In his book Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoon series) says: “We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we’re dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.” (I highly recommend Adams’ book.)
Today’s edition of Coffee & COVID newsletter provides a typical example of mind reading.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal defecated a hurt-feelings story headlined, “Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland”
In short, the Journal’s ‘news’ article reported that Trump is being mean to European élites, again, and it is making them feel unsafe, again. “Europeans are afraid of Trump,” said Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, a think tank in Paris. The Journal’s inelegantly implied theme, or thrust, was that European leaders’ fear of Trump explains why they didn’t criticize the recent arrest of Venezuelan narco-terrorist Maduro.
This is journalistic misdirection, and I’ll tell you why. The Journal was imputing a motive (fear of Trump) on all European leaders, without admitting that it was editorializing, [NOTE: emphasis added] to diminish the significance of the leaders’ apparent agreement with the move and thereby prevent it from legitimizing Trump’s actions. They only went along because they were afraid, was the Journal’s implied argument, which was dressed up as ‘news.’
Mind reading is one of the most common cognitive errors I see in critical thinking and news reporting.
On a related topic Alex Edmans points out two other common errors in his excellent book May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do about It. As he says in the Introduction:
We’ll take a deep dive into two psychological biases – confirmation bias and black-and-white thinking – that are the two biggest culprits in causing us to misinterpret information.
Edmans, professor of Finance at London Business School, introduces his Ladder of Misinference. This paragraph in the Introduction summarizes this ladder.
We accept a statement as fact, even if it’s not accurate – the information behind it may be unreliable and may even be misquoted in the first place. We accept a fact as data, even if it’s not representative but a hand-picked example – an exception that doesn’t prove the rule. We accept data as evidence, even if it’s not conclusive and many other interpretations exist. We accept evidence as proof, even if it’s not universal and doesn’t apply in other settings.
May Contain Lies takes a different approach than many of the books I’ve read on critical thinking. Those other books talk about common fallacies and cognitive biases. Edmans plows new ground by offering a new way of looking at statements and claims. Highly recommended!
Loserthink and May Contain Lies are two of my favorite books on critical thinking and being objective. They will help prevent us from falling into thinking traps.
