The Percentage of Americans Who Are Human Beings

Foreign Policy posted the following statistics on their blog last week in a post titled Food for Thought (I’ve added the source information):

• Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55 (Washington Times article)
  Source: Baylor University “survey of 1,648 adults, who were asked 350 questions on their religious practices [in fall of 2007].”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39 (U.S. News & World Report article)
  Source: Gallup poll “based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Feb. 6-7, 2009.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36 (Guardian UK article)
  Source: Pew poll “conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34 (MSNBC article)
  Source: Associate Press poll, “conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34 (same MSNBC article as above)
  Source: Same as above

Most of the responses to the post I’ve encountered across the web have involved some variation of alarm or disgust at how stupid these Americans are. Some people are ashamed. Others are scared!

Come on.

My take: no one can comprehend the entirety of the human experience and not everyone is convinced by empiricism.

These are cosmic topics—difficult for almost anyone to grasp. Because I haven’t dedicated years of scholarship to evolution or anthropogenic global warming, my belief in them is buoyed mostly by faith in the scientific community. I’m ok with that. There’s plenty of evidence for me to trust science (like the computer I’m using to write this).

Other people place faith in other communities—perhaps ones that believe in angels or are skeptical of global warming. I’m ok with that too, even though I think they’re probably mistaken.

There’s value in considering how much these people want to believe in angels, and how much they want to believe that they’re not destroying the planet by living the way they always have. I say there’s value in this because it helps us understand a bit more about why people believe what they do. This understanding is essential if you’re interested in making policy and persuading people to support it.

This is, ultimately, my problem with the elitist responses to Foreign Policy’s post: scoffing at people who disagree with you will not help you win them over. It seems defeatist (if not dogmatic)—if you care about global warming, you should think seriously about how to persuade people to change their behavior. It’s hard—much harder than scoffing.

Also, I really want to believe in UFOs.

Bonus reading:

Scientific American published a great little article by Michael Shermer in May called Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World that posits that the human mind may be predisposed to believe in supernatural forces like angels or “the government.”

You really should read the article, but the idea is summed up in two parts:

1. Humans often identify patterns where there are none. Shermer calls this “patternicity,” and he explains it’s origins like this:
   

   The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

2. Humans also tend to assume that the patterns we observe (whether real or not) are the result of some intentional action. Shermer calls this “agenticity:”

   As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Foreign Policy’s statistics reveal how patternicity and agenticity may be problematic for policymakers who try to base their decisions on empiricism—particularly in a democracy.

It’s also fun to watch parties on both sides of the global warming debate create “agents” out of each other—i.e. how the skeptics decry “the scientists” while global warming defenders fret about “the rubes,” as if either group were a cohesive and intentional entity.

Also, Nudge is a very fun book that examines why humans make poor decisions in the face of evidence and even past experience.