(featured image via DALL-E 3)
We should be careful not to take our interpretation of the facts as the objective, unequivocal truth.
A good 20 years ago, Frédéric Brochet, then a PhD student oenology (the study of wine), was cataloguing the descriptors wine tasters use for his dissertation. He ran an experiment with 54 undergraduate students at Bordeaux (where else!) University’s Faculty of Oenology, tasting a white (sémillon and sauvignon) and a red (cabernet-sauvignon and merlot) Bordeaux wine. The participants were asked to pick from a list of odour descriptors those they thought corresponded with the wines (they could also provide new descriptors themselves). One week later, the same panel was invited to taste the same wine again, with each participant receiving the full list of descriptors he or she produced a week earlier, listed alphabetically and without any indication which descriptor had been used for the red or the white wine. For each of the descriptors, they were asked to indicate which of the two wines most intensely presented the character of the descriptor. There was one twist, though: this time the red wine was in fact the white wine, with the addition of a neutral red dye. Nonetheless, they ascribed the descriptors used earlier for the red wine to the fake red wine, as if it were real. They interpreted the fact that the wine was coloured red as a definitive signal that they were genuinely tasting red wine.
The predicting mind
A common model of how our mind functions is that it acts like a prediction machine. It creates a picture of the world based on what we have stored in our memory, and constantly verifies it with input from our senses, adjusting it as required. Because the world more often conforms with what we know about it, than deviating from it, we don’t need to reconstruct the entire picture from scratch every millisecond, and only need to process what is different, when something is different. Efficient, or what?
Sometimes this assumption of concordance is so strong that subsequent signals to the contrary have no effect. This is what happened with these wine expert students. Despite their comparative youth, being French, they would have had the chance of tasting numerous wines, even before they started their course. Every single time, they’ll have associated the colour with the nature of the wine. But our minds do not automatically distinguish between observed facts (“this looks like red wine”) and the meaning we associated with them (“this is red wine”).
While they were, in truth, given two glasses of white wine, the fact was that one of those glasses was spiked with a red dye. They had interpreted this as an unequivocal sign that it contained genuine red wine – and that belief was so strong that they ignored the information their nose was supplying.
I was reminded of this remarkable study when after last weekend’s presidential election in Russia, Vladimir Putin was reported to have gained 87.8% of the vote. This cited result is a fact. Yet while some political leaders, from Chinese president XI Jinping and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to Iran’s president Raisi and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un congratulated Putin on his landslide re-election, in Europe, the elections were labelled “pseudo-election” (by German President Steinmeier) and “neither legal, free or fair” (by the Polish foreign ministry) and described as an “imitation of elections” (by Ukrainian president Zelenskyy), “so-called elections” by German PM Scholz’s spokeswoman Christina Hoffmann. The same fact (87.8% of the vote), but two very different interpretations (massive signal of trust from the electorate, or massive fraud).
It is tempting to regard one of the two interpretations as the only correct one, and the other one as factually and morally wrong. The problem is that this would apply regardless of what one’s actual position is: of course, your own side is right, and the other side is deluded and malicious. However, neither side can possibly convince their opponents of the error of their ways. Either side can adduce arguments for their case, but these will be immediately rejected by the other side. So, either side sticks to its own, very different truth, based on the same facts.
The commonality disparate interpretations
And such situations are common, perhaps much more common than we might realize. In the last few days, there has been some commotion around something former US president, and current presidential candidate Donald Trump had said. The headlines left little to the imagination: NBC wrote “Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election”, and the Guardian headlined “Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election”. Even given Mr Trump’s reputation for regularly making shocking statements, many people will, for a moment, have wondered, “did he really say that?”. And the accompanying video clips confirmed he really did. Only, often the broader context for the statement was omitted, namely that Trump was talking about the fate of the US car industry, which would be slaughtered unless he was elected and subsequently imposed 100% tariffs on imported Mexican-built Chinese cars. Countless people would, however, have taken the headline at face value, and come to the conclusion that the prediction referred to the violence that would erupt in case Trump lost the election. Once again, nobody questions the fact itself (what Trump said), yet the (lack of) context determined the interpretation: Trump was openly inciting violence.
[The buses are as regular as clockwork (image: screenshot BBC)]
As if to further support my point about the ubiquity of such situations, another example came to my attention this week. A BBC report from Pakistan featured a reporter supposedly standing on a bridge over a busy highway in Islamabad. However, closer inspection of the background shows that the image is looped: the same bus keeps on appearing every 15 seconds or so. So, was the journalist really where she pretends to be? One lone commenter remarked that it was at worst lazy editing, not deception – “standard practice in newsrooms, not meant to deceive, but to represent the location from where the reporter is reporting from”. Many more reactions were less forgiving, and accused the BBC of fraud, fakery and lying. Here too: same fact (the background was not real), different interpretations (ineptitude, or proof of ill intent).
We rarely start with an open mind. More often than not we already have a clear view of what the truth is – Putin is an evil dictator, or a strong, nationalist leader; Trump is a mad authoritarian, or the guy who stands up for American workers; the BBC is tendentious and untrustworthy, or blunders when applying common techniques.
We not only have prior experiences and memories, but we also have preconceptions and prejudices, we have affinities and dislikes, allegiances and aversions. All of these shape the beliefs we have, well before any facts make their appearance. When they eventually do, our tendency is to look for signs of confirmation for those beliefs. The facts, almost always beyond dispute, easily become indistinct from the truth, as it exists in our imagination, and hence unquestionable proof of it. It is hard to resist that tendency, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth trying, and at least consider that other interpretations are possible.
There is an ironic little twist to the wine experiment: it has often been retold without mentioning that the inept ‘experts’ were, in fact, undergraduate students. Might this be because it is more satisfying to take down experts a few notches, or because students don’t belong in a narrative that seeks to mock wine snobs? I rest my case (of Bordeaux).
Koenfucius 