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

Psychology toolbox: How to use skepticism

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Psychological illusionist Derren Brown presents magic as an analogy for how we process the world around us. In the same way we believe in a trick by forming a narrative around it, we can tell ourselves stories in life.

It's important to maintain a sense of skepticism. But it's equally as important to recognize the edges of usefulness in being skeptical.

For example, an atheist can be skeptical of religion while still admitting that the narratives around religion might be valuable and psychologically useful.

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DERREN BROWN:

Derren Brown began his UK television career in December 2000 with a series of specials called Mind Control. In the UK, his name is now pretty much synonymous with the art of psychological manipulation. Amongst a varied and notorious TV career, Derren has played Russian Roulette live, convinced middle-managers to commit armed robbery, led the nation in a séance, stuck viewers at home to their sofas, successfully predicted the National Lottery, motivated a shy man to land a packed passenger plane at 30,000 feet, hypnotised a man to assassinate Stephen Fry, and created a zombie apocalypse for an unsuspecting participant after seemingly ending the world. He has also written several best-selling books and has toured with eight sell-out one-man stage shows.

Read Derren Brown's latest book, HappyWhy More or Less Everything Is Fine

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TRANSCRIPT:

Magic is a great analogy for how we process the world generally. So, we have this infinite data source coming at us, there’s an infinite number of things that we can think about, but we essentially make up a story about what we’re seeing. We edit and delete and 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 oh my god that’s impossible is what we do every day in real life, and 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 that 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 I am encouraging a form of skepticism, but I do think that the broad easy skepticism of the magician or the atheist, I’m an atheist but I think that both of those camps have it too easy. So, there are things I think that are important skeptically and then there’s also important checks on the very nature of skepticism. Particularly in the world of people making claims, grand claims, which is what as somebody rooted in magic come across a lot, an important point that I guess goes back to Hume, which is the extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. So, 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. As opposed to it’s up to the other person say you to disapprove 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 because you could always miss the mouse, it’s up to me to show you it. If I’m going to show you a photograph of it it has got to be a proper picture not a doctored picture and so on. So, what you have a lot of is evidence that isn’t real evidence.

So, for example, a psychic and medium using say her very demonstration of doing it as proof of psychic mediumship, well that’s no more valid than if a magician saws a woman in half and says well here’s proof that I’m doing it. Look I’m sawing her in half. Well, that’s not proof. Proof would be okay do it with my saw, do it with my box, do it with my woman as opposed to your assistant and do it under some kind of controlled conditions and then maybe I’ll believe it. You create conditions that everyone agrees on and then it becomes evidence. I think just in terms of understanding not getting too caught up in other people’s stories and other people’s narratives and falling for them, that reserve of skepticism is important. And when it's your job to disprove and when it isn't that's important, particularly in a world full of charlatans and people trying to get us to believe what they want. But it's very difficult because...

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