Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Making Sense of Truth-Denial

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Fantasy theme analysis helps us understand the contagion that happens when “information” combines with our hard-wired impulse to see the world in self-perpetuated stories.

There are many aspects of the ongoing pandemic that defy easy understanding. It’s not always clear why it has spread in some areas of  the world and remained more contained in other parts. But we do know proven ways to reduce the spread of COVID and its variants.  A simple list of public health precautions is available to anyone who cares to look: mask up especially indoors around other people; get tested if you have symptoms, and be sure to be vaccinated with one of the amazingly effective shots that will greatly increase immunity and lower the chances of death.  The science is clear: these precautions work. A person is more likely to get sick and die without a vaccine. As of this summer, 97 percent of the individuals in hospital ICUs for COVID were unvaccinated.  No wishful thinking can change these facts.

Even so, the denial of this most elemental of realities persists, and gives the virus a chance to change and infect new victims.  Meanwhile, alternate narratives circulate and gain credence mostly because they affirm what the deniers want to believe.  Hence COVID becomes a tool of control cleverly engineered by big-pharma, big government, or a host of other phantoms.

The Mechanism of Evidence Denial

Years ago, social scientist Robert Bales noted that groups of people put together in a room to solve a problem often reach a moment when there is a convergence of views around a preferred narrative. In many cases folks in the group didn’t have the facts or knowledge to make a judgement picked up bogus ideas from other like-minded people around them. Think of a jury reaching a judgment on a case based on a shared prejudice.

Later on theorist Ernest Boorman at the University of Minnesota refined Bales’ ideas into a convincing and solid theory called Fantasy Theme Analysis. Boorman acknowledged what  we all sense: that even in the presence of good information, we tend to rely on the views of our reference group and our natural compulsion to spin narratives that allow us to move from uncertainty to conviction.  This is more likely to happen with people who were never adequately trained in even the rudiments of fact-checking or assessing a source’s likely credibility. One result is the protective responses of fantasy themes that “chain out” to others with similar views and the same inabilities to process truth claims.

Such flawed thinking may well cost us our republic.

Fantasy theme analysis helps us understand the contagion that happens when incomplete information combines with our hard-wired impulses to see the world in sets of comfortable stories. Each one is filled in with actors, motivations, villains, and final outcomes. We hate incomplete narratives, as when there is an airplane accident caused by bad weather.  So we are happy to construct our own story, regardless of what solid evidence might oblige us to believe. We especially want to put human agents in the picture to be at least partly responsible.

Here’s another example I have used that suggests that none of us are immune from fantasy thinking. I was sitting in my office one day in the 80s with a copy of the New York Times opened up on my desk. A colleague dropped by and, at the same time, we both noticed the paper’s front-page picture of the new Soviet version of a space shuttle. The Buran space craft looked exactly like the American version. Same wing shape. Same color. Same size. And without missing a beat we both blurted out the view that “they must have stolen the American design.” End of story. We “knew” it and we were ready to fill in the blanks. The similarity of the shape was enough to accept the fantasy of a theft of our plans.  All the while, we pretty much ignored the physics of space flight, which mandates similar design parameters for any earth-to-space vehicle.

With group fantasies, the world is explained from existing beliefs. Without them, we would have to live with the continuous uncertainties mandated by the real world of incomplete information and awkward truths.

In my field the phrase homo narrans is sometimes used to describe the essence of our species. We tell stories to live. That is our priority, with Truth far down the list of imperatives. Truth is often too inconvenient. It feels better and it is much easier to bolster each other’s views with agreeable tales that put a disliked faction or renegade political group behind a particular phenomenon.  Such flawed thinking may well cost us our republic.

If we are looking for reasons for the current peril of the American experiment, we need to deal with the paradox of a society awash in “information” that makes it possible for frail minds to cherry-pick beliefs that fit with what they already “know.”

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America’s Recurring Cycles of Forced Relocation

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What are the historical moments that illustrate the canon of American values still worth celebrating?

Whether it was the Presidency of Donald Trump, the world-altering effects of COVID, or the continuing interest in America’s ethnic and tribal identities, the nation is now looking back on its history with an especially critical eye. What narratives have been blindly passed on that were wholly or partially false? What are the historical moments that illustrate the canon of American values that are still worth celebrating? Is every monument to national greatness now burdened with back stories and alternate narratives that give pause?

Of the many layers of this onion of shared national experience, we could just consider diasporas and forced relocations within our borders. Most raise troubling questions of just how much freedom the American “melting pot” has allowed some of its members.

There is, of course, the depressing and decades-long relocation of indigenous groups, with many unhappily resettled on the arid lands of Oklahoma and the southwest. There is also an entire literature devoted to African Americans fleeing their own southern roots for a better life in the industrial Midwest and northern cities like Chicago: perhaps the biggest internal diaspora of any. And there is the ongoing effort to cleanse the population of foreign nationals—many who are hard workers—who are non-citizens. Even Mormons went through their own diaspora, moving because of persecution first in New York State and, later, in Missouri, before finally settling in the empty spaces of Utah.

Claiming membership in a cultural community now often produces more pride than claiming American citizenship.

More recent attention has been paid to the thousands of Chinese who were brought in during the 19th Century to build the railroads and mines. They and their heirs have faced discrimination from the beginning. The national disease of nativism that was turned against Asian Americans has also played out against the Irish, or Jews and Muslims—legal citizens after their own diasporas—who settled in communities as servants, shopkeepers, mill workers or domestics.

Not every story about ethnic separation comes with stories of overt discrimination. And seemingly endless accounts of forced removal or denial of entry include most cultures on every continent.  Daily headlines currently focus on in-migration to southern Europe and North America. Even so, it is all the more ironic that American citizenship per se may now mean less to many than membership in a specific cultural community.

Recent comments from actor/writer George Takei of Star Trek fame raises a representative moment. Takei was a Japanese American aged five when his family was swept up in yet another diaspora: this one initiated by F.D.R. at the beginning of World War II. A federal order called for the round up Japanese Americans—men, women and children—to be held in camps far removed from their homes. The government seemed to favor one-story barracks in the desert, like Dalton Wells in Utah.  Camps were typically surrounded by guards and barbed wire. By chance, Takei’s family was moved from California to a small camp in Arkansas. The official argument then was as weak as it is now: Japanese Americans might be disloyal in the war against Germany and Japan.

His account is chilling as it is simple. At gunpoint they were ordered out of their home by two military guards and held in a prison camp from 1942-1946.

We were loaded onto trucks that morning and we were driven down to Little Tokyo, the  Japanese American community in downtown Los Angeles. We were let out at the Buddhist temple there, and the area was crowded with other Japanese Americans who had been picked up. There was a row of buses, and we were tagged and loaded onto those buses, and the buses took us to the Santa Anita racetrack and there we were unloaded and     herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned a horse stall, still pungent with the stink of fresh horse manure. That’s where we would sleep temporarily while the camps were being built. For my parents, going from a two-bedroom home with a front yard and a backyard, to taking their children into a horse stall to sleep was devastating. My father told me about it when I was a teenager, and said it was absolutely horrific, humiliating, and degrading. The government at that time called it a Japanese neighborhood, or relocation center, but it was really a prison camp.

When we wonder how so many Americans and more than a few presidents could stray so far from the nation’s professed beliefs, we should remember that an unearned form of nativism seems woven deep into the nation’s fabric. It’s clearest manifestation is in the nation’s original sin of slavery. And it’s all the more ironic when the country was built up by immigrants and their heirs who fled their own states, only to appropriate lands of the indigenous population already present.