Why do pseudosciences work (to the limited extent they do)?

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote "The Social Contract" in 1762 he was just formalizing a idea that has always been intrinsic to human societies: the individuals relinquish some of their freedoms in an explicit or implicit exchange for the protection of the group and the maintenance of the social order. This is so much a natural law, that you can even find rudimentary versions of it other social animals like some kinds of apes, wolves, deer and many more. When a beta male chimpanzee takes some physical punishment from the alpha male without responding, it is not because he cannot respond, it is because his station in the group does not allow it, and responding in that case could lead to stronger punishment, ostracism or death.

It is important to point out that the existence of a social contract is natural, but its content is absolutely conventional: the terms of the social contract are agreed over generations as a social group gets consolidated and changes are generally slow, require either internal or environmental pressure to happen (as a general rule, if a set of values has kept the society alive there is no reason to change it). The freedom to set our own social contracts is one of the reasons that Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book "Sapiens" to explain why our "shared fictions" are more powerful than the arrangements visible in other species.

Photo:Keith Gonzalez on Pixabay

This social contract is so strong that it can occasionally lead to the demise of the society, as was the example of the Polynesian tribe of the Morirori who, having embraced pacifism as a way of life, were in 1835 unable to repel the invasion of Maori tribes, even if they outnumbered the invaders by 4 to 1, and ended up massacred and enslaved.

However, in most cases there is no such a violent change in the environmental conditions and the societies survive, amending their Charters and their Constitutions as the need arises. However, as brilliantly explained by Daron Acemoglu and Brian Johnson in their 2012 book "Why Nations Fail", societies can fail as a whole if it becomes unable to sustain the structure that holds it together: if the state does not collect enough taxes to fund schools, roads, police departments, etc. it will fail to deliver on their side of the social contract. In this kind of situations it is not unlikely that other institutions start to provide for the citizens in the places where the state is failing, rising to be a "parallel state". These are the cases of the Hezbollah group in Lebanon, which provides better social services to its members than the Lebanese state, or the Sicilian Mafia, which originated as a guild of land owners, protecting their members and arranging disputes in a much more efficient way than ordinary justice did.

These days, a similar failure is happening in the provision of knowledge. As science advances and becomes more and more convoluted it also gets further away from the layman, which not only fails to understand the research, but he does not grasp either that the progress made is ultimately providing benefits to him as well. At some point, a disconnect happened between the expectations of the citizens and the ability of the scientific community to deliver convincing science.

The gap is particularly wide in the field of health procurement: the increased presence of technological tools in the medical care has probably improved the security of the doctors, which have many more elements to judge when making a diagnosis, but it has also undermined the trust of many patients, who have been expecting promising results while the medical community still suffers from many unknowns.

One of the most direct consequences of this failure to deliver is that many patients (and people who are not technically sick, just unhappy, unfulfilled or simply lost) have turned and keep turning to alternative forms of care: from aura cleansing, to reiki, astrology and other divination methods, homeopathy, and many more. Regardless of their theoretical background or their alleged working principles, the common factor to most of these therapies or treatments is that they are personal. Sick people compound their physical ailments with the psychological pain linked to the loss of their abilities, the burden they impose on their families, their insecurity about the future and, in most cases, the feeling that the medical workers have turned them into lab devices to be analyzed and treated but not taken care of.

In some sense one could argue that most of these para-sciences are not very different from a life coach or a psychotherapist. The widow that goes to the medium to connect with her deceased husband is actually trying to come to term with his death, and a successful provider will help her understand that she has to get over it and rebuild her life on her own. A person reading their horoscope on the day they are having an exam is just looking for a confidence boost that will help quenching the anxiety they are experiencing. And the list goes on and on.

These professionals (at least when they are honest) can provide the time and the personal attention that the system fails to provide in this increasingly individualistic society, but it is important to understand that the panoply of tools they can count of if extremely limited and, particularly in the case of sick patients, they can supplement, but they cannot replace the conventional evidence-based therapies.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine mentioned that she is going to have her astral chart calculated (she said "read", but bear with me) to try to deepen her self knowledge. I replied that the drive to know oneself is always commendable, but she should take the "reading" with a pinch of salt: most of these techniques are base on the Barnum-Forer effect, providing wide and vague description of personality traits that almost anyone can identify with. Furthermore, the confirmation bias will help the willing listener to discount any gross inaccuracy as "a small error" while judging acceptable statements as "unbelievable accurate". I posited that she would be equally pleased with the reading if she provided a different date of birth and she agreed that it was an interesting proposition (although I do not believe she is going to spend the money of a second reading with different data). 

In the end, I hope that the experience helps her think deeply and look squarely into herself, and then make wise decisions. It is a bit like tossing a coin because you cannot decide between two options, only to find that following the coin's result would be too painful and making the decision yourself in the end. Enjoy the weekend.