Consider the following question: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Almost everyone who reads this question will have an immediate impulse to answer “10 cents.” It just looks and feels right. And yet it’s wrong. In fact, it’s clearly wrong—if you give it some careful thought—and yet it is perfectly normal to stumble on this test. “Almost everyone we ask reports an initial tendency to answer ‘ten cents,’ ” write psychologists Kahneman and Shane Frederick. “Many people yield to this immediate impulse. The surprisingly high rate of errors in this easy problem illustrates how lightly System Two [Head] monitors the output of System One [Gut]: people are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.”
Head can be amazingly lax. Psychologists have repeatedly shown, for example, that when people are asked about their own sense of well-being, the weather makes a major difference: Sunny skies push the reported sense of well-being up, while rain drives it down. That’s Gut talking. Everyone knows weather affects mood. But there’s obviously far more to the question of one’s well-being than a temporary mood caused by foul or fair weather. Head should step in and adjust Gut’s answer accordingly. And yet it often doesn’t. Numerous studies have even found that the weather is strongly correlated with gains or losses in stock markets. It’s ludicrous that sunshine should have any bearing on the financial calculations of Wall Street stockbrokers, and yet it clearly does. Head is like a bright but lazy teenager: capable of great things, if he would just get out of bed.
And that’s how things work under normal conditions. Psychologists have demonstrated that when people are in a rush, Head’s monitoring of Gut’s judgments becomes even looser and more mistakes get through. “Morning people” are sloppier in the evening, while evening people are at their worst in the morning. Distraction and exhaustion also reduce Head’s focus. So does stress. And it’s pretty obvious what happens after drinking a beer or three.
Now, if you happen to be in a stressful spot like an African slum after midnight, exhausted from a long day of work, a little woozy from drinking a few pints of Guinness, and upset by the theft of your wallet and the pictures inside—well, Head really isn’t going to be at his best.
Summarizing the relationship between Head and Gut, Kahneman wrote that they “compete for the control of overt responses.” One might say—with a touch less precision but a little more color—that each of us is a car racing along a freeway and inside each car is a caveman who wants to drive and a bright-but-lazy teenager who knows he should keep a hand on the wheel but, well, that’s kind of a hassle and he’d really rather listen to his iPod and stare out the window.
That night in Nigeria, the caveman drove while the teen curled up in the backseat and went to sleep. I was lucky to get out alive.
3
The Death of Homo economicus
"Recent figures suggest some 50,000 pedophiles are prowling the Internet at any one time,” says the Web site of Innocents in Danger, a Swiss-based NGO. No source is cited for the claim, which appears under the headline "Some Terrifying Statistics.”
It is indeed a terrifying statistic. It is also well traveled. It has been sighted in Britain, Canada, the United States, and points beyond. Like a new strain of the flu virus, it has spread from newspaper articles to TV reports to public speakers, Web sites, blogs, and countless conversations of frightened parents. It even infected Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general of the United States.
Unfortunately, the mere fact that a number has proliferated, even at the highest levels of officialdom, does not demonstrate the number is true. So what about this number? Is it credible?
There’s one obvious reason to be at least a little suspicious. It’s a round number. A very round number. It’s not 47,000, or 53,500. It is 50,000. And 50,000 is just the sort of perfectly round number people pluck out of the air when they make a wild guess.
And what method aside from wild guessing could one use to come up with the number of pedophiles online? Accurate counts of ordinary Internet users are tough enough. But pedophiles? Much as one may wish they were all identified and registered with the authorities, they aren’t, and they aren’t likely to be completely frank about their inclinations when a telephone surveyor calls to ask about online sexual habits.
Another reason for caution is the way this alleged fact changes from one telling to another. In Britain’s The Independent newspaper, an article stated there are “as many as” 50,000 pedophiles online. Other sources says there are precisely 50,000. A few claim “at least” 50,000.
There’s also variation in what those pedophiles are supposed to be up to. In some stories, the pedophiles are merely “online” and the reader is left to assume they are doing something other than getting the latest headlines or paying the water bill. Others say the pedophiles are “looking for children. ” In the most precise account, all 50,000 pedophiles are said to have “one goal in mind: to find a child, strike up a relationship, and eventually meet with the child.” This spectacular feat of mind reading can be found on the Web site of Spectorsoft, a company that sells frightened parents software that monitors their children’s online activities for the low cost of $99.95.
Then there’s the supposed arena in which those 50,000 pedophiles are said to be operating. In some versions, it’s 50,000 around the world, or on the whole of the Internet. But an American blogger narrowed that considerably: “50,000 pedophiles at any one time are on MySpace.com and other social networking sites looking for kids.” And a story in the magazine Dallas Child quotes two parent-activists—identified as “California’s Parents of the Year for 2001”—who say, “The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it can also be an evil one, especially sites like MySpace.com. At any one given time, 50,000 pedophiles are on the site.”
All this should have our inner skeptic ringing alarm bells. But there is a final, critical question that has to be answered before we can dismiss this number as junk: What is its source?
In most of the number’s appearances, no source is cited. The author simply uses the passive voice (“It is estimated that . . .”) to paper over this gaping hole. Another way to achieve the same effect—one used far too often in newspapers—is to simply quote an official who states the number as fact. The number then takes on the credibility of the official, even though the reader still doesn’t know the number’s source. After an article in the Ottawa Citizen repeated the 50,000 pedophiles figure within a quotation from Ian Wilms, the president of the Canadian Association of Police Boards, I called Wilms and asked where he got the number. It came up in a conversation with British police, he said. And no, he couldn’t be more precise.
Fortunately, there are several versions of the “50,000 pedophiles” story—including the article in The Independent—that do point to a source. They all say it comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So I called the FBI. No, a spokesperson said, that’s not our number. We have no idea where it came from. And no, she said, the bureau doesn’t have its own estimate of the number of pedophiles online because that’s impossible to figure out.