for 2-10 years) is likely strong enough to handle the disease and consequently have real life-long immunity, which is what is really needed for “herd immunity” to actually work.

This person is wrong, of course, but there’s some science—or at least some attempts at using science—in there. It’s worth repeating, clearly: Refusing vaccines is a bad choice, but anti-vaxxers aren’t evil for making that choice. Every parent who turns down a vaccine is simply trying to make the right decision for their kid. As long as that motivation exists, there’s a chance that a parent can be convinced that vaccination is the safest choice—for their child, and those around them.

To figure out how to turn that “no” into a “yes,” it’s important to know how that decision occurred in the first place. As Amy Wallace explained in a WIRED cover story, vaccine refusal comes down to one emotion: fear. Or, in the current environment, the lack of it.

Thanks to the success of vaccination programs, many Americans have never seen a single case of measles—they didn’t get it themselves, and probably don’t know anyone who’s had it. That interferes with how they process fear in two ways.

Number one, we get responses like this one (from that same story, on Facebook):

Measles is not a dangerous disease, it is just a normal childhood disease, it’s safer to get antibodies from the actual virus than from vaccines. Unvaccinated children have higher and stronger immune systems, so they fight it fast…

Measles has, for many, become a hypothetical disease. And a hypothetical disease isn’t scary. “People become desensitized to the seriousness of the disease when they’re not exposed,” says Kristin Hendrix, a pediatric researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine. Measles was eradicated in the US in 2000, so even if you’ve seen a case, you probably haven’t met someone who pulled the short straw: The one person in 10 who gets an ear infection, potentially resulting in deafness, or the one in 20 who gets pneumonia, or the one in 1,000 who develops encephalitis—or dies.

Which leads us to number two. The risk of vaccines—the one in 3,000 chance of seizure for the MMR, or the one in more than a million chance of a serious allergic reaction—starts to seem much bigger in comparison to those fading memories of measles past. “Parents can be scared very easily by hearing about potentially negative consequences,” says Gary Freed, a pediatric researcher at the University of Michigan. And the act of stabbing your kid in the arm with a needle far more immediately threatening than the potential exposure to measles, especially if you’re counting on her not being exposed to the disease in the first place.

My husband nearly died from the tetanus vaccine when he was a kid.

Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion. No matter how many times you drive home the statistical near-impossibility of a negative vaccine reaction, it’s often overlooked in the face of a personal anecdote. If someone has a relative who had a bad reaction to a vaccine—or even a great-aunt on Facebook whose friend’s daughter became withdrawn after one—the immediacy of that story will carry more cognitive weight than numbers. Humans are big on narrative. Science (usually) is not. So now, medical professionals and researchers must figure out how to use information—cold, impersonal facts—in a way that can counteract the power of that primal (and inaccurate) risk calculation.

That job is far harder than it used to be. Doctors once were the primary source of medical information, but now it’s everywhere online—some of it true, some of it not, and the vast majority somewhere in between. That’s a problem, because humans suffer from a major case of confirmation bias. “We seek out and gravitate toward information that confirms what we know to be true,” says Hendrix. Sometimes confirmation bias is so extreme that it even turns positive messages into negative ones: One paper last year found that while pro-vaccine information corrected some misperceptions about vaccines—like the fallacy that it causes autism—reading it actually made some resolutely anti-vax parents even less likely to vaccinate.

Unfortunately, recent research has shown that presenting provaccine messages and evidence to anti-vaxers only makes them become more ingrained in their misguided beliefs.

Researchers don’t have any great ideas about how to change the “stickiness” of bad information once it gets that distorted. But there’s hope. There always have been a certain number of staunchly anti-vaccine parents—researchers estimate about 2 percent of parents fall into that camp, and that number isn’t changing much. It’s a second group of parents and patients—the so-called vaccine-hesitant—that are the ones fueling the fire of vaccine refusal. But they’re also the ones that still may be open to change.

Doug Opel is a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital working to target those fence-sitters with individually tailored information. “Parents themselves can have a hard time knowing where they are, or they don’t fully disclose what they think about vaccines in an appointment,” says Opel. “That turns a pediatric appointment into a chess match.”

Opel’s shot at a solution is a 15-question survey that gives parents a score on a scale of 0 to 100—over 50, and you’re much less likely to vaccinate. He’s most interested in targeting parents in that 50-to-80 range, by addressing their specific concerns in one-on-one conversations instead of relying solely on an impersonal Vaccine Information Statement from the CDC.

It’s not an easy job: Any conversation he has with a patient is going head-to-head with personal horror stories from Facebook friends and anti-vaccine celebrities. “We know that personal narratives and anecdotes that are emotionally laden are very persuasive,” says Hendrix, “and that people play into fear-based information more than positive information.”

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: The Silly Theory That Almost Kept Darwin From Going on His Famous Voyage

According to the theory of physiognomy, this man in Giambattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia would behave like a dog because he looks like one. Kinda like Teen Wolf, only without the sick Ray Bans.

The other day I had what could be considered a bit of an … overreaction. On a crowded train during my morning commute to WIRED there was an old lady who looked kinda mean sitting with her purse splayed on the seat next to her. What a savage, I thought, someone should put her in a home. OK, I wasn’t serious, and there are of course worse offenses in the world, but in retrospect, what was interesting and admittedly kind of rotten about my reaction was that I judged her by her looks. She had a droopy face and downturned mouth, so clearly she must be miserable and mean.

It’s patently silly, but in a way it isn’t. We’re evolutionarily programmed to read our peers’ faces. For instance, a scowling, red-faced raging person is probably best avoided, if not getting roughed up is in your best interest. Good judgement could mean the difference between falling victim to a dangerous character and rightly keeping your distance and escaping unharmed. Not that I was afraid of the old lady. I want to be very clear about that.

A couple thousand years ago some folks were apparently so worried about all this that they thought up a little something called physiognomy—the “art” of reading a human’s personality in their face. Bird-like features meant a bird-like personality, and by using this system you could figure out who to avoid without even speaking to them. But this was no fringe movement: Charles Darwin himself was judged by the physiognomist captain of the Beagle and nearly barred from the voyage. And if you can believe it, there are still physiognomists out there practicing this bunk and charging people for it, making outrageous claims like you can tell if a person is wealthy or not by their nose (I’m not kidding—oh how I wish I were kidding). Weirdly, though, there may be a tiny bit of truth to ascribing certain personality traits to certain physical traits.

But first: a brief, weird history of physiognomy.

Saving Face

It was the ancient Greeks who pioneered the practice of physiognomy. None other than Pythagoras apparently “‘physiognomized’ the young men who presented themselves for instruction,” wrote the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, meaning that he inquired “into the character and dispositions of men by an inference drawn from their facial appearance and expression, and from the form and bearing of their whole body.”

The idea was that if you looked like an animal, say, a sheep, you also had its personality. And according to Jodie Jenkinson in her essay “Face Facts: A History of Physiognomy from Ancient Mesopotamia to the End of the 19th Century,” the theory “served a dual purpose, providing a measure for diagnosing illness and delineating character, as well as establishing a method for divination”—that is, predicting someone’s future—“based on physical appearance.”

I’ve got this feeling that Giambattista doesn’t particularly like what I’m writing about him.

Physiognomy was practiced here and there in Europe in the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that the practice really blew up. For this we can thank the Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta, who according to Jenkinson legitimized physiognomy “as the product of natural science.” In his book De Humana Physiognomonia, della Porta presented often quite beautiful illustrations of humans and the animals they resembled side-by-side. The features of both parties tended to be wildly exaggerated to prove a point, and indeed Jenkinson considers the drawings to be one of the earliest forms of caricature in human society.

Mercifully, physiognomy was widely discredited by the end of the 1600s. But that didn’t stop a few rogue characters from continuing to explore it. In the 18th century a pastor named Johann Casper Lavater wrote a massive four-volume work on physiognomy, arguing that “one could better love one’s neighbor by classifying him according to his facial features.” For Lavater, who was apparently never told that it’s what’s inside that counts, physical beauty was an indication of moral beauty. He figured you could also read the wrinkles and creases in someone’s face, much like a psychic would read your palm.

Cesare Lombroso thought that you could tell a born criminal by their facial features. Oddly enough, he mostly chose ones that he himself didn’t have. Go figure!

Taking this one step further, the criminologist and accomplished racist Cesare Lombroso argued that you could pick a criminal out of a crowd by analyzing their features. Indeed, he argued criminals were evolutionary throwbacks, closer to apes than humans. By comparing them to “savages” around the world, you could tell if they were liable to fall into a life of crime. Just a few of the things to watch out for: “oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic”; “the projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes”; and of course noses with a “tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.”

And physiognomy even came damn close to altering the course of human history. Charles Darwin very nearly didn’t sail on the now-famous voyage of the Beagle—which informed his theory of evolution by natural selection—because the ship’s mercurial captain, Robert FitzRoy, didn’t like Darwin’s nose. “He was an ardent desciple [sic] of Lavater,” Darwin later wrote, “and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted wheather [sic] anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”

You’d think that with such a rotten track record, physiognomy would be extinct today—and you’d be wrong. Take, for instance, the dazzling display of delusion embedded below. Not only does a physiognomist seriously suggest on national TV that you can judge character based on facial features, but that you can use physiognomy to determine how wealthy a man is before you start dating him. “The nose is the key,” she says. “And the larger the nose, the more spiritual or financial abundance. Mother Teresa of Calcutta for example had a huge nose.” I couldn’t make this up, folks.

Facing the Music

Here’s the weird thing, though. Several studies have found that there is a bit of correlation between how people judge faces and how the owners of those faces score on personality tests, though only for a limited number of factors like extroversion and conscientiousness. When shown pictures of faces, for instance, students have correctly judged the person’s personality more often than you’d expect with pure chance.

Part of what may be at work here is testosterone. Men with higher levels of the hormone, and therefore a higher propensity for aggression, tend to have rounder, wider, more “masculine” faces. While studies have shown that women prefer such faces in their mates—perhaps because they indicate good, strong, scrappy genes—we may also be evolutionarily programmed to be wary of these types of men. Thus would a snap judgement that a wide-faced man is aggressive be potentially true. It’s not sure-fire, of course, because anyone regardless of testosterone levels can turn out to be aggressive or not aggressive, but it shows that there may just be a little truth in judging people based on their faces.

Aw, that face. That mugshot. That trail of carnage Al Capone left in his wake.

Interestingly, this can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we expect masculine-looking types to be aggressive, that societal pressure could in fact change behavior. The same goes for more baby-faced men: If we judge them to be more submissive, they could well just subconsciously give in and adopt that personality. As David Perrett of the University of St. Andrews told New Scientist in 2009: “Infants with masculine faces grow up to be children and adults with masculine faces. Parental and societal reactions to these cues may help shape behaviour and personality. In essence, people would be growing into the character expected of their physiognomy.”

The problem is, it can also work the other way around. A man with a baby face—Al Capone, for example—could subconsciously push back against the characterization of submissiveness and become a murderous bastard. (I’m not suggesting Al Capone became a murderous bastard because someone pinched his cheeks. It’s just a hypothetical.) Same goes for a more masculine-looking guy. Sick of being pegged for a meany-head, he could instead play nice.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death

Halley’s comet in 1910 before not wiping out life on Earth.

On May 6, 1910, Halley’s comet approached Earth and killed England’s King Edward VII, according to some superstitious folk. No one could definitively say how it did, but it certainly did. And that wasn’t its only offense. The Brits also figured it was an omen of a coming invasion by the Germans, while the French reckoned it was responsible for flooding the Seine.

Yet there was even more apocalyptic hype surrounding the 1910 return of Halley’s comet, which is named for astronomer Edmond Halley, who calculated that the celestial body would appear on average every 76 years. Writing to the Royal Observatory, one worrywart warned the comet would “cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and the primeval forests of North and South America to be swept by the briny avalanche over the sandy plains of the great Sahara, tumbling over and over with houses, ships, sharks, whales and all sorts of living things in one heterogeneous mass of chaotic confusion.”

Throughout history, there’s always been a bit of panic when comets approached the sun, burning off into long, ominous tails. But in the months preceding Halley’s flyby of Earth on May 19, 1910, folks got real creative with their anxiety. It didn’t help that a few months earlier, The New York Times had announced that one astronomer theorized that the comet would unceremoniously end life as we know it.

French astronomer Camille Flammarion sure knew how to part a head of hair.

He was a Frenchman named Camille Flammarion, and in typical French despair, he reckoned that as we passed through the comet’s tail, “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet,” The Times reported. Astronomers had detected the cyanogen in the tail using spectroscopy, which reveals an object’s composition by analyzing the light coming off it. “Cyanogen is a very deadly poison, a grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue being sufficient to cause instant death,” the paper wrote. To its credit, though, The Times noted that most astronomers did not agree with Flammarion.

One skeptic was Percival Lowell, who noted the gas was “so rarefied as to be thinner than any vacuum,” and therefore posed no threat. Also stepping in was Robert Ball, director of the Cambridge Observatory, who noted that another famed astronomer, John Herschel, reckoned “the whole comet could be squeezed into a portmanteau.” In a hilarious response to the question of whether a comet should be shoved in a suitcase (turns out it’s actually 9 miles long), The New York Times hit back with a short piece that begins with a vocabulary lesson:

    “The rising generation hereabout may need to be told that ‘portmanteau’ is a word of French origin used in England to describe the useful article called in vulgar American circles a ‘grip,’ and among the truly cultured a ‘suitcase.’

    “If Sir John Herschel really said this comet could be packed in a suitcase (Sir Robert is not quite sure that the hyperbolical remark originated with Herschel), he was talking nonsense. The proposition suggests three factors—the comet, the suitcase, and the packer. The comet will soon be visible, and there are plenty of suitcases, but who will undertake the packing? We do not believe that comet could be packed into a suitcase. Experience teaches that mighty little can be packed in a suitcase by any man. It takes a woman to pack one properly. There are plenty of women, of course, but Sir John’s lighthearted assertion, now gayly step-fathered by Sir Robert, will not tempt them to do any unnecessary packing. A comet, once packed in a suitcase, or even in a trunk of the largest size, would be mussed beyond recognition and of no further use to anybody. Better leave the comet where it is. We shall all feel safer.”

Halley’s comet, as seen in its 1986 pass by Earth. And it didn’t even end the world…yet.

 Others also adopted a jovial outlook for the comet’s approach. “Tunesmiths composed songs to serenade the heavenly visitor, and poets burst into verse,” writes Ian Ridpath in A Comet Called Halley. “Products such as Bird’s Custard and Pears’ Soap featured the comet in their advertising: ‘Pears’ soap is visible day and night all over the world’ was one slogan.”

But other enterprising capitalists hatched more nefarious schemes. Fraudsters hawked anti-comet pills, with one brand promising to be “an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens,” while a voodoo doctor in Haiti was said to be selling pills “as fast as he can make them.” Two Texan charlatans were arrested for marketing sugar pills as the cure-all for all things comet, but police released them when customers demanded their freedom. Gas masks, too, flew off the shelves.

The spokesman for Hope’s completely worthless anti-comet pills was apparently a hobo.

 It’s little wonder, then, that some people were getting a tad riled up. Writes Ridpath: “A shepherd in Washington State was reported to have gone insane with worry about the comet, while in California a prospector nailed his feet and one hand to a cross and, despite his agony, pleaded with rescuers to let him remain there.” Churches found themselves packed to the brim with worried followers, while at home people were going so far as to plug up keyholes to keep out the comet’s vapors. (Sound familiar? If you think these people were nuts, remember that in 2003 our government told us to seal our homes with duct tape in the event of a terrorist attack. In 2003. The 21st century.)

More rational humans saw the comet for what it really was: A truly spectacular event that a lot of us see but once in a lifetime. As Earth passed through the comet’s tail on May 19, 1910, curious onlookers packed rooftops around the world, while the French—other than Flammarion, presumably—enjoyed special comet dinners. Indeed, Flammarion seemed to stick to his theory right until the end of the comet’s show, claiming that four observers “had certain olfactory experiences, which are described variously as a smell of burning vegetables, or a marsh, or of acetylene.”

Read more at Wired Science

TV Medical Show Claims Not Backed by Science

Most people know that they can’t believe everything they see on TV, though many assume that talk shows featuring well-known medical doctors are giving them valid health information.

However a new article in the British Medical Journal examining the medical advice given on TV talk shows finds that many of the claims are unproven or unsubstantiated. The researchers examined 40 randomly-selected episodes for each of the two most popular medical shows, The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors, to examine and rate their content. From those episodes they randomly selected 80 of the stronger recommendations from each show and researched what evidence was available in the published, peer-reviewed literature to support those recommendations.

The results are sobering for anyone who heeds advice from these shows:

“We could find at least a case study or better evidence to support 54% of the 160 recommendations (80 from each show). For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%. For recommendations in The Doctors, evidence supported 63%, contradicted 14%, and was not found for 24%.”

Dr. Oz and the Magic Beans

Perhaps the most famous example of the sort of problems that the study describes emerged in 2012 when celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz endorsed green coffee bean extract as a “magic weight-loss cure” on his show. Oz was reprimanded by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., on Capitol Hill for promoting dubious and discredited supplements and treatments. Dr. Oz acknowledged of the products he features and promotes on his show: “I recognize that oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact.”

The example of coffee bean extract was raised: “Green coffee bean extract, which Dr. Mehmet Oz promoted on his show as a ‘magic weight-loss cure,’ had one scientific study backing up the extract’s purported effects … When asked specifically about the green coffee bean extract, Oz cited a study that found people who took the supplements did lose weight. However, that study was funded by the product’s manufacturer,” according to LiveScience.com.

Scientific consensus, of course, cannot be built on a single study, no matter how well designed. For doctors to determine that a drug or therapy should be used by patients — it is safe and effective, its benefits can be demonstrated beyond placebo and outweigh its side effects, and so on — dozens of studies should be consulted.

Any single clinical study, or even handful of studies, may be wrong for any number of reasons ranging from poor research design to faulty statistical analysis. The fact that the single study demonstrating the efficacy of green coffee bean extract in weight loss was funded by its manufacturer does not, by itself, discredit its results. Many perfectly valid studies are paid for by companies with a financial interest in the results. But it does mean that any potential conflicts should be noted — which they were not.

Read more at Discovery News

Fantastically Wrong: History’s Most Hilarious Misconceptions About the Elephant

Antiquity’s saddest elephant laments the cursive that someone wrote all over it.

In the “Heffalumps and Woozles” ditty from Winnie the Pooh, elephants—those would be the heffalumps—wear tuxedos and use their trunks as accordions and suddenly turn blue. Fantastical, to be sure, but it’s downright unimaginative compared to what European natural historians used to believe about the elephant: That it has no knees and it can’t have sex until it eats the ridiculously toxic mandrake root, and even when it successfully mates, dragons eat its baby.

Oh, also, you’ve been lied to. Elephants aren’t afraid of mice. Sorry. I know it was cute and all.

Now, it’d be easy to chalk up these misconceptions to the fact elephants are naturally distributed in Africa and Asia, and Europeans simply didn’t have enough contact with the animals to inform their judgements. The reality, though, is that the elephant has an old (and brutal) history in Europe.

The Foot Bone’s Connected to the Leg bone, the Leg Bone’s Connected to the…Wait, Where’s the Knee Bone?

Let’s start with the elephant’s unfortunate lack of knees, a myth that persisted through the Middle Ages. In his charting of the history of this misconception, imminent 17th century skeptic and all-around ornery fellow Sir Thomas Browne notes that even the ancient Greeks knew this wasn’t so. Western armies first fought elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela in present-day northern Iraq in 331 BC, where Alexander the Great squared off against Darius of Persia. Yes, men fought elephants. The so-called war elephant, you see, was an incredibly effective weapon in ancient warfare—if you could manage to feed them and keep them from stepping on your own soldiers. But Alexander overcame the Persians, captured their elephants, and sent the beasts back to Greece. Having seen elephants for themselves, the Greeks had no reason to doubt their possession of knees.

Hannibal’s army and their war elephants crossing the Rhône. It’d be way more awesome if not for the inherent cruelty.

Indeed, Aristotle’s description of the elephant is incredibly descriptive, and he quite thoroughly busted the myth that they have no knees. And later on in Roman times, everyone who was anyone knew elephants had knees, because those lucky enough to attend gladiatorial games were treated to the cruel slaughter of the animals hauled in from Africa. In fact, in his sprawling encyclopedia Natural History, Pliny the Elder specifically mentions the elephant’s knees when recounting a battle in Rome’s Circus between 20 of the beasts and a number of men:

“One of these animals fought in a most astonishing manner; being pierced through the feet, it dragged itself on its knees towards the troop, and seizing their bucklers, tossed them aloft into the air: and as they came to the ground they greatly amused the spectators, for they whirled round and round in the air, just as if they had been thrown up with a certain degree of skill, and not by the frantic fury of a wild beast.”

An inexplicably tiny war elephant (would seem to defeat the purpose of using an elephant) at top, with wild ones at bottom. From the Rochester bestiary.

 Yet after Pliny and Aristotle debunked the notion that elephants don’t have knees, the idea popped back up after the fall of the Roman Empire. For that we can thank the Physiologus, which was written between the second and third centuries AD. Pulling from all manner of ancient authors, this was the mother of all bestiaries. “The elephant has no knee joints enabling him to sleep lying down if he wanted to,” it claimed. From there the fallacy made its way into other bestiaries throughout the Middle Ages.

More skeptical natural historians eventually began to question this, though. The 13th century’s Albertus Magnus, for instance, noted that the elephant wasn’t missing knees—it just had stiff joints in its legs, limbs he claimed were the same girth from top to bottom, like pillars of meat. Such robustness, Magnus claimed, was necessary to support its weight.

Dangerous Sex, Slaughtering Mice, and Other Elephantoid Pursuits

The Physiologus also helped disseminate other fanciful elephant “facts” that had been bouncing around intellectual circles in the ancient world. Take for instance, the beast’s odd sex life. According to the book’s anonymous author, when elephants want to conceive, a male and a female must head “to the east near paradise,” where they’ll find the mandrake. This plant’s root has a long history of being used by humans as an aphrodisiac, though as a member of the nightshade family it contains powerful toxins that can kill in high doses. (It was once said to take the form of a human that screamed bloody murder when you pulled it from the ground, killing anything within earshot.) The elephants supposedly give it a nibble, and “the female immediately conceives in the womb.”

Elephants gather to mate around a mandrake, lower right, which they’ll eat as an aphrodisiac. The voyeuristic dragon is presumably there to watch and eat their babies.

 According to the Physiologus, when it comes time for the female to give birth, the male must be vigilant, for the elephant’s eternal enemy, the serpent, will snatch the baby. Pliny refers to it as a dragon, but he’s likely referring to a large constrictor. This fiend is “perpetually at war with the elephant,” he writes, “and is itself of so enormous a size, as easily to envelop the elephants with its folds, and encircle them in its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth, and by its weight, crushes the dragon which is entwined around it.” In the Physiologus, the serpent seems decidedly smaller, as the male elephant “kills it by trampling on it until it dies.”

Not bad for a creature that’s supposedly afraid of the lowly mouse. And for this myth we once again have Pliny to thank, believe it or not. Elephants “hate mice and will refuse to eat fodder that has been touched by one,” he claims. Not so. As a researcher of elephant behavior told LiveScience in 2011: “In the wild, anything that suddenly runs or slithers by an elephant can spook it. It doesn’t have to be a mouse—dogs, cats, snakes or any animal that makes sudden movements by an elephant’s feet can startle it.”

Read more at Wired Science

When Spirits 'Dictate' Books: What's to Believe?

Just in time for Halloween, there are several recent books out that are claimed to have been written by dead people through living writers. One is by musician David Young called “Channeling Harrison,” in which he claims that the spirit of ex-Beatle George Harrison is in contact with him, guiding his songwriting and teaching him life lessons.

There is nothing new about this; so-called “channeled” books were very popular in New Age circles in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the most popular was the 1970s book series “Seth Speaks,” dictated by Jane Roberts, who claimed that an energy named Seth possessed her body and dictated esoteric information through her about the soul, the nature of consciousness, spiritual truths, higher planes of reality, and so on.

Channeling remains immensely popular among New Agers; hundreds of books, audiotapes, seminars, and DVDs are devoted to the practice.

Ghost-Written Books

Earlier this year in her book “Conversations with History,” claimed psychic medium Susan Lander wrote that Betsy Ross, widely credited with sewing America’s first flag, came out to her as a lesbian about 175 years after her death. According to an interview on Out.com, “When Lander asked Ross why she contacted her, the American icon announced: ‘I am gay and I fly the flag of pride and liberty for all of us… I am gay, I am gay, I am gay… I am speaking now as a revolutionary act,” Ross explained [through Lander], saying she no longer wanted to carry this secret. ‘I want history to accurately reflect who I was.’”

It’s a surprising revelation from Ross — especially since many scholars doubt that she actually sewed the flag she’s famous for. According to “The Washington Post,” “There simply is no credible historical evidence that Ross… either made or had a hand in designing the American flag before it made its debut in 1777… it is all but certain that the story about her creating the American flag is a myth.” Given Betsy Ross’s interest in wanting history to accurately reflect who she was, it’s very strange that she would not have offered evidence defending her claim to fame.

Wendy Weir, sister of the Grateful Dead singer and guitarist Bob Weir, wrote a book titled “In the Spirit: Conversations with the Spirit of Jerry Garcia,” in which she offered 250 pages of what she says the dead singer told her about life, music, and the world, in a series of lessons from the cosmic beyond.

Unfortunately little of Jerry Garcia’s lyricism seems to have survived death, and most of his messages are indistinguishable from standard New Age platitudes; here’s a typical message: “Joy is love. Joy is peace. Joy is within each and every one of us if only we listen to it calling, follow its song, and open the doors to where we so often keep it hidden behind pressure, guilt, work, obligations, fear, and pain. Allow the light of joy to shine forth from within, allow it to penetrate the Universe, and you will be transformed, for life within you will be raised to a high vibration and the life without you will respond to this shift… This is a lesson we should incorporate into all of our lives, every day. Open up, allow your joy to shine forth, and feel the radiance, the joy, shining back to you.”

One of the problems with channeled books is that for the most part anyone can claim to communicate with the spirit of anyone, from Jesus to Napoleon to Michael Jackson, and write a book about it.

Verifying Ghostly Information

While the vast majority of information imparted through psychic mediums and channelers is impossible to independently verify, every now and then they do offer facts that can be examined.

For example before its demise in 2007 as a printed magazine, “Stuff” had a regular column called “Beyond the Grave: Interviews with Dead Celebrities.” It’s not clear how tongue-in-cheek the readers took it, but the psychic who wrote it, Victoria Bullis, was certainly serious about it. Bullis “interviewed” many dead celebrities including ex-model Anna Nicole Smith, and when Smith was asked about the then-hyped controversy over the paternity of Smith’s daughter Dannielynn, Smith was clear and unequivocal: “Please tell everyone it’s Howard K. Stern.”

However soon after the interview was published, DNA tests revealed that in fact Smith’s former boyfriend Larry Birkhead was the father. For Bullis and others who believe that people can talk to the dead, this presents an interesting problem, because the ghost said something that wasn’t true.

There are several possible explanations: 1) Smith did not know who the father of her child was, and therefore the dead don’t have any better information than the living (about paternity, cosmic truths, or anything else); or 2) Smith lied to Bullis and her readers (thus calling into question the truth of anything communicated by a ghost) or 3) “World-renowned psychic” Victoria Bullis cannot really talk with the dead as she claims.

The Psychology of Channeling

So are all these communications with dead people hoaxes or frauds? Not necessarily; surely some are cynically cashing in on dead celebrities, but most of them truly believe that they have been in contact with the dead or some unseen presence. This is neither pathological nor unusual: countless shamans, prophets, priests, and others claim to hear voices or receive supernatural knowledge or messages from the spirit world.

It’s an interesting phenomenon with a psychological explanation. When people meditate and relax, random thoughts, images, symbols, and messages may spontaneously arise. If we believe in ghosts or higher powers — and especially if we are actively trying to communicate with them — then in this harmless dissociative state we may interpret our own thoughts as coming from another consciousness outside the body.

David Young, author of “Channeling Harrison,” believes that George Harrison began communicating with him in his dreams, and Young soon began noticing what he considered to be significant coincidences in his life.

Read more at Discovery News

9/11 Conspiracies: Social Media And Their Enduring Appeal

Over the past week, a video claiming to prove that no planes actually hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, circulated widely on Facebook and other social media. Despite a self-evidently absurd premise (thousands of people saw the event, both on television and in real life above them in Manhattan), the video now has been seen almost 3 million times.

The video was soon definitively debunked; it was not a hoax nor faked, but nor was it what it was claimed to be. A 9/11 conspiracy theorist "truther" had reviewed the footage and while slowing down and manipulating the video, decided that there was something suspicious about that footage: part of a plane seemed to disappear before impact.

Researcher Mike Hall analyzed the video "proof" and discussed the results on a podcast called Skeptics with a K (as distinguished, for example, by "sceptics" who populate countries who use the Queen's English). As Slate writer Scott Huler explained, Hall found that the hijacked plane "disappeared exactly the way you disappear when you step behind a tree: The building came between the camera and the airplane. The building is a good six blocks south of the tower—in front of it, not behind it. The single supposed fact on which the video based its 2 million–hit paranoid parade was provably wrong, in minutes."

Interestingly, it did not occur to the conspiracy theorist that the video he was analyzing might have been faked or inaccurate in some way; in classic conspiracy thinking, one video that seems to show something different than dozens of others (not to mention thousands of eyewitness accounts) is hailed as the one true and accurate evidence.

Sharing the Conspiracy

So what explains the wild popularity of the video? Part of the answer lies in the unquenchable thirst for conspiracy theories, and the fact that they are impervious to debunking. 9/11 conspiracies, in part because they trade on politics and what was arguably America's greatest tragedy, are not going away any time soon.

While certain specific claims central to conspiracy theories can be, and have been, disproven (ranging from Barack Obama's "faked" birth certificate to Osama bin Laden's "faked" death to the appearance of supposedly dead Sandy Hook school shooting victims), conspiracy theories themselves, for the most part, are immune to debunking. True believers will dismiss any information that proves them wrong as simply a part of the cover-up. It's a closed information system, a self-reinforcing echo chamber that insulates beliefs from skeptical analysis.

Though the casual ambivalence with which this patently false conspiracy misinformation video spread through social media is concerning, it's important not to overstate its influence. Though the video was made by a conspiracy theorist, just because nearly 3 million people saw and/or shared the video does not mean that they endorsed it; most just passed it along as another "interesting" video, which for all they cared might as well have been of a kitten astonished by a mirror.

In fact many—perhaps most—people probably didn't get past the headline. Research has found that most people don't actually bother to read what they share on Facebook or Twitter. As a Time magazine piece (that I didn't read every single word of) notes, "Just because a story gets a lot of tweets doesn’t mean people are reading it.

"Chartbeat, a company that measures real-time traffic for websites, says its data indicate that many people only spend a few seconds on an article page before tweeting it out. Chartbeat measures things like how far people scroll down, amount of time spent on a page and where they click next in order to determine whether people are actually reading content. 'We've found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading,' Chartbeat CEO Tony Hailie tweeted."

Thus it's easy to overestimate the influence of these conspiracy videos when the psychology of social media plays a bigger role. In fact, the public ambivalence seen in the social sharing of the video (reflected in accompanying messages such as "I don't know if it's real, but check this out..." or "Something to think about...") is typical of conspiracy theory propaganda, which often includes disingenuous disclaimers along the lines of "I'm not saying it's true, just asking questions!"

In both cases the effect is the same: the "disclaimers" allow both conspiracy theorists and non-conspiracy theorists to spread misinformation and speculation under the guise of sharing an outrageous claim without having to formally and personally vouch for its validity.

Slate's Huler reminds readers "to think-- and above all check -- before you share. If it's a lie, by perpetuating it you claim at least a portion of the responsibility."

Read more at Discovery News

Can Thieves Rob People Using Hypnosis?

A woman in Germany claims she was hypnotized outside of a supermarket, put into a trance, and later woke up at home having been robbed.

A news story explains, “A pair of hypnotists are being hunted by police after a victim claimed she was put in a trance before being robbed. Police in Germany are investigating a spate of crimes involving two Russian women who tell their victims they will read their fortune. In one incident 66 year-old Sarah Alexeyeva told detectives she was spoken to outside an Aldi supermarket in Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein. But the next thing she knew she snapped out of a trance and was sat in her armchair at home. All her jewellery and valuables had disappeared, police said.”

Though such claims are unusual, they are not unheard of. According to a 2008 BBC News story, “Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotizing supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers. In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: ‘Look into my eyes’, before finding the till empty.”

There’s a certain creepy Gothic allure to the idea that a mesmerizing stranger can ask you to stare deeply into his eyes, or ask you to follow a pocketwatch swaying seductively to and fro and listen to him count backwards into a hypnotic trance. But it’s pure fiction.

Misunderstood Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a widely misunderstood psychological phenomenon, due largely to its depictions in popular culture and film. Many people believe that hypnosis is a way to access memories of traumatic events that have somehow been hidden or forgotten. In the book “Human Memory: An Introduction to Research, Data, and Theory,” Dr. Ian Neath of Purdue University notes, “The majority of studies do not find that hypnosis allows recollection of information that could not otherwise be recalled.”

In fact there is a significant danger that any information or memories that may be recalled under hypnosis may be false, created accidentally by the power of suggestion. False memories elicited using hypnosis played a role in the “Satanic Panic” scare of the 1980s and 1990s in which dozens of people were falsely accused of physically and sexually abusing children. Some people even spent years and decades in prison for crimes they did not commit based on little or no evidence other than hypnosis-derived memories.

Another common myth about hypnosis is that it can put someone into a helpless or suggestible trance-like state. To psychologists, however, this idea has no basis. If it were possible to simply stare deeply into a stranger’s eyes to induce a trance-like, compliant state, then it would happen all the time. Anyone with practice or skill in hypnosis could easily turn to a life of crime by walking into a bank, casting a hypnotic stare at a teller, and take whatever they like.

In their book “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology,” psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein debunk this popular myth: “Recent survey data show that public opinion resonates with media portrayals of hypnosis. Specifically, 77 percent of college students endorsed the statement that ‘hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, quite different from normal waking consciousness.’… But research refutes these widely accepted beliefs. Hypnotized people are by no means mindless automatons.”

Many psychologists believe that hypnosis is not some special altered state of consciousness, but simply a form of deep relaxation. Stage hypnosis — such as the kind seen in Las Vegas comedy acts where “suggestible” audience members get on stage and pretend to be chickens or caught in embarrassing situations — is not true clinical hypnosis but instead a combination of showmanship and participatory comedy.

Read more at Discovery News

The Pseudoscience of Baby Gender Prediction

Now that there’s a new addition to Britain’s Royal Family, the question of whether it’s a boy or girl is over. But for the past weeks and months there have been countless predictions about the regal infant’s gender — much of it based on folklore and superstition.

A few of the classic ways to tell whether a woman will have a boy or girl include that old chestnut that if a mother is “carrying high” she will have a girl, while a baby lower in her abdomen signifies that a boy is on the way.

Some people believe that the last sexual position adopted at the time of conception influences whether it’s a boy or girl. Centuries ago it was widely believed that if a child is born while the moon is shining, it will be a male, while a baby born during a moonless night will certainly be a girl.

Others were sure that what a woman ate during her pregnancy was important: “A craving for sweets, if indulged in, is believed to influence the unborn babe to become a female,” according to Claudia de Lys’s “Giant Book of Superstitions.”

The scientific fact is that a baby’s sex is decided at the moment of conception, and basically the result of random chance. Whichever one of the millions of sperm reaches the egg first will fertilize it, and a baby’s sex is determined by the male chromosomes.

These myths are nothing new. Folklorists have long documented a wide variety of superstitions about pregnancy and babies. Curiously — and somewhat predictably given the sexism often evident in superstition and folklore — women and mothers are given an undue amount of blame for how their child turns out.

One common belief was that the fears and emotional impressions experienced by the mother would be manifested in her unborn child. For example, if a pregnant woman loved strawberries (or feared cats) her son might have a birthmark shaped like a strawberry, or a cat.

Centuries ago a baby’s birth defects were often blamed on the mother’s damaged emotional or spiritual state.

According to “The Encyclopedia of Superstitions” by Edwin and Mona Radford, an old superstition “is that if a pregnant woman meets a hare, the baby will have a hare-lip (cleft palate) … the fear inspired by such an encounter was heightened by the idea that the hare might not be the innocent animal it seemed, but instead a witch in that form.”

No discussion of dubious Royal Baby predictions would be complete without a mention of the hordes of psychics who offered their supernatural suppositions over the past nine months.

Of course there’s a 50/50 chance of correctly guessing the baby’s sex, though apparently psychics did worse than chance. According to a press release issued a few weeks ago, “62 percent of the 50 psychics surveyed at Psychic Source, the most respected psychic service provider, predicted that the royal couple will be welcoming a female heir. Representing the majority of psychics surveyed, Psychic Ricky stated matter-of-factually: “It will be a girl. At least one of her names will be Diana.”

Read more at Discovery News