Human beings are not rational by nature. We’re primates who evolved on the plains and savannas of Africa, concerned about survival. Our days were spent seeking food and shelter and procreating. At some point along the way, our large brains developed the ability to problem solve and most importantly, how to remember what we’ve learned and add on to it. This cumulative knowledge has led to the remarkable development of the species where in 2020, we create technology that would have seemed like magic to our early ancestors. But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost all of our ancestral traits.
Human brains are loaded with innate biases which cloud our judgement and make it hard to think rationally, often causing us to form incorrect assumptions about the world around us. I’m going to focus mostly on confirmation bias and how we use it when confronted with information that creates a cognitive dissonance in our primate brains.
Let’s take cigarette smoking as our first example. We have learned over time that smoking cigarettes leads to adverse health outcomes like COPD, emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease. From just a practical point of view, we can deduce that filling our lungs with smoke probably isn’t good for them, but we have more than that. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence to confirm that smoking cigarettes is literally killing us. But people still smoke them. How do smokers rationalize doing something they know is killing them? How do they keep these two contrary ideas in their minds? How do they pick up a cigarette and inhale carcinogens with the knowledge that lung cancer isn’t a particularly pleasant way to die? They will find something to cling to that allows them to do what they want; for example, my grandfather smoked two packs a day and he lived into his 90’s. Or, I know it’s not good for me, but it relaxes me and stress is also bad for you. Or, I know it’s not good for me, but people gain weight when they quit smoking and being overweight is bad for you.
Alcohol is a poison. I wrote an extensive analysis of its affects on the body here, so I won’t belabor the point. There are significant adverse health outcomes from drinking alcohol, not to mention the societal issues and personal relationship issues it can cause. But we love to drink. So we rationalize it away. They say a drink a day is good for you, or a glass of wine is good for your circulation, or I need a drink to take the edge off after a long day and all that stress from work is bad for you.
This brings me to the global COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted the world order and changed the lives of the world’s population. It’s very real, and there’s no avoiding it. We know the virus is spread person-to-person and that some people get mildly sick, some get very sick, and some die. As of this date, 140,000 Americans have died from it. More than all the wars we’ve been involved in as a nation combined, and just in 5 months time. It’s catastrophic from any angle, but we want to go on living in the way we did pre-COVID. So we have to carry two contradictory ideas in our primate brains at the same time. I want to go to a bar and drink with my friends, and go to the beach and party, and go to Bike Week in Myrtle Beach and live my life, but there’s a life-threatening disease out there and I don’t know who I might encounter that has it, and will give it to me. What to do?
First, there was the “there’s very few cases in my area,” justification. Some still use that, but it’s harder to do now as COVID cases explode around the country. The United States has been the worst developed nation in the world in containing the spread of the disease, so it’s basically everywhere now. There was the “it’s like the flu,” argument, then the “cure is worst than the disease.” The Idiot-in-Chief Donald Trump is a perfect example of this kind of resolution of dissonance. Find any bit of information that confirms what you want to be true, and run with that, ignoring or dismissing any contrary information. Most recently, as we face the prospect of sending our kids back to school, people are hanging their hopes on scant evidence that maybe very young children aren’t as susceptible to the disease. They will argue it’s worse for their health not to attend school than to attend and risk contracting the disease. Trump, as is his nature, takes the argument to a ridiculous degree and said in a recent FOX News interview that kids, they get it and they get the sniffles for 2 days and then they’re fine. This is not true of course, but he so desperately wants it to be true, and for others to think it’s true, that it becomes his position. He has said that the CoV-2 virus is 99% harmless, which is basically taking a 1% mortality rate and assuming the 99% of people who didn’t die from it are fine. So it’s harmless. Again, ridiculous and false, but it resolves the dissonance.
I recently read a long thread of comments on Facebook, among reasonably intelligent people, about the mortality rate of COVID-19, who posted all sorts of information confirming their belief that it was okay to continue living as we always have, albeit with some precautions like physical distancing and mask wearing, because the death rate was so low. This is the confirmation bias that is bothering me most right now, because one can use the % of people who die from the disease as a powerful argument that it’s not as bad as the “media” makes it out to be. It can be pretty convincing because after all, we want to go on living our pre-COVID lifestyles and if the death rate really is pretty low, maybe it’s okay. And these are smart people making these arguments. The reason it bothers me so much is because it assumes that death is the only adverse outcome from COVID-19. That is not only preposterous, but it’s extremely dangerous.
We don’t know the long term effects of the disease. We won’t for some time. But we do know that people get very sick from it, requiring hospitalization, often in the ICU, and need a ventilator to help them breathe. They end up with lung scarring, blood clots, organ damage and persistent adverse symptoms even after “recovering.” To tell people that COVID-19 fears are overblown because mortality rates are under 1% is criminal. Some people are probably doing it with good intentions; they’re just resolving their own dissonance in a way that allows them to go on living in the manner they choose to live. But it’s reckless to influence others in this way.
Right now, today, hospitals around the country are bursting at the seams. They are literally out of ICU beds for the worse COVID patients and are running desperately low on needed protective equipment. But the death rate….
Right now, today, as many people are hospitalized for COVID-19 as there were at any other time since the pandemic began. But the death rate….
In the Rio Grande Valley in TX, hospitals are full. Read that again. Full. Patients in the hospital are up 37% in the last two weeks. But the death rate…
- In Corpus Christi, hospitalizations are up 103%.
- In Miami, 39%. “We are teetering on the edge of disaster,” says Carlos Migoya, the chief executive of Jackson Health System, the largest public hospital in Miami.
- In Lafayette,LA hospitalizations are up 46%.
- In St Petersburg, FL it’s 126%
- In Tampa, 188%.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. You’ve got to be pretty damn sick to get admitted into a hospital right now. I think you can see how dangerous it is to use the death rate as your particular confirmation bias to resolve your unwillingness to accept that life has changed and you must change with it. You may want to go to the movies, to a hair salon, to the gym, to a bar and do it without wearing an uncomfortable mask. You may want to date, and make out with strangers, you may want to live life the way you always have. But you can’t. Not without risking your health, your life, and most importantly, everyone else’s. Smoking cigarettes will adversely impact your health, but it won’t for everyone else. Drinking alcohol will adversely impact your health, but it won’t for everyone else. Ignoring the ugly reality of this pandemic and finding some weak argument to justify your actions will not only likely adversely impact your health, but everyone else’s. And you just don’t have that right.
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