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In Tyler Hamilton's 2012 book The Secret Race (written with Daniel Coyle), the cyclist exposes the most sophisticated doping program in the history of sports, orchestrated by Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner now stripped of his titles after a thorough investigation by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Hamilton shows how such an elaborate system was maintained through the “omertà rule”—the code of silence that leads one to believe everyone else believes doping is the norm—and reinforced by the threat of punishment for speaking out or not complying.
The broader psychological principle at work here is “pluralistic ignorance,” in which individual members of a group do not believe something but mistakenly believe everyone else in the group believes it. When no one speaks up, it produces a “spiral of silence” that can lead to everything from binge drinking and hooking up to witch hunts and deadly ideologies. A 1998 study by Christine M. Schroeder and Deborah A. Prentice, for example, found that “the majority of students believe that their peers are uniformly more comfortable with campus alcohol practices than they are.” Another study in 1993 by Prentice and Dale T. Miller found a gender difference in drinking attitudes in which “male students shifted their attitudes over time in the direction of what they mistakenly believed to be the norm, whereas female students showed no such attitude change.” Women, however, were not immune to pluralistic ignorance when it came to hooking up, as shown in a 2003 study by Tracy A. Lambert and her colleagues, who found “both women and men rated their peers as being more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they rated themselves.”
When you add an element of punishment for those who challenge the norm, pluralistic ignorance can transmogrify into purges, pogroms and repressive political regimes. European witch hunts, like their Soviet counterparts centuries later, degenerated into preemptive accusations of guilt, lest one be thought guilty first. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described a party conference in which Joseph Stalin was given a standing ovation that went on for 11 minutes, until a factory director finally sat down to the relief of everyone. The man was arrested later that night and sent to the gulag for a decade. A 2009 study by Michael Macy and his colleagues confirmed the effect: “People enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure.”
Bigotry is ripe for the effects of pluralistic ignorance, as evidenced in a 1975 study by Hubert J. O'Gorman, which indicated that “in 1968 most white American adults grossly exaggerated the support among other whites for racial segregation,” especially among those leading segregated lives, which reinforces the spiral of silence.
Fortunately, there is a way to break this spiral of ignorance: knowledge and communication. Tyler's confession led to the admission of doping by others, thereby breaking the code of silence and leading to openness about cleaning up the sport. In the Schroeder and Prentice study on college binge drinking, they found that exposing incoming freshmen to a peer-directed discussion that included an explanation of pluralistic ignorance and its effects significantly reduced subsequent student alcoholic intake. Moreover, Macy and his colleagues found that when skeptics were scattered among true believers in a computer simulation of a society in which there was ample opportunity for interaction and communication, social connectedness acted as a prophylactic against unpopular norms taking over.
This is why totalitarian and theocratic regimes restrict speech, press, trade and travel and why the route to breaking the bonds of such repressive governments and ideologies is the spread of liberal democracy and open borders. This is why even here in the U.S.—the land of the free—we must openly endorse the rights of gays and atheists to be treated equally under the law and why “coming out” helps to break the spiral of silence. Knowledge and communication, especially when generated by science and technology, offer our last best hope on earth.
This article was originally published with the title Dictators and Diehards.
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18 Comments
Add CommentKnowledge and communication may be factors in the way that people behave but shunning, mocking, bullying and threatening are more effective motivators. Acceptance, encouragement and inclusion are also effective motivators.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a fan of Shermer's and a cycling agnostic as well, I was in lockstep with his perspective of "pluralistic ignorance" (in "Dictators and Diehard) that grows from a code of silence among groups. I knew of that code within the cycling community and was feared it would come crashing down and take Lance Armstrong with it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut then I was totally surprised by Shermer's finish with a call to support equality of gays and atheists. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I have experienced this code of silence in the exactly opposite way among my well-educated friends to support gay issues. The "code" comes in the form of phrases like, "You can't be serious…" (friendly derision) when I wanted to breach the gay marriage issue. Bottom line - it simply is not talked about among my liberal, Democratic friends (of which I am one).
Even during Prop 8 voting in Calif. there was not a drop of discussion. The code was "on" and continues to this day in the public media as well. The lack of open and intelligent discussion is complete. As Shermer rightly noted, the antidote is knowledge and communication.
A willingness to admit to error can make a big difference.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA person, who is being trained to push a lever, cannot change his reaction with information. The reward for pushing the lever cannot be overcome until the person controls his own rewards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople often bow to a bully even though they understand that they are being intimidated. In our society there is no effective way of dealing with a bully.
Control Fraud may better describe the situation. It is a truth about human nature I submit: "Community lies always seem like a surprise." One example is the observation that we notice every fault of others we see, yet we can't imagine being featured in every other freak show devotee's notice. I saw human volunteers electric shock subjects with a button when they and control monkeys would not cause intra-species gratuitous harm unless instructed by a voice of authority approving the action. Control lies work and destroy confidence and trust. Humans trust mother nature but Regulations prohibit natural products in spite of Genesis 1:29 authority, yet manufactured products cause far more harm. Hot-spot education and licensing; not regulation frees the State from control fraud. The controllers are allowed to commit the fraud for their own benefit and protection racket and maybe they will give the knowledgible, educated, communicating and smart entitled ones a job. This mass lie is mass bankrupt and it's way time to walk away from the hot mess individually.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“This is why even here in the U.S.—the land of the free—we must openly endorse the rights of gays and atheists to be treated equally under the law and why “coming out” helps to break the spiral of silence.”
The author is surely joking. Free Speech and Democracy are just as sacred to all Western nations (and several Eastern ones as well).
If the US stands out within Western countries it is regarding a curiously strong conservatism, and the power plays the conservatives get away with. Gun control and welfare, just to name two areas, are off-the-chart lousy when compared to just any other Western country.
If you get Aids, first you go bankrupt, and then you die. Whereas in Brazil – hardly an example of a wealthy nation - all citizens, and even applicant foreign nationals, get free medicine (this is just populism, but it sure beats dying). Welfare does not make smart people lazy; it just keeps the streets clean, and stupid (or unlucky) people from going desperate.
Britain is a Capitalist country. The US and all other countries of the Americas are plutocratic Oligarchies, some more populist, others less.
It is a nice note, though, to see SA praising skeptics.
How can this be written without talking about the Nazis and Jews? Oh, and religion. And a belief in a fair and equal political process. And racism. Or are these examples of something else?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI may be straying away from the intended topic, but I love the inset illustration, referring to one of my favorite childhood stories, "The Emperor's New Clothes",
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html
Ironically, the analogy with imaginary 'dark matter', having now been entrenched within astrophysics for the past 30-40 years, is striking! Please see "Inappropriate Application of Kepler's Empirical Laws of Planetary Motion to Spiral Galaxies Created the Perceived Galaxy Rotation Problem...",
http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Dwyer_FQXi_2012__Questionin_1.pdf
Sorry, we might not know what Dark Matter is exactly, but it's DEFINITELY there. Several lines of evidence point towards a significant chunk of matter in the universe having basically zero interaction with light:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence
I don't get what you're trying to say...Do you think that the ability of the majority to decide the civil rights of minority groups should be up for debate? Do you think there are two somewhat equal sides to this issue that warrant discussion?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Or are these examples of something else?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, for the most part, yes. One could certainly not associate racism with any kind of omerta ... quite the opposite! Racists tend to be of firm (if mistaken) conviction and far from being bound by any code of silence see themselves as the whistleblowers, the prophets of doom should the general population not awaken to the danger posed by tolerance of the invader.
The rise of Nazism, on the other hand is far too complex a story to have a single, simplistic causative explanation. Germany, riddled with religious and intellectual doubt, economically oppressed as the result of the onerous reparations imposed after WW1, and universally despised, was as ripe a fruit for extremism to pick as there has ever been in history.
This is obviously some new meaning of the word 'definitely' that I have not previously encountered. There is more proof for the existence of Thor than dark matter!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or, the Law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in Eternal Law and Natural Law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this[Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. 1963. Letter from the Birmingham Jail dated 16th April, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html]
Michael Shermer, I love you!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI grew up in Europe, surrounded by atheist, liberal, scientific, sceptic minds…you make me feel like I'm home again ;-)
The issue that is not addressed here and that continues to puzzle me is the phenomena of "The True Believer"; that person who, in the face of evidence, experience, logic, reason, or even proof to the contrary, insists on clinging to some belief that is based on demonstrated falsehoods.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome research seems to show that when such people are confronted with factual information they tend to cling even more tightly to their false beliefs.
People who do this make up a large enough segment of our population so as to cause some of our most severe and persistent social and political problems. It is not an insignificant issue, it effects all of us in some very negative ways.
What is the root of this problem? Can it be addressed? How?
I read this article following a local screening of the documentary film "Waiting For Armageddon," which presents the views of fundamentalist Christians on "the end times." In the film, we see a mother telling her daughters that they will never marry and raise families because they will be taken up by the "rapture" before that can happen. The daughters are clearly disappointed by the prospect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe other striking phenomenon is the donation of millions of dollars from these groups to Israel. They do this to confirm their belief that the "promised land" and events in the middle east fit the prophecy that includes a final holocaust. Of course, the poor Jews must at the final hour renounce their age-old beliefs and accept Jesus as the son of God, or go directly to Hell.
Knowledge and Communication - are the lynchpins to Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth. I would rather follow the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Nine Principles" for the New World (http://theethicalskeptic.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/the-nine-principles/). They do not agree with Mr. Shermer here. Ethically as a skeptic, I do not boast of Knowledge and Truth, as Mr. Shermer does. I can only tender Clarity and Value in my life work. Clarity in how I communicate, and can ethically understand my opponents' points of view. Value, by conducting my own research and adding new ideas of my own. Not regurgitating propaganda.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo tender Knowledge and Communication, I might as well be metaphorically placing the folded little pieces of paper authorized knowledge into the internet of pipes crafted inside George Orwell's 1984. I have added nothing.
Ethical Skepticism requires much more integrity and courage.
Never have lived in the American South, have you? I do assure you, speaking against such things as dragging gays to death behind pickup trucks will meet with considerable community resistance.
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