A Introduction

What do hypotheses, biases, and inductive reasoning have in common? The question is at the heart of this chapter. One answer is that they can all arise from what, for lack of a better term, we can call “automatic thinking.” I don't have a precise or sophisticated definition for automatic thinking and will have to hope that everybody can agree that thought-producing mental activity is almost con­tinually going on while we're awake.

Automatic thinking occasionally appears in the spotlight when people are talking about scientific bias; however, it is frequently glossed over or ignored when the topics of hypotheses and inductive reasoning come up, which is too bad because this kind of thinking is key to understanding them as well. If you take automatic thinking into account, you may become more skeptical about ad­vice that tells you to avoid the hypothesis when you're carrying out experimental science and be less inclined to see inductive reasoning as a special aptitude of the human mind.

We don't usually pay much attention to our mental complexity and, instead, work with a common-sense impression of how the mind functions, what the phi­losopher Daniel Dennett labels “folk psychology.”¹ Folk psychology is intuitive, compelling, and often mistaken. We find inductive reasoning persuasive because we rely on folk psychology.

It goes without saying that scientists have the same built-in cognitive habits that everyone else has: scientists jump to conclusions, use unexamined mental short-cuts, fall prey to biases, go along with the crowd, hop on bandwagons, and engage in other unsound cognitive behaviors. What allows scientists to get be­yond the limitations of folk psychology are skepticism, a drive for getting to the truth, and stiff competition with their peers. As the critics that we reviewed in Chapter 10 remind us, a faith in folk psychology continues to confuse discussions of science, and lessons from cognitive science provide a useful perspective. To give it a name, this is a meta-cognitive approach: we need to think about how we think, and, to do that, we'll need to ask what sensory illusions, heuristics, fads, and cognitive biases can tell us about science and the hypothesis. Inborn tenden­cies account for the pervasiveness, indeed, the inevitability, of the hypothesis in scientific thinking. The best we can do is to comprehend and work within our limits. Resistance is futile.

11.