[Answered on Quora.com by Franklin Veaux]
There’s a fascinating experiment I learned about in one of my cognitive science classes in uni. It went like this:
Start with a big wheel that has a whole bunch of buttons around the edge, and a button in the center. The buttons around the edge are all numbered, but not necessarily in any particular order; the numbers might look random, like 22, 6, 108, 49, 3 ... whatever.
Anyway, in addition to the buttons, there are also two lights, a red light and a green light.
This does have to do with your question, I promise. I’m getting to that.
The experimenter brings a test volunteer into the room with the wheel and says “this is a test of learning and mathematical reasoning.” That’s a lie, of course.[1] It’s actually an experiment about how people form internal models of the real world.
The experimenter says “There is a pattern to the numbers on the wheel. Your job is to figure out the pattern. Press any two buttons with numbers on them, then press the button in the middle. If those two numbers are related, the green light will come on, if they’re not, the red light will come on. We want to see if you can figure out the pattern.”
Now here’s the sneaky part:
The numbered buttons? They’re fake. They don’t do anything. There is no pattern. When you push the button in the middle, the red light and green light come on randomly.
It’s set up so that you do the experiment in four trials.
The first trial: The green light comes on 20% of the time, chosen at random.
The second trial: The green light comes on 50% of the time, chosen at random.
The third trial: Disaster! The green light never comes on. No matter what numbers you push you always get red.
The fourth trial: Triumph! The green light always comes on, no matter what buttons you push.
Now here’s the interesting thing:
After the experiment is over, you explain that there is no pattern. The buttons with the numbers are fake. They don’t do anything. They aren’t even hooked up.
And the weird part is, almost every test volunteer you do this to will refuse to believe you. They’ll call you a liar. They’ll say you’re lying because they outsmarted you and figured out the pattern, so you’re lying to them because you’re angry that they ruined your experiment.[2] They’ll get angry at you. They’ll run out of the room. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you take the wheel apart and show them that the numbered buttons are fake. They’ll refuse to believe you even if you push the middle button over and over and show them the pattern of lights.
Once our brains have learned something through trial and error, we will hang onto that pattern we’ve deduced even in the face of absolutely overwhelming evidence that we are wrong.
Okay, so what does this have to do with your question?
Most people who go through this experiment refuse to accept the truth. They become so fixated on their own cleverness, so obsessed with their own skill, so proud of having figured out the pattern, that they cannot accept they were fooled.
They will actually believe the experimenter is lying to them before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out. They will actually reject the evidence of their own eyes, seeing fake buttons that aren’t attached to anything, before they accept that there was no pattern to figure out.
There is one group of people, however, who do not do this:
Paranoid schizophrenics.
Paranoid schizophrenics, as a group, almost always figure out there is no pattern and the numbers don’t mean anything before the experimenter explains it to them. They go through the trials, and at the end, when the green light always comes on, they say “this is bullshit, you’re fucking with me, the numbers don’t mean diddly, those buttons don’t do anything.”
Paranoia is the hypertuned hypothesis that everyone you encounter has an agenda against you and is trying to deceive you.
So. Why can people with paranoid schizophrenia pick out psychopaths so easily?
I’m not actually convinced that they can. It might simply be that a stopped watch is right twice a day. If you believe that everyone is a psychopath, you’ll have a 100% success rate identifying psychopaths…and a 100% false positive rate on non-psychopaths.
However, having said that ...
There is one difference. Most people who believe they have figured out a pattern will keep trying the pattern over and over, and each green light becomes more “proof” that they are right.
A person who believes everyone is trying to trick or deceive them doesn’t do this.
A normal person who thinks that the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 22, then when the green light comes on, say “Aha! I was right!”
A paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the numbers 101 and 22 go together will push 101 and 87, looking for a red light ... because they want to see if you’re pulling a fast one on them, so if the green light comes on, they’ll know that the experiment is a lie.
So they press 101 and 87, sure enough the green light comes on, and aha! They’ve got you. They’ve figured out you’re deceiving them.
In other words, they aren’t testing the hypothesis “there is a pattern to the numbers and I’ve figured it out.” They’re testing the hypothesis “this whole experiment is a setup and you’re trying to deceive me.”
This goes to a core part of the scientific method: falsifiability.
Why did it take so long in human history for science as a formal system to be invented?
Because human beings are wired, for evolutionary reasons outside the scope of this answer, to look for evidence that the things we believe are right, not that the things we believe are wrong.
But not even a thousand positive results can “prove” something is right, whereas it only takes one negative result to prove something is wrong. The best way to be sure is to try as hard as you can to prove that the things you believe are false, to throw everything you can into finding evidence that what you believe is wrong.
The more your ideas resist being proven wrong, the more confidence you can put in them.
Most people won’t do this. Most people can’t do this. If they think they’ve spotted a pattern, most people will only look at positive correlations that seem to confirm the pattern. (This is the classic mistake conspiracy theorists make.) People don’t want to be proven wrong.
But if you start with the idea that everyone you meet is trying to deceive you, you look for deception everywhere, even in what the experimenter, or the experiment, is telling you.
If you believe everyone is a psychopath, you see psychopaths everywhere.
[1] In many, many psychological experiments, the description of the experiment given to the test subject is a lie. Often, you’re trying to study behaviors that people do unknowingly. The description you give people can’t tell them what you’re looking for if you try to study something people do unconsciously, so you give them some other description as a smokescreen.
[2] Most of the time, most experimental ethics review boards require experimenters to disclose the real purpose of the test. It is very, very common for people who’ve volunteered for a psychological study to come away from it believing “I ruined the experiment because of my cleverness.” If you ever talk to anyone who volunteered for a psychology experiment and they say “yeah, I ruined the experiment,” what they mean was “I don’t know what the experiment was about and when the experimenter told me, I refused to believe it.”
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