Why People Believe Weird Things

Michael Shermer

Several of the reviews at Amazon accuse this book, while being interesting, of failing to supply any answers to its title question. It's a mystifying charge since Michael Shermer provides a comprehensive checklist in chapter 4 "How Thinking Goes Wrong" and also provides additional explanations throughout the book. His list of reasons include lazy thinking, the need for comforting explanations, the quest for power and money (on the part of those who stand to gain from promoting the paranormal and other cultish movements), the Darwinian working of the human brain (pattern matching, need for a "creator" figure), poorly executed science and all kinds of other wonky thinking.

My problem with the book is something different. It's that it devotes an uneven amount of space to two of Michael Shermer's special targets; creationism and Holocaust Denial. The first is non-existant as a "problem" in this country and it comes across in this book as a truly weird Americanism. The second, while slightly more established as an "issue" over here (after all we're responsible, I guess, for the unlovely David Irving), always looks a bit out of place alongside nutters who believe in pyschic powers, the paranormal and alien abduction.

Still, Michael Shermer's discussion of the both topics (especially creationism and its determined assault on the American education system) is so interesting as to make their lengthy treatment justifiable. Nevertheless it would have been good to hear more about the paranormal, UFOs and other loony conspiracy theories (not just Holocaust Denial) all of which are only briefly discussed.

My favourite passage, however, _does_ occur in the early chapter dealing with psychic powers. After a dubiously conducted experiment in ESP, Shermer is the only sceptic in the audience. A "believer" collars him afterwards and challenges him to explain those occasions when just as we're about to ring someone our phone goes and it's them ringing us. Psychic communication?

From page 72:

"No, it is not," I told her. "It is an example of statistical coincidences. Let me ask you this: How many times did you go to the phone to call your friend and she did not call? Or how many times did your friend call you but you did not call her first?"

"I only remember the times that these events happen, and I forget all about those others you suggested."

"Bingo!" I exclaimed, thinking I had a convert. "You got it. It is just selective perception."

But I was too optimistic. "No," she concluded, "this just proves that psychic power works sometimes but not others."

As James Randi says, believers in the paranormal are like "unsinkable rubber ducks."