The role language can play in overshadowing data

Analysis: Language introduces biases and human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented.

By Elina Makri, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

"The limits of my language, means the limits of my world", writes Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-British philosopher in his bοοκ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921.

However, paradoxical it may sound, language is not quite innate in the human brain. It evolved because of culture which plays a crucial role in making language possible.

"Language does not emerge spontaneously in a socially isolated brain; unlike attention, it does not self-install. The raw capacity for language may indeed be there in the abstract sense, but it will remain unrealized unless culture has an opportunity to guide the brain through the very subtle and complex process of language acquisition", writes cognitive neuroscientist, Merlin Donald.

Language introduces biases and human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented.

"Words will frame you," says Cyriel Pennartz, Professor of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. He refers to the famous economic theory of Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and economist who won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2002 in working on the influence of irrationality on decision-making.

"Suppose we play a game and one way of framing would be to say: for every bet you make, you have a certain chance of winning.

The first frame would be to tell you that you will earn a basic wage of €100, just for joining the game, no matter if you win or lose. You start playing but there will be a net effect of loss in your game which of course you do not like and this will make you conservative in placing further bets.

The second frame would be that you do not get a basic wage but everything you gain will come from winning bets. But now, the setup is that the net earnings you make are equal in frame 1 and frame 2. But just in frame 1, you get the idea that you lose all the time, in frame 2, you have the idea that you win most of the time.

People look at these options differently and that shows very clearly that framing is a big thing. They enter a game and say 'ok, I have a big chance of losing, so I am going to play conservatively and carefully'. They feel better about the second situation because they felt they 'won' something. In the 1st frame, it feels like a net loss".

Humans have a good natural sense of numbers which goes approximately up to 20. It is not about being able to count but rather the notion of 'many' or ‘few’. This innate numerosity exists even before the language. Human babies have it, birds and monkeys too.

It’s a survival thing but language can trigger emotions that can be even stronger than the inner mechanisms humans have to make basic comparisons.

"As you go above 100, it all becomes a big number: 400 is not so different emotionally from 40.000 or 4.000. When we enter the range of many zeros, we become very poor at estimating intuitively. There is a big difference between the statistics and the intuition about it. We have to be very rational to beat this combination of emotion and imagination", adds Pennartz.

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From RTÉ 2FM's Dave Fanning Show, Fake news is hard to differentiate, Social media spreads misinformation at alarming rates, the end result is that the world is startying to distrust everyone! In 'The Irrational Ape - Why Flawed Logic puts us All at Risk and how Critical Thinking can save the World' David explores the danger of having access to all information all the time!

How numeracy can magnify political polarisation

A striking experiment regarding the crucial role that language plays by overshadowing data is presented in the paper "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government" led by Dan Kahan at Yale University.

The researchers wanted to find out why public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence. They recruited American citizens of various social and political backgrounds and explicitly measured the citizen's numeracy.

Researchers presented four versions of a problem involving interpretation of data and causal inferences. Two of the versions of the experiment involved a skin-rash treatment, presented in two different ways.

What changed were the words (labels) at the top of the columns: Rash Got Worse and Rash Got Better. The numbers stayed the same.

The second two versions of the experiment involved a gun-control measure. People were instructed that "a city government was trying to decide whether to pass a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public".

They were also told that "government officials were unsure whether the law will be more likely to decrease crime by reducing the number of people carrying weapons or increase crime by making it harder for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from violent crimes''.

The column headings were again manipulated, generating one version in which the data, properly interpreted, supported the conclusion that cities banning guns were more likely to experience increased crime relative to those that had not, and another version in which cities banning guns were more likely to experience decreased crime.

The findings were quite astonishing: While on the first two versions of the experiment, regarding the skin treatment (a topic devoted of partisan significance), subjects high in numeracy were more likely to get the right result, yet on the gun ban (a topic which provokes intense debate depending the political affiliation of the subject), capacity in numeracy proved irrelevant.

Even worse: Numeracy amplified polarisation. Participants higher in numeracy were more likely to construe data correctly.

The correct interpretation of the data was manipulated by varying the result specified by the headings above the columns.

Numerate citizens would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.

The researchers pointed out that when data, correctly interpreted, threatened the people's outlooks, high-numeracy partisans had no meaningful advantage over low-numeracy individuals.

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From RTÉ Radio One's Marian Finucane, Aidan Moran Professor of Cognative Psychology at UCD joins Marian in studio about popular myths about the brain and mind

The power of the mind is not to be underestimated

Roshan Cools, Professor of Cognitive neuropsychiatry at Radboud University in The Netherlands, refers to the example of the smell of sweaty feet where some people smell cheese while others do not: "If you present a subject with an order and you tell its sweaty feet people think it's awful and avoid it. If you tell people that is cheese, for those who like cheese, they like it."

Roshan also mentions the milkshake study, a remarkable experiment about our mindset, done by clinical psychologist Alia Crum, which shows that words affect not only our mindset but also our physiology.

During the experiment, people were assigned in two different groups. Both had to drink a milkshake. One group was told that the milkshake was a healthy, low-calorie one while the other group was told that the milkshake was a high-calorie one.

Once both groups drank the milkshake, scientists measured a hormone in the blood called ghrelin, often called the "hunger hormone".

Blood levels of ghrelin are highest before meals when hungry, returning to lower levels after mealtimes. What the scientists found is that the high-calorie shake group had a much bigger effect on blunting and reducing ghrelin.

What is astonishing is that both groups were given the exact same milkshake, it was just labeled (and framed) low-calorie for one group and high-calorie for the other.

This illustrates that people’s belief about the content of something as healthy or unhealthy, impacted their physiology.

"Ιt's the power of the mind. It's the prefrontal cortex... " says Roshan.

Elina Makri is an Early Stage Researcher at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a PhD researcher at JOLT, the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie European Training Network.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ