The Delusional Podcast with Kevin Blake Ferguson: Recent Episodes
Kevin Blake Ferguson
Illusionist Kevin Blake Ferguson discusses psychological illusions, cognitive biases, and other ways people fail to see the world for what it is.
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The Curious Case of a Man Named Red who asked me to cast a spell to save his marriage.
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I use to have a lucky pair of swimming goggles. They were neon green, the color of speed, and when I looked through them I felt like I was seeing the world how plants see the world, all blinding greens and yellows. I remember when I would take them off everything would seem faded, like the summer sun had bleached out the true colors of the day. The goggles were lucky, which I knew because every time I would wear them at swim meets I would win my races. Of course, the truth was that I was 8 years old, and the real luck I had was (1) a natural gift for swimming and (2) a backyard pool and (3) minimal competition. But as a kid, it was the goggles, so I wore them every day at practice even though they made my nose bridge bleed.
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Habituation and the hedonic treadmill. Once upon a time, there was a man who walked to work every day.
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Any conjurer worth their cards knows that the hardest thing to fool an audience into believing is not that something happened, but rather that nothing happened at all.
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When I reminisce about my life, there are a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences that I look back fondly on. Getting stabbed in the hand. Bad relationships. Swim practice. As much as I know that these episodes were filled with sleep deprivation, light-to-substantial physical and mental torture, anxiety and aimlessness, the phrase 'good times' nonetheless finds its way to my lips, arising from some other place inside me that is not bound by skin and bones.
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Many years before you or I were born, during the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance in Europe, people danced. Sometimes it was a sole soul doing the boogie-woogie, sometimes it was thousands upon thousands all writhing and convulsing together. Although I tend to avoid the clurb, I can get down, so normally I’d find any story of dancing to be a happy thing, and it certainly would be in this case, if not for the fact that these revelers seemed to have no control over themselves, and could not stop, being as they were: in the throes of madness.
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I'd like to tell you a story about unintended consequences and a man by the name of Kenneth Adelman.
Back in halcyon days of 2003, when Smash Mouth was huge and I was learning how to do magic tricks off VHS tapes, Kenneth was gainfully employed by the California Coastal Records Project. His charge: to take aerial photos of the coastline to document erosion. During the course of the project over 12,000 photos were taken and archived online, but there was one photo in particular, “Image 3850,” that stands out for a very special reason. One of Kenneth’s pictures of the bluffs in Malibu also included in it the view of an oceanfront mansion owned by a certain celebrity. Upon discovering the photo, this celebrity was so upset at this ‘violation of privacy’ (through a photo which had about the resolution of a Google Earth satellite image) that she sued poor Kenneth for $50 million dollars to get him to remove the photo from the archive.
And people say Americans are overly litigious. Here was a man doing the noble work of preserving our dear coast, and he was sued for $50 million dollars. Who, I hear you wondering, was this malefactor? Barbra Streisand.
Two very important things happened next:
One, the lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay $155,000 in legal fees, and our protagonist Kenneth Adelman was no worse for his wear apart from perhaps having to throw away a few old cds.
Two, in the weeks after it went public that Streisand was trying to stop people from seeing a photo of her house, over half a million people went to see the photo. And get this: before the lawsuit, "Image 3850" had only been downloaded 6 times, 2 of which were by Streisand's lawyers. From 4 people to over a half-million. And now it lives forever as the featured image for a phenomenon named in her honor, which I'm sure she's very happy about, the Streisand effect.
The Streisand effect is what happens when an attempt to hide or suppress something has the unintended consequence of bringing more attention to that very same thing.
The Streisand effect can be explained through psychological reactance, which is a theory that suggests that when we feel our freedoms being constricted, there is a natural tendency to push back in order to regain that freedom; when Streisand tries to stop the public from seeing a photo, the public rushes to see that photo. This is psychological reactance.
It's easy to see how people would push back against figures who swing their power and money around like bludgeons, but reactance also affects how we relate to people on our level—our partners, friends, and coworkers, kids, in a way that can lead us to strengthening false beliefs and being blind to valid arguments and new information.
When faced with contradictory evidence, new information or an argument against a belief one holds dear, instead of successfully letting go of that belief, and assimilating that new information, as you'd hope a rational person would do, occasionally contact with new information can backfire, resulting in false belief getting more firmly entrenched in the mind. Looking at this through the lens of reactance, you experience a threat to your freedom to believe what you want; then, rather than adjusting your mental map to incorporate the new information, you challenge the person expressing it.
This specific type of reactance, also known as the backfire effect, has been the subject of many experiments. And while some have found no effect, backfires seems to happen when the topic is something divisive, or controversial. Take something extremely topical: vaccines.
Although they’re a feat of technological and scientific progress that have saved the lives of literally billions of people and eradicated some of the worst diseases that have ravaged our species, some misinformed people are apparently still skeptical. This is unfortunate, especially at a time like this. So how do we get a population to change their minds? We would hope that more information would fix it. Sadly, with vaccines, that may not always help.
Pluviano, Watt, & Della Sala, 2017 looked at how misinformation lingers in memory and also experimented with strategies to educate people about the benefits of vaccines. Unfortunately, they found "…existing strategies to correct vaccine misinformation are ineffective and often backfire, resulting in the unintended opposite effect, reinforcing ill-founded beliefs about vaccination and reducing intentions to vaccinate."
So, not great. The nihilist in me takes solace in the fact that this is natural selection in action, swift and just. But then I remember the consequences. When left up to the invisible hand of the free market of ideas, we need to do everything we can to make sure the best ideas win. Big topics such as vaccines, climate change, gun control, and so many more have ripples that effect everyone now, and in the future.
With reactance, boomerangs, and backfires, we return to the relationship between passion and reason. The more passion we have for a topic, the less reasonable we are. But it’s not so simple as removing passion; we live in a world where we desperately need both—we need reason to determine what path we should take, and we need passion to give us the energy to get to our destination.
If there's a lesson here it's to be wary of our emotional responses, and if we feel ourselves reacting to a feeling instead of an argument, an instinct instead of a fact, a pre-conceived notion instead of an intelligent case, we should pause, take a step back, and consider a little more deeply.
And whatever we do, we should not sue Kenneth Adelman.
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In the history of mentalism, there is perhaps no greater act that has imprinted itself onto the soul of its performers than the oracle act. In the act, the oracle on stage answers thought-of questions from the audience about their futures. One moment a man is an illusionist, or a mind-reader, or a mentalist; the next, he's unveiling the great and hidden secrets of the universe right before your eyes. But it’s not just magicians who can see into the future.
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Understanding confabulation as the best tool for conflict resolution.
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Listen now | Welcome to Delusional! Whoever you are, thanks for being here. If you're anything like me, you've spent most of the last year, or two, or ten, thinking what in the Holy Christ is happening in this world? Kids are eating tide pods. Adults aren't vaccinating their kids. Certain NBA players are watching so much YouTube they think the earth is flat. The Oxford dictionary names 'post-truth' the word of the year, which is two words.
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