Wrong and More Wrong
Reading the newspaper was a daily ritual in my household. In fact, we had the news delivered to us daily at our doorstep. Sometimes, my sister would wake up early before work just to get an early jump at the goings-on in the world. My parents were also affixed to the headlines, which would prompt morning discussion and debate. I will never forget one morning when we were all around the kitchen table as one of our neighbors made the front page for being a bad police officer. His entire family lived in our co-op just a few floors up and was always a happy, wholesome, hardworking family. As my neighbor’s son hit the front page of the Daily News, underneath the large print headlines was his picture. Several disturbing allegations, which later see him vilified within the community as the public perception of him was tainted. Nearly a month later the bombshell, he was found to be falsely accused. When the newspaper updated the story of his vindication, it was on page seven and the damage was irreparable. The culprit wrong thinking.
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The premise for Robert Duffy’s Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything is forces us to consider how easily we can be led to wrong thinking. Duffy details 4 models based on societal influences to examine how we are influenced into wrong thinking:
• Many of us got lots of basic social and political facts very wrong.
• Faulty thinking and the media and politicians.
• Our delusions provide clues to our own emotional responses.
• Our delusions can have serious consequences.
He also provides one power point to counter the dilemma of delusions:
• Realizing the complexity of the problem is our only chance to deal with our delusions.
While the four models are indeed factual his second point concerning faulty thinking, the media and politicians was a point worth pondering for me. As America is being primed for this year’s upcoming Presidential election, the United States of America has retrenched itself into becoming the divided States of America. A major culprit in the becoming of these divided states is the dissemination of misinformation which can be directly attributed to the news media. Duffy brings this point to light using the moniker fake news, a popular slogan of the former president. Fake news long existed before he ever took office and has caused new levels of division, sexism, racism, classism, bias and prejudice worldwide. just to name a few. The media has become a misinformation superhighway. We once relied on media to present the facts in an objective manner through fair and balanced journalism, it has since converted to becoming overly subjective leaving us to ping pong between channels with the public left to differentiate what is fact and what is fiction.
If you ever to watch ABC News Tonight with David Muir in the U.S., you will find that negativity dominates its programming. There is always a good news/ brighter story to tell segment found at the conclusion of practically every show. This is generally a short 1-to-2-minute heartwarming story; however its placement is both intentional and suspect. This segment comes buried some 25 minutes into the broadcast, long after we have watched unforgettable stories and images of tragedy, terror, crime and conspiracy. As viewers have been saturated and overshadowed by an overwhelming deluge of negative images this does nothing but further enhance our delusional thinking that the world has gone totally bad. Duffy actually counters this thought narrative with one his ten suggested steps towards combatting our wrong assumptions in which he stated things are getting better; “too pessimistic view of how things are changing can cause extreme reactions, where we rip up what’s been achieved because we’re blind to the progress we have made.”
Looking at the examples he cites throughout his book there is also a credible argument that lends to how we default to system 1 thinking. As Duffy states our delusions have serious consequences and he encourages readers to look differently, “ an appreciation for how different people are, and how misguided we can be about ourselves, is important in forming a more accurate view of the world.” These misunderstandings which are often fueled by misinformation give us unnecessary wings causing us to fly off the handle. I have a saying that one of the worst types of people are the ones who are loud and wrong. That double entendre really gets up my skin. Being wrong is one thing. Being loud and wrong is another. I have been guilty of this as I can recall more instances than I care to remember where I acted on knowing incomplete facts or being swayed by misinformation leading to impulsive or wrong decisions.
I also appreciate Duffy’s mention of Kahneman’s book Thinking Slow. and Thinking Fast and the parallel he highlights between system 1 and system 2 thinking. Much of his book supports our ignorant tendency to defer to system 1 but shows us an alternative in how we should view things. The book also has a linkage to —–by forcing us to look at what’s missing and asking the right questions.
He concludes with his Ten Commandments even giving Kahneman System two approaches. This book surely can be entitled reasonable reasoning as it prescribes ways to discovering truth from fiction. It also is the identification of our mode de operandi as Duffy certainly paints a broad picture using human and societal inferences in how we go wrong. He says facts aren’t cure-alls, but they still matter. But what matters most is getting it right.
[1] Bobby Duffy, Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding, First US edition (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 221.
[2] Duffy, Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything, 233.
About the Author
Daren Jaime
One response to “Wrong and More Wrong”
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Hi Daren,
Thank you for your post.
From a Pastor’s perspectives, how do you handle the complexity of the problem of misinformation and helping people deal with delusions?