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The Confidence Paradox (continued from preceding page)
companying such achievements are absurd claims, fads, magical thinking, and unscrupulous profiteer- ing involving the stars, holistic medicine, placebos, and the like. Open-mindedness to new possibilities and experiences is admirable, but gullibility and ignorance are never praiseworthy. I have a friend who annually scrapes together a pile of money from modest savings to pay for a costly week at a retreat that prohibits phones, radios, and all other forms
of vocalization including talking; feeds its clientele
a gluten-free diet centered on sprouts and water- cress; and designs its daily activity schedules around colonic cleansing and healing-crystal treatments. There is little new here. History rings with accounts of unwise, unpleasant, or downright dangerous “health” treatments involving flesh-eating fish, bat blood, bird feces, leeches, maggots, bee venom, bloodletting, snake-weighting massage, burning towels, human fat (Axungia hominis), arsenic hair removal, “miracle” herbal remedies, bogus medical supplements, magic crystals, electrical shock, trephi- nation, and lobotomy to name a few.
My friend gushes about the spa experiences, touting them as blissfully cleansing and testifying to their powerful health benefits, further reinforcing the well-documented potency of the placebo effect and eagerness with which many humans open wide their pocketbooks willingly to bizarre forms of self-inflict- ed deprivation and punishment in hopes of some benefit.
A list of phony treatments, holistic cures, and alterna- tive medicines touted through history by unscru- pulous merchants and hucksters would fill a small volume, yet people continue to fall victim to re- branded skullduggery in hopes of miracle results. It’s understandable if individuals are tempted to suspend disbelief when confronted with a dreadful disease or life-threatening condition, but the cost of misdirec- tion and fakery—in emotional currency, needless suffering, and disappointment—is enormous.
If know-it-alls often know the least and many average folks can be duped, are we destined to remain fools or, at best, undiscerning and gullible? After all, brains are wired to take the path of least resistance, which often means doing what we think we know or have done before. The Cornell investigation, described above, explored people’s perceptions of their own competence in the test domains of humor compre- hension, logical reasoning, and grammar, but they also studied the possibility of making the most incompetent people—the bottom quartile or lowest- scoring 25%—realize their ineptitude by making test subjects more competent through training designed
to improve logical reasoning skills. Such training was successful in several ways. It not only improved test performance scores dramatically over the course of the study but also sharpened the self-assessment of individuals participating in the training. The results point to the importance of feedback—social, critical, quantitative—in revising one’s own conclusions by comparing them with reality. Critical thinking, once again, can make a difference.
If the internet and other media abound with spin and fabrication as well as flat-out lies, where can valid and reliable information be found for those willing to take time to look? Perhaps the most important criteria are the credibility and integrity of a source of information. Every area of human interest these days, from astrophysics to abstract art, features subject-matter experts who know the field well even if they do not know everything. The shelves of libraries hold more critically acclaimed and award-winning books on wide-ranging top-
ics than most of us will ever take time to peruse. University output, including educational websites and peer-reviewed journals, are among the most trustworthy resources, but on topics ranging from pyramid power to vaccination, it’s inevitable to encounter sham sources with legitimate-sounding names offering pre-scripted conclusions masquer- ading as reliable data. Warning signs are familiar- sounding organizational or professional titles imi- tating legitimate ones, claims appearing too good to be true, glowing personal testimonials, unsound or unbalanced analysis limited to one side of a com- plex topic, or issues unduly simplified. The absence of proof does not prove or disprove anything, much like the presence of opinion. Anyone can evaluate a source of information by asking if someone, start- ing with the author and affiliation, stands to gain by making a particular claim, then remembering how those who claim they know the most often know the least according to the Dunning–Kruger effect. In the end, it might be necessary to swap the seductive allure of absolute certainty in our thinking for the better ambiguity and unease of not being quite so sure about what we think we know.
Kirvel is a Pushcart Prize (twice) and Best of the Net nominee for fiction. Awards include the Chautauqua 2017 Editor’s Prize, the 2016 Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize for creative non- fiction. He has published in England, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in dozens of U.S. literary journals. His novel, Shooting the Wire, was published in Au- gust 2019 by Eyewear Publishing Ltd., London. Most of his literary works are linked on https://twitter.com/Rkirvel.
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