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Guile and Gullibility
Every semester, I teach American Government to 70 Freshmen. As part of the class, my students are required to review a book on American politics and, every semester, I observe the complete lack of guile my students have. Even the best students are ultimately quite gullible. They take everything they read at face value, some of them go so far as to deny that a book of facts can possibly have a point of view. This distresses me for what it says about how my students think about and understand the world.
Despite the name of the class, the three branches are, in fact, only a quarter of the class, and government itself probably only half. The remainder is a basic introduction to politics: public opinion, regime-types, parties, and so on. The class covers this much territory because, truly, the government of the United States doesn’t do so much to govern us as it is simply the mechanism through which the forces that do govern us — majoritarianism, elitism, media, interest groups — work, and the purpose of the class is to give students an idea of how these forces influence students so that they can be aware of their surroundings. It is all part of that ancient ethos about knowing thyself and, ideally, recognizing that you know nothing.
Everything we know is the result of an appeal to authority. Yes, even science, the authority of empiricism, is a much weaker foundation than many realize. The manipulation of knowledge is a simple and effective way of controlling other people. It needn’t be done intentionally or maliciously. In a democracy, public opinion itself can be quite powerful: what the public believes becomes what everyone believes in short order, and half of Americans can’t all be wrong, no? This terrified the Founders, who put great effort into preventing the formations of absolute majorities through federalism, separation of powers, the and First, Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. In the friction between competing authorities, Americans could suss-out the truth for themselves; but first Americans need to understand what is happening around them.
Hence, the book review I assign. I give my students three authorities — me, their textbook, and the book they are reading — and I ask them to evaluate the book, explaining its purpose, whether or not they are convinced, and how they justify their belief. The knowledge will still have its roots in an authority, but it should be justified belief, which is at least part of a definition of knowledge.
Overwhelmingly, they fail the task. Some stumble on the first point: unable to divine the purpose of a book, simply declaring it “factual.” Some stumble on the second. So many times my students declared a book “accurate” that I almost created a macro to ask “how do you know?” And as for justification? Well, if you can’t tell me what a book is about and whether it is right in the first place, what is there to justify? But even those who offer a justification, ultimately fall back on mere authority. They held their position because it was congruent with either the book they were reading (begging the question) or because they agreed with me (simply appealing to another authority). There was no sense of why the book was trustworthy; many of them implicitly thought the book trustworthy because it was right in the small factual details — thus, if it gets the small things right, it probably gets the big things right, but none explicitly argued this — or why I was trustworthy. They were simply authorities. (And don’t get me started on the cavalier attitude toward citation; if citations are an evidence chain, then nothing my students know is admissible anywhere.)
My students are not even willing to state on their own authority what they are currently feeling, that is how much they rely on outside authorities. And so they simply line-up with the authorities they like better without any real deliberation, thought, or judgment. How do they know what authorities they like better, given that they cannot even state their own preferences? I strongly suspect they get it from the first authorities they were placed under — which, if we’re lucky were their parents, but was probably TV and the broader culture — the very thing the Founders were trying to avoid.
It is dispiriting. There are things that students should simply be able to catch if they have been paying attention to the class. Most conspiracy theories should fall apart on the fact that the number of people necessary to keep the secret is far too large, and if the conspiracy was small enough not to be detected, then it would not have the power to implement itself in a country as decentralized as the US. And yet my students think these conspiracy theories they review — whether about the Bilderbergs, the FED, or someone else — are accurate. They believe JFK was murdered by a conspiracy of someone (precisely by whom depends on the book), yet most of these conspiracies are so large we would surely know about it.
In one paper, on Prohibition, the entire book was about how conservatives in the 1860-1880s wanted to impose Prohibition to reform society, end the long tradition American tradition of violence and alcoholism, and how this would improve society and help it progress socially. The phrasing of the review alone should have set off alarm bells: conservatives do not, as a rule, wish to end long traditions. Conservatives today might be interested in maintaining prohibition, but the people who wanted to do it in the 1860s and 1880s were rightly known as Progressives. To some extent, the book detailed the coalition (women and mainline Protestants) which also should have been a tip-off. I do not blame the student for not knowing this in advance, but the student should have at least noticed the incongruity — that groups not normally thought conservative, doing things not usually called conservative were being hung with monicker “conservative” — and at least felt that there was something wrong, even if the student could not put their finger on what.
The effect of this on my students, I do not know, but it infuriates me in two ways. First, that authors would engage in such misdirections in the first place — I teach my advanced students to be their own devil’s advocate and to qualify and caveat their claims for precisely this reason — and second that my students fall for it. And I don’t know how to teach them better to break out of it other than, when I return the reviews, to point out that they are all very gullible as nicely as I can.
Published in Culture, Education
I think Calculus is awesome.
Just not when my grade depends on it.
No kidding, it does! Which makes it handy, for human brains as well as computers.
Unfortunately, suboptimal inference is not necessarily maladaptive. That is, our inference heuristics needn’t be absolutely optimal in order to be good enough for getting on with life.
But successful students do not always question theories when they learn them first. And many conservatives would argue that too much questioning is distracting, especially in the younger grades.
So, for example, conservatives often argue it’s better to know how to add in base ten than to explicitly investigate why addition – or base ten – works the way it does, that it’s probably more efficient to have students first memorize the quadratic formula and use it before they know how to prove it, and so on.
Being the sort who did question – who could not even get myself to remember the quadratic formula correctly before I could derive it – I might have been the sort of student who lived up to your moral standards of inquiry, but at considerable cost to efficiency.
So, unless they’ve learned about justifying belief before, they are relying on your authority that justifying belief according to your standards is important. And, if they didn’t fully trust your authority for some reason, they might not have believed your claim that justifying belief according to your standards is important enough to pay much attention to, or follow through on.
I wonder how much of their gullibility might boil down to “I trust some random book more than I trust the teacher who actually bothers to take a personal interest in teaching me.”
I… have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’m not dealing with children, I’m dealing with college students. Yes, they should have learned how to follow an argument before they came to my class -they should also have learned to write, to read, and to add (and they should know the quadratic formula already). And regardless of maladaptive in the general sense, a college graduate who cannot think his or her way out of a paper bag is a failure.
I am fine with the mass of humanity not spending great deals of time thinking about the deep questions of life. Actually, I’m not fine with it -the incuriosity of man is the single greatest boon to tyrants, whether authoritarian, totalitarian, or populist -but that is not my problem today. These are college students. They are striving for a degree which certifies that they can think and they can write.
And while I do not believe that you should learn all there is to being an educated person in my one class, I do not think it is asking too much as a first step for the student to compare and contrast two books and then give an answer to the question “this one is right, because what?” That is not simply a statement of “boo” or “yea!”
I agree, they should have. But if they haven’t, it would explain their behavior.
As Ball Diamond Ball is fond of pointing out, it’s reasonable to distrust an interlocutor who makes unreasonable demands on you to justify yourself. Unreasonable demands for justification are quite likely just a form of badgering rather than an attempt to arrive at truth.
Now, a mind previously untaxed by the burden of having to justify very much might perceive as unreasonable demands for justification that ought to strike the educated mind as reasonable, if only because unfamiliar things often seem unreasonable the first few times around.
So a dynamic of “I do not trust my teacher because his demands are unreasonable” might be coming into play, and might persist until more familiarity with such demands teaches the student that the demands (and also his teacher) are not so unreasonable after all.
It’s like Merina said, “They may do horribly on their papers, but I’ll bet in the process they learn something.” What they learn from you now might not bear fruit until later, after repeated exposure builds their trust in the kind of educated thinking you demand from them and wish they already could do.
I don’t have the experience with the numbers of young people you guys do, but what I have noticed is a tendency to avoid disputations. They aren’t used to defending their own positions, or constructing a coherent attack on opposing ones. One is likely to get “well, that’s your opinion,” even when it isn’t opinions being disputed. In a technical debate, it may well be that there is no right or wrong answer, but there are trade-offs, and these are usually measurable.
I had an argument in high school that lasted the better part of two weeks about who the hero of The Odyssey was. (My teacher said Odysseus. I said Penelope.) There was nothing of any importance in this argument: I was mainly just being a pill, plus it was fun to argue with this particular teacher. Sometimes I get the idea that these kids have never had anything even close to an experience like that.
Think of the Church Lady sketches from SNL back int eh Dana Carvey days.
The median person has more than the average number of legs.
College students are idiots. Especially when taking classes that are not part of their majors. They just want to get through it.
Many years ago when living in Madison WI, I audited a 100-level Astronomy course at the University of Wisconsin, which is a relatively selective public university.
There were two “non-traditional” students in the class – a retired gentleman in his late 60s, and me (I was 29). In the lecture sessions of over 100 students, there were only two people that asked questions with any regularity. Guess who? [I also had an experience that I thought only happened in bad movies – the Prof went off on a tangent during the lecture, and one student raised her hand and asked if that was going to be on the test]
In the smaller discussion sections (approx 15 students), I heard a lot of complaining about how hard the homework was, with one girl insisting that her boyfriend, a Junior Astronomy major, had told her he couldn’t figure out how to do it.
When I was in grad school in the mid 70s, one of my cohort advised me not to take limnology in the summer. He said the class will be full of teachers going back for their diploma-mill masters degrees so they can get a salary increment, and they will drag the class down. He said they will be whining, “Will that be on the test?” and “Why do we need to learn this?”
I didn’t like hearing that about teachers as I had previously been an upper-elementary school teacher, and besides, the best time to take limnology is in summer, as there is a lot of field work best done when there isn’t ice on the lakes. It wasn’t even offered at any other time.
So I took the class, and while the teacher-students weren’t quite as bad as had been predicted, they definitely brought the quality of the class down.
My first thought regarding your post was my most prominent memory of high school, when one of my English teachers, on the first day of his class, said that his most important objective was to ensure that we all came out of the class knowing that “a lot” is two words. Perhaps we didn’t need such a low bar, but I successfully cleared that hurdle, without much argumentation or discussion required. This was in the late 70s, back in the “pre-Common Core” days. (It didn’t just start recently.)
My second thought is that, had I taken your course when I was in college, I doubt I would have done well. While I had occasional pangs, I didn’t really start to question the world in a more consistent manner until I was in my late 20s. The trigger event was when a shipmate introduced me to National Review. Although I’m outwardly polite, my thinking hasn’t been the same since.
I found Mrs. Ruby Bredberg’s high school English class in 1964-65, or maybe 1965-66, to be very helpful. In one unit we learned how to recognize common propaganda techniques. As I remember it, these were a subset of some of the lists of logical fallacies one can find on the internet.
This being a public school and educators being what they are, the textbook examples were all directed against conservatives and right-wingers. And they did expose the dishonesty of some of the rhetorical techniques I had been hearing from right-wingers ever since I was a little tyke. But it wasn’t hard for me to figure out that they worked both ways. I have been applying that knowledge ever since.
Pelicano, your comment on evaluating sources brings back memories. I had an astonishingly good teacher for AP US History. On every assignment, we had to evaluate sources for reliability using two criteria: The source’s ability and willingness to tell the truth.
I apply this test to every source of information I encounter, 25 years later.
This teacher, Mr. S, was a lefty activist outside the classroom, but kept politics out of the classroom. Once a student asked him what he hoped to accomplish as a teacher. He answered that he hoped his students would still think about the lessons he taught as they got older. I do, and they transformed me into a conservative. I expect Mr. S would be proud, but I also expect he would recognize the irony.