Psychology toolbox: How to use skepticism | Derren Brown | Big Think

Magic is a great analogy for how we process the world generally. We have this infinite data source coming at us, and there's an infinite number of things that we could think about. We essentially make up a story about what we're seeing; we edit and delete, we form a narrative, and we mistake that narrative for the truth. The way you watch a magic trick of any sort and edit your experience to form a story that brings you to a point of going, "My God, that's impossible!" is what we do every day in real life. We have to, because it's our only way of navigating forward.

But it's important to remember sometimes that it is just a story. There's a lot of stuff going on that we're not aware of, and of course, a magician doing a trick is exploiting exactly that process: the fact that we are master editors. So what I am encouraging is a form of skepticism.

I do think that the broad, easy skepticism of the magician or the atheist, you know, I'm an atheist, but I think that both of those camps have it too easy. There are things I think are important skeptically, and then there are also important checks on the very nature of skepticism. I think the important point, particularly in the world of people making grand claims—which is what I, as somebody rooted in magic, come across a lot—is that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

If somebody is making a grand claim, a supernatural claim for example, it's going to be up to them to come up with equally strong and impressive and grand evidence for that thing. It’s not up to the other person, say you, to disprove it, which is often what they say: "Well, you can't disprove it." If I say I've got a green mouse living in my house and I expect you to believe that, it's not your job to prove that I don't have a green mouse by looking in every corner of my house. You could always miss the mouse. It’s up to me to show you.

If I'm going to show you a photograph of it, there’s got to be a proper picture and not a doctored picture, and so on. What you have a lot of is evidence that isn't real evidence. For example, you know, a psychic medium using, say, her very demonstration of doing it—that's proof of psychic mediumship. Well, that’s no more valid than if a magician saws a woman in half and says, "What’s my proof that I’m doing it? Look, I’m sawing her in half!"

Well, that’s not proof. Proof would be, "Okay, well, do it with my sword. Do it with my box. Do it with my woman as opposed to your assistant," and do it under some kind of controlled conditions. Then maybe—you know, you create conditions that everyone agrees on—and then it becomes evidence.

So I think that, just in terms of understanding, not getting too caught up in other people's stories and narratives, and falling for them is that reserve of skepticism is important. It’s important to know when it’s your job to disprove and when it isn’t—particularly in a world full of charlatans and people trying to get us to believe what they want. But it's very difficult because it's hard to know what information sources to trust. That’s just part of the world we live in now, and it’s dizzying and depressing knowing where you can start, but at least you can do your best.

You can try and work authentically by spotting your own biases and understanding as much as you can the biases of others. Where I think skepticism, in its broad modern popular sense, manifests is: “I just don't believe in God; I don't believe in this; I don't believe in that.” I think it has its limits. I speak very much as a skeptic myself and as an atheist, as I said.

It is important to realize the edges of its usefulness in those things that may not be objectively true but can be psychologically true, in inverted commas. In other words, they can be psychologically resonant to the path of living and what we take in life and what's important and what's helpful. So that's what you don’t want to throw out. You don’t want to throw out that maybe with the bathwater.

In religion, for example, those things that are easily knocked down if you're an atheist are easy to kind of make fun of and disprove. Those things are also kind of often our straw men to knock down, but they can often be pointers back to something that is psychologically useful. There are signifiers of something.

If you take what happens with religion, you have something that happens—an experience of transcendence or a kind of a thing that happened historically. Nothing magical or supernatural, but just for people at that time, a connection to a sense of the transcendent, whatever that was—a message or something.

Then, as that moves out of living memory, a bunch of practices and dogmas and things are formed to try and recreate that feeling, and that becomes now a thing of belief rather than a sort of knowledge that it was at the time. To sustain and protect that belief, an institution is sort of created and developed and becomes politicized and powerful and monetized and all of those things.

Then it moves into a world where we are nowadays, where things have to be sort of proved with evidence. It starts to try and come up with evidential arguments that somehow never quite really work. So you do end up with a thing that's easier to knock down, but that can miss the fact that there's something at the heart of it which maybe is useful. Maybe those narratives around religion are useful to us psychologically.

Maybe they have an archetypal or mythological use that would be a shame to dismiss because we feel the absence of those things. It’s the very fact we turn to psychics and fortune tellers and become terrified and lonely around death. Those things happen because we’ve lost touch with some of those myths and some of those more resonant narratives.

So I am, I think, being a little skeptical about skepticism itself and the easy narratives that it forms. I think that is also very useful.