Mostly Mindless Protests
On Being Wrong to Belong. And stegosaurus.
[A] belief’s relationship to the truth is secondary to its probable impact on the social coordination of the group… and its impact on the belief-holder’s approval by her coalition or community - John Tooby1
Dinos
Not long ago, I traveled to Montana, where I was able to spend some time at the Museum of the Rockies, which has a first-rate exhibit about dinosaurs. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion about the stegosaurus and what their plates are for.
Stegosaurus has distinctive plates (see image below) running along its spine and four sharp spikes on its tail. Paleontologists understand that it is possible to evaluate guesses about the function of organisms’ parts even if the organism is long dead, its behavior cannot be observed, and its DNA inaccessible except for the occasional bit inside a mosquito locked in an amber tomb.2
The most natural guess about stegosaurus’ plates was that they were for defense. However, this guess is, it is now believed, unlikely to be correct. The problem is that the shape and positioning of the plates don’t reflect good design for this function: the plates are relatively thin and are not positioned in a way that would have offered much protection against attacks.3
A second guess about the function of these plates was that they acted as a thermoregulatory system. The idea was that the plates, rich in blood vessels, could dissipate heat when they were oriented towards the sun or absorb heat when they were oriented away. However, the vascular patterns of the plates don’t appear well suited to this function either.4
The current best guess5 is that the plates functioned to send signals. Because the plates appear to have a lot of blood vessels—the basis for the thermoregulation hypothesis—their color might have changed depending on the details of blood flow, not unlike human blushing. These signals might have been designed for attracting mates, warning off rivals, species recognition, being embarrassed, or some other purpose.
One lesson to take from this is that it is possible, even with evidence that is millions of years old, to evaluate different hypotheses about the function of evolved structures. (Imagine how useful this perspective might be in species that are still alive!)
A second lesson is that if you have a trait and it doesn’t appear to accomplish something in the physical world—if it’s not doing something—then it might be for communicating.
Devices vs. Signals
This distinction can be traced back to Darwin’s books, Origin of Species and Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man.
In Origin, Darwin developed the idea that the shapes of organisms’ parts were sculpted by the process of natural selection. Shapes that did a job better—grasping better, digesting better, whatever—led to greater reproductive success and were molded by the forces of natural selection.
In this context, features such as the peacock tail vexed Darwin, so much so that he famously wrote, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” The reason was that the tail didn’t seem to do a job well. It didn’t seem useful. If anything, it seemed to get in the way of doing the job of flying about.
His second book answered this riddle. The idea was that the big tail was communicating something. I must be pretty healthy to have a tail this big—a lesser creature would never be able to produce such brilliant colors, such large feathers —so you should mate with me.
I’m simplifying, but that’s the gist. My view is that the best account of all of this is The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller, for those interested in the topic.
Just as in the case of our Stegosaurus friends, bowerbirds presented something of a puzzle to modern biologists. The males would build these very impressive looking structures—they looked like nests—but then they wouldn’t use them for nesting. Why go through all the trouble? It turns out that bowers are mating displays. Again, these are designed to signal something to potential mates. Look at what I can do. The nests weren’t good at being a place for eggs. They demonstrate skill.
The Costs and Benefits of False Beliefs
Beliefs can be looked at the same way as stegosaurus plates.
Some beliefs, particularly true ones, are just obviously useful. If you want a sandwich and you have true beliefs about where the bread, cheese, and mayo are, you can satisfy your hunger.
Now, humans also regularly acquire false beliefs. We can be very confident of this because many beliefs logically entail that others’ beliefs must be false. If monotheists, for example, are right, then all the atheists and polytheists are wrong. (And vice versa.)
Supernatural beliefs, discussed below, are good examples for this sort of analysis because we can be sure that most, if not all, are wrong. Here is one of my favorite examples of why (supernatural) false beliefs can be costly. In the memoirs of Emperor Babur, we learn that Zulnun Arghun relied on a soothsayer, who foresaw that Arghun would win his upcoming battle, so he “did not put the fort in a defensible state; did not prepare ammunition and warlike arms; did not appoint either an advance or picquets to get notice of the enemy's approach, nor even exercise his army, or accustom it to discipline, or battle-array…” This yielded the predictable result, which is why you have probably never heard of Zulnun Arghun.
Now, some scholars have proposed ways that supernatural beliefs might be useful in the stegosaurus sense: if they aren’t doing something tangible, then maybe they are signals.
Let’s suppose that people prefer loyal group members to disloyal ones. The problem with signaling loyalty is that doing so honestly can be hard. Sure, I’m wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey today, but maybe tomorrow I’ll change it out for a Dallas Cowboys jersey.6 How can one signal loyalty beyond cheap talk?
Well, some groups use things like tattoos. In some places, if you have a tattoo showing your allegiance to one gang, other gangs won’t have you. The tattoo signals permanent allegiance because you can’t switch. Can beliefs do the same job? Can I show my loyalty to you and your group by endorsing the same belief you have?
Not just any old beliefs will do the trick. Regular true beliefs—the world is round, the sky is blue—won’t work for this purpose because anyone might have such a belief simply by learning about the world. You might share them by accident, rather than because of your group membership.
How about false beliefs? If I said I thought Columbus discovered America in 1215, you’d think I was ill-informed. It’s a false belief, but it’s not wrong in the right way. Suppose, instead, I said that a baby blue demon was manipulating the CIA to use their mind control to get everyone to go to Taylor Swift concerts. Now you’d think that I was just crazy. That’s too wrong.
Let’s go back to that one particular kind of false beliefs, supernatural ones. Elsewhere, I (in collaboration with John Christner) suggested that endorsing supernatural beliefs is an especially good way of signaling your group membership and your commitment to it.7 Let’s just pick one supernatural belief that is probably new to you. Suppose someone said they believe that “a certain kind of tree can be made to fruit if a pretty woman kicks it.”
That’s not the sort of thing you’re going to discover for yourself, because it isn’t true. So, if that’s a belief you have, and someone else has the same one, well, you might think of them as a fellow traveler. Endorsing supernatural false beliefs—impossible, contradicted by evidence—picks you out as a group member. The only way you could come to the false belief is through learning from others in the club.
Now, the belief might sound crazy to someone outside the group, maybe even like a delusion. But this is a feature, not a bug: the more a belief disqualifies you from joining another group, the more people can count on your ongoing loyalty. In short, if you have a supernatural belief that those around you don’t share, then they are likely to infer that you’re either 1) on a different team or 2) crazy. Hear that guy? He thinks women can kick apples into being.
Supernatural beliefs, then, are a perfect sort of thing that doesn’t do something useful per se—belief in rain dances can’t help you predict the weather—but it does perform well as a signal.
Groups Matter
Whether people think you’re in their group or not matters. For this reason, people go to some effort to signal their membership. Simply walking down city streets illustrates how people mark themselves. Jerseys and colors signal which sports team you root for. Tattoos signal anything from one’s military unit history to which fictional stories one likes. We are consistently and constantly signaling to one another about our beliefs, desires, and loyalties.
These rituals have historical legs. The biblical story (Judges, Chapter 12) discusses how the Gileadites prevented their enemies from crossing the river Jordan by using their (in)ability to pronounce the “sh” in the word “Shibboleth” as a signal of group membership. Also in the Bible, the Jews signaled their religion by marking their houses when a plague was visited on the Egyptians.
In short, group markings are consequential. They can mean life and death.
It’s not that surprising that we are motivated to signal to others that we are strongly committed to the group.
There’s safety in numbers.
Protests
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” — Thomas Sowell8
Now, at last, onto the idea in the title. Recently, a survey was conducted among demonstrators who were chanting, “From the River to the Sea,” a call to drive out or kill all the Jews between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. The Wall Street Journal reported that in a sample of 250 protestors polled, fewer than half of them could name the river or the sea behind their call for genocide.
It seems odd to attend a protest in favor of such a drastic proposition without knowing the basics of the issue.
To understand why this sort of thing happens, we return to stegosaurus. The plates—beliefs—aren’t doing anything. The people at protests don’t care about having true beliefs because they aren’t going to use them as tools to get something done.
This is, to be sure, a bi-partisan issue. On the right, I recall a protest about President Donald Trump’s “perfect” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, back in 2019. I was struck by one clever interviewer at the protest who asked people holding up signs that said, “Read the transcript!” if they had, well, read the transcript. I’m sure that the interviewer picked which answers to show but, of course, of the ones shown, none had.
Many people clearly do not know important facts relevant to the issue that is at the heart of what they are protesting.
Stories such as these look funny to me in the same way that some traits do. If someone is protesting something, spending the time and energy to make their voice heard, surely they ought to know the basics of what they’re protesting. In the same way that building a bower is not about making something useful, protesting might not be motivated by trying to bring about useful (to the protestor) change.
Instead, the motive here is to signal that one is in the relevant group.
And, just like the sexual selection examples, the more costly, the better. Sure, I can say I am pro this or anti that. Why should you believe me? Talk is, of course, cheap.
In contrast, if I spend the time making a sign and giving up my valuable weekend standing out in the cold for the cause, well, that’s a signal that carries some weight. Not only that, but in the present polarized moment, participating in a protest on one side might well restrict your options in terms of your relationships with people on the other side of the issue.
Note that if this is right, it also doesn’t matter if I know anything at all about the cause. I don’t need to read no transcript or name no rivers. By being there, I am on your side. This fact also explains why prominent group members—be they actors, prominent activists, etc.—are likely to share their opinions on the Current Thing, even if the issue falls far outside their knowledge or expertise. To be a member of the group in good standing, their best move is to assume the group’s position on that Current Thing, regardless of what they know about the Thing.
This tendency can, of course, have perverse consequences.
The most obvious is that one might—think about Zulnun Arghun—protest counter to one’s own interests or principles because of false beliefs or ignorance. In the Wall Street Journal piece, the claim is that when protesters polled by the researcher were educated about the river, the sea, and the meaning of the chant, “of the 80 students who saw the map, 75%... changed their view.”
Not Just Protests
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool. –George Orwell
The tendency for humans to adopt beliefs because they improve one’s reputation as a group member instead of their truth is, in my view, the source of tremendous damage. (See Rob Henderson’s excellent ideas on luxury beliefs for additional insight.) John Tooby, whose quote opens this piece, captured it best, noting that the motivation to acquire beliefs in the service of groupishness is particularly damaging among those specifically tasked with discovering truth: scientists.
Tooby captured this phenomenon and the polarization that results, writing:
[T]o earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups… The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements.
The problem for scientists is that they have the same tribal instincts as others. If facts come along that ought to cause them to change their minds in a way that would make them “bad” allies or coalitions members, they often won’t because group membership, for many, is more important than the facts.
Tooby adds:
Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally.
He wrote that in 2017, only shortly before the global pandemic that would emphatically bear out the truth of the sentiments. As “the science” was moralized, one’s view on the origin of the virus, the effectiveness of masks, and the wisdom of taking the vaccine, and so on, became markers of which side one was on. Revising one’s position in light of evidence was defection against the group, undermining updating of people’s beliefs, a core feature of science.
During and after the pandemic, the tendency of scientists to sacrifice truth for partisanship was much more visible than usual to the public as citizens looked to scientific authorities for guidance. The result was that many people, not unreasonably, lost faith that science and its institutions were, in fact, interested in Veritas.
Conclusion
Humans evolved to be motivated to show our allegiance to our groups. This fact explains why we adopt, retain, and advertise our beliefs, even those contradicted by evidence. Quoting Tooby one last time, he notes that because “coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership…even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group.”9
Groups are frequently united by shared antipathy toward some real or imagined other. So, to get the benefits of belonging to a group, you often don’t have to worry about facts, logic, consistency, or the welfare of the people whose deaths we are cheering for.
You just have to mindlessly show up and cheer for them.
REFERENCES
Kurzban, R., & Christner, J. (2011). Are supernatural beliefs commitment devices for intergroup conflict? In J. P. Forgas, A. W. Kruglanski, & K. D. Williams (Eds.), The psychology of social conflict and aggression (pp. 285–299). Psychology Press.
Main, R. P., de Ricqles, A., Horner, J. R. & Padian, K. 2005. The evolution and function of thyreophoran dinosaur scutes: Implications for plate function in stegosaurs. Paleobiology 31, 291-314.
Tooby, J. (2020). Evolutionary psychology as the crystalizing core of a unified modern social science. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 14(4), 390–403
Tooby, J., 2020.
The bit about amber is obviously a reference to Jurassic Park and is a joke. The part about what paleontologists understand about evaluating function is not.
Main et al. (2005) write: “De Buffrénil, Farlow, and de Ricqlès (1986) reviewed this history and tested three major hypotheses by studying the histology of the bone tissue of a plate of Stegosaurus. They discounted the hypothesis that the plates served as armor because “the plate structure is extremely light and hollow…”
Main et al. (2005) write: “The ’plumbing‘ of Stegosaurus plates was not apparently built to support a ‘radiator‘ system of internal blood vessels that communicated with the outside of the plates and coursed along their external surfaces to return heated or cooled blood to the body core.”
This was the position taken by the exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies. Main et al. (2005): “It seems more likely, as in other groups of dinosaurs, that the variation of dermal armor form in stegosaurs was primarily linked to species individuation and recognition, perhaps secondarily to inter- and intraspecific display, and rarely to facultative thermoregulation.” Here is a somewhat more recent piece.
I will not.
Others have made similar suggestions. For a recent piece reviewing some of this literature, see Williams (2022). Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer laid groundwork for these ideas. See also, for instance, Van Leeuwen’s recent book Religion as Make-Believe, chapter 6. He writes: “[I]f a belief guides practical actions, it works best if it is true, but if a ‘belief’ defines a group identity, then it can still work or even work better if it is not true.”
Thomas Sowell (2006). “Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays”
I wonder which coalitions he had in mind?