In the very first book of his monumental history of the Peloponnesian War, whilst presenting a preliminary survey of the early Hellene culture up to the point of the war’s outbreak, Thucydides muses about the lack of critical thought given to stories and traditions, “even on matters of contemporary history which have not been obscured by time:”
The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever. […] So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.
(Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 1, paragraph 20.)
“Accepting readily the first story that comes to hand;” it is an idea that could just as easily be expressed by a modern observer about the manner in which so many today unquestioningly take any tidbit or anecdote heard or read as fact so long as it is communicated as such – even when, to borrow a phrase used by editor Robert B. Strassler in the gloss to the paragraph – “they are clearly in error.”
While it would be easy simply to attribute this obviously long-standing human weakness to intellectual laziness, it is worth considering the discoveries partly contradicting such an assumption as presented in a recent paper titled “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government” by Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic. In this paper, Professor Kahan et al. explain how their research has lead to the conclusion that “more Numerate [sic] subjects would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks,” or in other words, even those among us with a high level of computational skills – indeed, especially those with such skills – resist information if it conflicts with our existing view of the world.
While the “Motivated Numeracy” paper does indeed give one pause, I suspect that there is still room for both intellectual laziness as well as an ingrained resistance to psycho-socially conflictive information to play a role in this – as testified to by Thucydides – age-old problem.
