From denial to reasonable doubt

Introduction

Claude: This door can be double-locked, or on the contrary wide open, and in fact it can be transparent. This is the door of belief.

[Opening theme]

Gwen: Hello and welcome to The Cassandra Project, a podcast for scientists and activists who are warning about the socio-ecological catastrophe but feel they're not being heard.

Cassandra was a Trojan princess gifted with prophecy but deprived of all power of persuasion. Unable to convince her listeners, she was condemned to see her visions come true.

A Greek myth that is sadly contemporary, as it is embodied today in the scientists and activists who are trying to warn us about the ongoing ecological and social catastrophe.

In this podcast, alone or with guests, I decode the blind spots that prevent your messages from being heard, and I share keys to break this curse.

In this third episode, I am still joined by Claude Garcia, an ecologist specialising in tropical forest management and co-author of the article "Choices We Make in Times of Crisis." Today, we take a closer look at the archetype of the denier, and propose ways to help them through the door.

If the idea of guiding deniers through doors sounds strange to you, I refer you back to episode 1, in which Claude presents the 4-door system: a framework for understanding people we tend to judge as irrational in the climate debate.

Discussion

Not a mandatory stop

Claude: So, the deniers. The first thing to know is that this is not a mandatory stage.

Gwen: Right.

Claude: Because we present it as a journey, but I might not doubt an information for even a second after receiving it. Again, it will depend partly on the channel. But for instance, think of a discoverer, someone who finds a new equation, someone who sees in their instruments that an asteroid is heading for Earth. In the film Don't Look Up, you can see this very clearly. The first reaction is: no, that can't be right, I must have made a mistake. So the first impression is going to be disbelief in the face of new information. But this state of belief and acceptance can actually move very quickly. You don't have to stop in the denier box. You can go straight through. Especially if the information aligns with a whole set of existing beliefs, if you already suspected something and this comes to confirm it.

So this door can be double-locked, or on the contrary wide open, and in fact it can be transparent. This is the door of belief.

Gwen: And if we go back to our analogy with the scientific process, part of the scientific process is to force yourself to doubt and to stay in front of this door for a moment.

Claude: Yes, absolutely. Not to rush, not to just verify and move on.

That is why scientific articles are peer-reviewed. That is why data is made transparent, and why others need to be able to replicate results, so that we don't go off in every direction just because someone said, "Oh, I think I've understood."

And this feeling of "I think I've understood" is something I know myself. I have had certainties, I believed I had understood. And then I realised: oh, I was completely off. And that hurts.

Gwen: Yes, it hurts. But I think we've all been through it at some point. And once you've been through it at least once, you remember it, and you become more vigilant.

Claude: Exactly. So, what is the necessary quality for those in the denier box? It's critical thinking. It's reasonable doubt. The goal is not to fall into conspiracy thinking, nor into naivety. You need to be able to discriminate between information. What is information? What is noise? What is manipulation? What is true? What is ill-intentioned? You've received the information. Now what do you do with it? That is the whole business of the second door.

And just as we made a typology of the ignorant, we can make a typology of the deniers. There are those who are unaware of their own denierism, those who deny being denieral. That one requires a bit of thought, what does it mean exactly? It's a bit of a brain-twister. There are those who are too busy to give credit to the fact that they might be denieral. And then there are those who say, and I've had conversations like this, "I'm afraid I might hold a certain belief." And that phrase always surprised me.

Gwen: "I'm afraid I might be a climate denier."

Claude: Yes, I've had conversations like that. And it was interesting.

Gwen: Is that a bit like the "I'm not racist, but..." type of statement?

Claude: Wow. I think if you give the benefit of the doubt to someone who says that, they think...

Gwen: We agree that some people say that while knowing perfectly well that they are racist, and just want to pass off their racist views behind it. But there are people where it's a bit more sincere. I think it works just as well with sexism, people who make generalisations and don't find it problematic.

Claude: And then one step further: "No, I promise I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

Gwen: Yes!

Claude: They can really believe that with all their heart.

Gwen: The famous "good-faith liars," once again.

How do we change our beliefs?

Claude: Exactly, exactly. That will always be there. But you see, we are making progress, because we are clearing the ground and realising that the levers for action and interaction will be different each time. And above all, it will save us from exhausting ourselves in conversations that can lead nowhere good.

Since we are talking about deniers, I love this quote, I believe it is from Alexandre Dumas fils: "Opinions are like nails: the more you hammer them in, the deeper they go." Typically, I believe it is not through argumentation that you can change someone's beliefs. I say this and all the psychologists are frowning and saying "My friend, you know nothing about our discipline, it is our job through dialogue and discourse to bring about change." So I am aware that I have my own biases and my own limits. And again, I dream of having conversations on this topic with people from other disciplines.

So we said we were going to make a typology of people who are concerned about their own refusal to believe. In the category of deniers, the four types, we will find people with healthy doubt, people with pathological doubt, people whose system, society, or social circle does not give them the means to believe anything else. All of these things exist. And this is something that door two and door three, the door of beliefs and the door of values, have in common.

As I said earlier, it forms, it gets shaped. Once I am an adult, I have the beliefs and values of my identity, my history, and the group I belong to.

So we need to ask a question: how does someone change a belief? How does someone change a value? Think about it: you, as an adult, Gwen, in your life, when was the last time you changed a belief? When was the last time you changed a value?

It is easier to change beliefs than values. I should probably clarify, I use the word "belief" in a very particular sense. It's not belief in God, it's not in that order. I claim that I believe in the law of gravity. For example, I pick something up, and I am fairly certain that none of the listeners will question this: we all believe the same thing. And this belief is supported by experiences, by scientific reasoning that has said, "Actually, we understand it this way, it has been replicated, we have experienced it ourselves in everyday life, so we have no reason to doubt it." But it is still a belief, meaning that on the basis of this belief, I will anticipate the future state of the world. If I drop my glass, every human being knows what will happen next. Will we all agree? So that is a belief. There we are.

In fact, that's it. I'm interested in belief as a cognitive mechanism, what the mind does to anticipate the consequences of an action. That is belief.

Gwen: It's what we consider to be true, to be reality.

Claude: Exactly, it's reality, it's what I believe I understand about the world. For example, if I believe the Earth is round, I will have certain beliefs and will describe certain natural phenomena in a certain way. If I believe the Earth is flat, I will have different behaviours and different expectations of the world. So that is the sense in which I use the term "belief."

Gwen: Yes, so we can fairly regularly change our beliefs about small things. And then there are some beliefs that are much more constitutive, and much more tenacious.

The power of surprise

Claude: Here's a simple example. Imagine that right now, in front of you, if we were in the same room, I started to levitate.

Gwen: [laughs]

Claude: And there you go! Exactly! You felt that amusement, that surprise, it's an emotion. You imagined what it would be like for your belief to be confronted with something different. That's exactly it, right? And now, who would be more surprised to see me levitate? You as an adult, or you as a four-year-old?

Gwen: I think me, as an adult.

Claude: Exactly. At four years old, anything is possible. As an adult, this belief is validated, rock solid, well-founded, you have no reason to doubt it. At four, well, maybe it's possible. And that's what magicians play on, again, because they show us things that our senses tell us should not be happening. And so you realise that, actually, without defence mechanisms, beliefs are in fact much easier to change than we think. All it takes is one surprising experience to suddenly call into question everything you thought you knew. If I have a train or plane accident, I will question the safety of that mode of transport, whereas before I was perfectly relaxed about it. So it's an experience that changes how our brain calculates probabilities. The probability that Claude will start levitating? Quite low.

Gwen: Quite low.

Claude: What's the probability that my train will be late, well, that depends on the country. If I'm on Deutsche Bahn, maybe higher. So in fact, beliefs change more easily than we think. Values, that's a different story. We'll talk about that later when we get to the busy.

Gwen: That's exactly what I was describing earlier with my feminism story, it's about having experiences, experimenting for yourself with something different from what had been... I was going to say what had been stuffed into my head, because that's a bit what it is, that's what makes you question things.

Claude: And if someone had told you without you having had the experience, it wouldn't have had the same impact.

Gwen: Yes, and in fact people did tell me. I was indeed confronted with feminist discourse throughout that whole period of denial.

Claude: You were told, but you hadn't lived it.

Epiphanies: sudden or gradual?

Gwen: So, this experience, because you were talking about epiphanies, or at least about sudden shifts when you receive information. Is it the same for this second door, or is it something more gradual?

Claude: No, no, it's really the same thing. Not from one day to the next, from one minute to the next.

Gwen: Yes, meaning we will have a number of experiences that begin to gradually undermine our belief, to call it into question. And at some point we become conscious of it, and this belief shatters.

Claude: Yes, these are really mechanisms. At the level of a society, it's the sum of individual processes, but the individual process itself is more of an all-or-nothing thing.

Gwen: And I imagine there are levels of experience that are more, how to put it?

Claude: More or less strong.

Gwen: More or less intense, yes, exactly.

Claude: More or less intense. There are gentler experiences. And if the experience is too gentle, it won't leave a mark and won't transform us. And there are traumatic experiences. Though trauma can be positive as well as negative.

Gwen: Negative trauma I can picture, positive trauma a little less so.

Claude: You win the lottery. It doesn't map onto beliefs, but in terms of epiphanies, there are happy events that leave their mark. There are happy surprises that mark us. So it's not only negative.

Gwen: Trauma is the force of the emotion.

Claude: The intensity.

Gwen: Yes, exactly, the intensity, whether positive or negative.

Claude: It has to cross a certain threshold. And we don't all have the same thresholds. Depending on our age, our state, our capacity for attention, our level of exhaustion, we don't all have the same thresholds.

Information without emotion does not produce meaning

Claude: Here we are touching on something I still need to think about more and discuss more, and that is the question of meaning. A scientific article contains information. It's like the tree falling in the forest. Does it make a sound? It's a bit like that. Information that has meaning is information that is perceived by a person. You read the article, the information had meaning for you. Right? It triggered something, it made you think. There were physiological processes, and that is what produces meaning. So what makes something meaningful is the emotion we attach to the information. Without emotion, information stays just information and is incapable of helping us go through the other doors. And that is why scientists for the past 30 years have been exhausting themselves trying to change the world by accumulating information, and it doesn't work, because information, science, does not produce meaning. It is emotion that produces meaning. If we are not able to connect an emotion to a piece of information...

Gwen: We don't remember it.

Claude: It doesn't accompany us on the journey.

Gwen: It's a bit like a net, how to put it? If there's a current, and you try to go fishing, if you have no emotion, the current passes through, you retain nothing. But if you have an emotion, the stronger it is, the tighter the mesh of the net, and so the more you'll catch in it, and the more the information will stay firmly anchored.

Claude: I love the analogy. I think the size of the net is what we were saying earlier, we are more or less attentive, more or less disposed, more or less ready to be surprised. The fish, the size of the fish, is the force and intensity of what we want to catch in the net.

Gwen: So experiences will be more or less transforma... tive?

Claude: Tive, yes [laughs].

Gwen: So if I connect this analogy back to sexism, which has become something of a running thread, I don't know if it's appropriate, but it is a running thread. Ultimately, we have positive transformative experiences: meeting women who in a very positive way do not fit a stereotype, which begins to do some work but not very intensely. And then we have more negative and more intense experiences, like directly experiencing sexism, which crystallise things more violently and finish the job.

Claude: In your case, yes. But it could perfectly well be the other way around.

Gwen: Yes, in this specific case.

Claude: In this specific case, absolutely.

Gwen: What I take from what we've just said is that the key to getting through this door is emotion.

Claude: And a very specific emotion in the context of the second door: surprise.

Gwen: Right.

Claude: The capacity to be surprised. But I think what you said is very interesting and very important: you need to be able to force yourself to maintain a reasonable doubt, and there is also the capacity to accept that you were wrong. All of that matters. The humility, and the strength. The humility to realise you were wrong, the strength to be able to abandon beliefs that clearly don't account for what the world is presenting to us. That's exactly the phrase I want to make: I am confronted with a reality that does not correspond to what I expected, and realising that the world is right and that it is up to me to revise what I expected of the world. That is critical thinking. A reasonable doubt, the capacity to assess and judge the relevance of information that comes to us. But without surprise, we simply don't process it.

Critical thinking and the responsibility of messengers

Gwen: The first thing that comes to mind about critical thinking is that it is particularly important when you are already convinced about a subject. Something that I think will resonate with many people, at least with people interested in climate issues and so on. Sometimes we see information go by that we really want to believe because it confirms our views. And you still have to tell yourself "well, let's verify anyway." It has happened to me, seeing something and thinking "OK," and believing it, because it perfectly supports my position. And then seeing it debunked by someone else and thinking "oh no, I was taken in on that one because I really wanted to believe it."

Claude: Yes, I think we all know that experience.

Gwen: So it's even harder on topics you're already convinced about.

Claude: Right, and that's where critical thinking is really essential.

And here we come back to what we said earlier: messengers have an enormous responsibility in making us believe things or not. And it's up to us to choose our messengers well [laughs].

Gwen: Yes, exactly, meaning we should try to be critical about our messengers. And it reminds me a bit of what happened with Covid. I think part of it is also a problem of journalists' scientific literacy, who tended to interview people simply because they were scientists, simply because they had an area of expertise close to medicine, on a topic that requires very specific expertise, and that muddied the waters somewhat. Or at least, we heard people presented to us as experts...

Claude: Who thought themselves experts.

Gwen: ...say things that later turned out to be disproved, which caused enormous harm and significantly undermined the figure of the scientist as a messenger. And something I don't think we heard often enough, for example, when I hear an expert in a field say "I don't know, that's not my area of expertise," or "I don't know, we'd need to verify," I immediately trust them more.

Claude: Yes [laughs].

Gwen: Because there's a kind of transparency about... When authority figures in a field are transparent about where their expertise begins and ends, and therefore where their authority lies, and remind me that they don't have authority over everything, or at least that when their authority ends, it is to me a sign of... Yes, of something that reassures me, let's say, that I can, how to put it, delegate my trust to this person.

Claude: Delegate, yes, that's the word.

Admitting you were wrong

Gwen: So that brings me to something I didn't want to forget earlier, where I was talking about admitting you were wrong or admitting you made a mistake. There's this issue for the person who needs to go through the door: the fact of managing to, even if you've already inwardly understood you were wrong, actually admitting it is complicated. Because there is also a kind of injunction, a kind of valorisation today, of knowing, of being sure of yourself, of not making mistakes, and so on.

Claude: It's not just today, it's a question of survival [laughs].

Gwen: [laughs] That's not wrong. We've rarely, in fact, valued that. But it may also have a perverse effect on messengers, which is that they will find it harder to admit they are wrong or that they don't know, because it can undermine their credibility.

Claude: You know, there's an experiment, there's an article, the title of the article is "The Perception of Self-Expertise." The perception of one's own expertise is linked to greater dogmatism. In plain terms: if I believe myself to be an expert, or perceive myself as an expert, I become more dogmatic. And this has been shown experimentally. You and I walk into a room. And you say to the audience, "Everyone, let me introduce Claude, an expert in decision-making processes." That single phrase, regardless of my relationship with the audience, your history with me, that single phrase will make me more dogmatic, less inclined to hear other viewpoints. So we need to be very careful about this notion of expertise.

Gwen: Because you've been introduced as an expert, so you're sort of infused with the idea of...

Claude: So I become dogmatic because I am an expert. And...

Gwen: And if you're not sure of yourself, if you don't present yourself as confident, people might question you.

Claude: Right. Well, maybe impostor syndrome has something redemptive about it [laughs].

Gwen: [laughs] Maybe... But it's true that it's a thought I often have when I listen to debates or when I listen to political speeches and so on. Very rarely hearing people say "I don't know," or "I don't know, that's not my expertise," or "I'll need to verify."

Claude: There's a phrase that stays with me, that I use and teach my students. I don't know who said it, but they should be given the Nobel Prize. It's: "There are some subjects so complicated that it takes a great deal of effort and energy just to be undecided." Just to say, I don't know.

And it's true. Hence the importance in a society of having ways to delegate decisions to others who have had the time, we'll discuss later in future episodes what we do with all of this and what social structures we should reinforce, what social structures we should create to allow society to move forward having understood and validated this framework. But here we are touching on something fundamental: what place for experts, what place for citizens, how much time for informed decision-making.