IdeaLog No. 2 | The Galapagos Effect | Incredible Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Web

2009-02-15T05:11:00Z

We’re rugged individualists here in the United States. We’re not about to drink the Kool-Aid. We stand by our guns (literally and figuratively). We’re self-reliant. We think for ourselves. Right?

Not according to a long tradition of psychological research. Consider the classic experiment on conformity designed by Solomon Asch. Asch showed people lines of different lengths and asked them to tell which was longest or shortest. When operating on their own, only one person in 35 chose the incorrect answer. But when Asch enlisted confederates who posed as experimental subjects and asked these confederates to choose, unanimously, the wrong answer, almost 40 percent of the real experimental subjects conformed to the others’ judgment and gave the wrong answer as well. Worse yet, a quarter of the time 75 percent of the people went along with the obviously incorrect answer.

Asch’s experiment has been performed again and again, around the world, with similar results, and it suggests that the desire to conform runs deep in us, which isn’t surprising in a species that grew up in small bands on African savannahs.

One of the glories of the Web is that it creates communities. Whatever your interests or concerns, for good or ill, you can find others who share them. If you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you can readily go to the Web to find survivors who will share stories, advice, and encouragement. Interested in dirigible driving? Ugandan drumming? Macrophotography of insects? There’s an Internet community for you. Chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, RSS and Atom feeds, email distribution lists, Web rings, search engines, community portals, sharepoint servers, virtual worlds, Internet whiteboards, and most other technologies that run on the information superhighway exist for this purpose: facilitating community. That word, community, has a nice feel to it, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t like community?

But wed the ability of the Web to create community with our tendency toward conformity to the group, and you get something not quite so warm and fuzzy. Liberals go to liberal blogs, where they read the comments of other liberals. Conservatives go to conservative blogs, where they read the comments of other conservatives. So, liberals will learn that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States gets 48 percent of the income, and conservatives will learn that the top 10 percent of earners in the United States pays 70 percent of the taxes, and each will receive confirmation and no disconfirmation of his or her leaning. We know that people are terribly prone to a number of cognitive biases—to confirmation bias (the tendency to notice and remember information or ideas that confirm our beliefs), to anchoring bias (the tendency to place too much weight on something recently encountered), to the clustering effect (the tendency to see patterns where none exist), to the availability cascade (the tendency to ascribe plausibility to an idea that one hears repeated), to overgeneralization (the tendency to take particular confirming instances as general confirmation), to outgroup homogeneity bias (the tendency to think that people outside one’s group are more similar than they are). These biases, and many more, are accentuated within isolated groups (those “communities” that sounded so nice a bit ago).

On the Web it’s easy enough to find these sheltered in-groups. There’s a large community on the Web of people convinced that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation owned by foreign bankers with a master plan for enslaving Americans by creating debt. There are thriving communities of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, jihadists, people who think that vaccinating children causes autism, and folks convinced that the ruling families and financiers of the world are actually aliens from the Pleiades with a spaceport under the Vatican. Each group has its blogs, its websites, its reports and white papers detailing the “facts THEY don’t want you to know,” and continual exposure to these and only these sources of information creates an exponential increase in the group members’ certainty. So extensive are the resources the Net has made available to such groups, and so sheltered are such groups on their virtual islands, that it’s increasingly easy for those who have drunk some group’s Kool Aid to point potential converts to “confirmation.” “Don’t believe me. Look for yourself. Do some research. Check out these sites.”

Darwin’s finches showed such dramatic differences because they were isolated on separate islands where they were exposed to different selection pressures and evolved unique characteristics in response to those pressures. It isn’t difficult to figure out why American politics has become so polarized in recent years. It’s because of people’s increasing isolation within their own electronic worlds, something I call the Galapagos Effect.

IdeaLog No. 1 | Combinatorial Explosion | We Are the World

2009-02-15T03:45:00Z

Years ago a girlfriend dragged me to a psychic in New York City who interviewed me in a room hung with beads and told me I was descended from Genghis Khan. Gee, I could have told her that. Chances are I’m descended from Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, too, and so, illustrious reader, are you. Why this is so has to do with something called combinatorial explosion.

There’s an old story about the guy who invented chess. He took the game to the Shah, who loved games and war. The Shah was so pleased to see his two favorite pastimes combined that he offered the inventor anything he wanted. The inventor replied, “I’m a simple man. Just give me two grains of wheat on the first square and double them on each square after that.”

“Done,” said the Shah, in the decisive way of Shahs, not realizing that he was bankrupting himself, for numbers doubled in each generation get big very quickly. By the time you get to the last square on the board, square 64, the number of grains of wheat tops 18 quadrillion—more than the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world!

Like everyone else on this planet, you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great grandparents, and so on. The number doubles with each generation that you go back. Go back 32 generations to AD 1200, when Genghis Khan was slaying or bedding everyone in Asia, and you will find, by this method of counting, that you have 4,294,967,296 direct ancestors! But that isn’t possible. According to the Population Reference Bureau, there were only about 450 million people alive in AD 1200. How can you have more ancestors 32 generations ago than there were people on earth at that time?

The answer is that you had relatives who married relatives. In the distant past, there were fewer people around from whom to choose mates, so cousins often married cousins, meaning that they shared some of the same grandparents. Your family tree, as you go back in time, gets bigger and bigger. Then, as the number of cousin marriages starts increasing, the number of ancestors in a given generation gets smaller, and your ancestral tree starts looking more like a diamond than like a tree or pyramid. So, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you are descended from just about everyone ever alive, including lots and lots of philosophers, scientists, poets, artists, kings, and queens. The bad news is that many of your ancestors were keeping it in the family.

Scientists have recently figured out other ways to show that we are all related. Inside all your body cells are little organelles called mitochondria. These mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA in your cell nuclei. You get your nucleic DNA from both your mother and father, but your mitrochondrial DNA all comes from your mother. So, theoretically, mitochondrial DNA would pass down, unchanged, from mother to mother, through the generations. But that’s not what happens. Random accidents cause mutations in mitochondrial DNA, and since we know the rate at which these mutations occur, by comparing people’s mitochondrial DNA, we can tell how long ago they had a common female ancestor. By this means scientists have figured out that everyone now alive on planet earth has a common ancestor in a woman who lived in East Africa about 125,000 years ago. Scientists call this woman Mitochondrial Eve. Another line of research, based on differences in Y chromosomes, traces all people back to a single male ancestor who lived in Africa only about 75,000 years ago.

So, not only are you descended from royalty, but you’re also African. Even if you’re not.

LearningsBlog

IdeaLog No. 2 | The Galapagos Effect | Incredible Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Web

IdeaLog No. 1 | Combinatorial Explosion | We Are the World