Standards for Evidence Explored in Detail
Logical Consistency
Logical consistency is by far the most common primary standard for evidence. Outside of individuals who establish personal emotional experience as their base, if someone told us they had any other primary standard of evidence, we would assume they mean “after logical consistency of course.”
It is very rare for obvious logical inconsistencies to appear in our beliefs about the world (that is, beliefs held by the type of person who would read this book), as most mainstream beliefs about the way the world works are already logically consistent and any inconsistencies that do arise are explained away by individuals who we believe are smarter than us and have far more free time. To find a commonly held logical inconsistency, you would need to delve into conspiracy theories.
A good case study for looking at logical inconsistency is the belief that the moon landing was faked. Consider the following three points that most people believe:
A. The Soviet Union and the United States where genuine enemies during the cold war,
B. the Soviet Union was not so completely incompetent as to not notice we faked the moon landings, and
C. the Soviet Union did not claim the moon landings were faked.
If you believe these three points, the standard of logical consistency would trump even compelling evidence that the moon landing was faked.
Though all our minds strive for logical consistency, we almost never use this standard to overturn existing ideologies—even if we really value logic. It is one thing to admit to yourself you were wrong about something because you didn’t have all the facts, but quite something else to admit you were wrong about something due to a logical inconsistency that self-reflection could have uncovered. For this reason, even among individuals who would swear that logical inconsistency trumps all other forms of evidence, logical consistency is almost never evoked to update their beliefs.
Personal Experience
An individual who establishes personal experience as their primary standard for evidence would override any set of current beliefs based on a personal experience. While many of us assume this is our ultimate standard of evidence (“I’ll believe it when I see it”), it is in fact a relatively rare standard to maintain at the top of one’s hierarchy.
Suppose a voice speaks to you, tells you it is the voice of God, and asks you to join the Church of Latter-day Saints. Do you do it? An individual who places Catholic Doctrine as their primary standard of evidence would dismiss this as a trick of the devil, whereas someone who holds expert consensus (in this case the consensus of the scientific community) at the core of his standards of evidence may experience this and dismiss the experience as a psychotic episode and become concerned that he is developing schizophrenia.
If you are one of the rare individuals who would respond to the above event by unquestioningly becoming a Mormon, personal experience may therefore be your ultimate standard for evidence. Knowing what you would do if a voice, claiming to be God, spoke to you and said something that did not align with your existing religious beliefs is valuable in understanding the true nature of those beliefs.
While personal experience is extremely rare as a primary standard of evidence, personal experiences may be so powerful that they override higher standards of evidence in your hierarchy. For example, suppose you heard the voice of God telling you to join the Church of Latter-day Saints not just once, but every morning for five years. While at first you may dismiss the voice as schizophrenia, after five years you would likely believe it—even if you have just as much reason to believe it is still schizophrenia.
Personal Emotional Experience (Gut Feel / Intuition)
Someone who establishes personal emotional experience as their primary standard for evidence will believe something is true because it “feels” true to them (whether they have personally perceived it within their lives). These people often describe themselves as “going with their guts” and making decisions based on “intuition.”
This is the most “natural” of all the primary standards of evidence in that it is the standard all humans default to when they cannot muster the emotional control required to suppress it. It is not a great personal failing if you feel drawn to believe something because it “feels right” even though you logically know it is a poor standard of evidence. This compulsion is a sensation all humans know (or at least all humans who try to overcome their base instincts).
Personal emotional experience is the primary standard of evidence used by a large portion of the population. It is particularly common amongst spiritualists, practitioners of new age philosophies, and individuals who have certain soft religious beliefs (e.g., “I believe everything in the Bible except for anything that is inconvenient and makes me feel bad”).
This standard for evidence is unique in that it is the only primary standard for evidence that does not require logical consistency. The ideological trees of individuals whose hypotheses about the world are predicated on whether something feels right (or is pleasant, interesting, comforting, or otherwise emotionally easy) are riddled with inconsistencies.
For example, individuals who establish a religious doctrine as their ultimate standard of evidence will still find it a valuable exercise to explain how apparent contradictions in their religious texts are only superficial misinterpretations. An individual who relies on personal emotional experience would not be concerned by such contradictions as long their conclusion feels right to them.
Because our emotional experiences are not bound to a logical framework, individuals who “go with their guts” make for uniquely frustrating debate partners for those who use other standards of evidence. While one may be able to convince an individual using gut feeling as their standard of evidence that there is no logical way the principle behind homeopathy is accurate (i.e., that diluting a substance does not, in fact, increase its potency), this will not influence his belief in homeopathy so long as it feels true to them.
Individuals relying on emotional experiences as their standard of evidence often find it equally frustrating to convince those who prioritize other standards of evidence, defaulting to arguments designed to attack one’s emotional attachment to a concept. Such a person may argue against a scientific or religious concept by labeling it as racist without internalizing that people with other standards for evidence do not use perceived racism as a barometer for truth.
Intuition does not always run against logic. It is well documented that human intuition works well for repetitive tasks so long as one has experience with them and the tasks involve immediate positive or negative feedback. Outside of these very narrow situations in which intuition is effective, it is equally well recorded that intuition does not lead to “factually correct” decision making (despite what some poorly researched pop science books claim). That said, it is relatively irrelevant whether a thing is “factually correct” to a person who makes decisions based on their emotional experience, as such a person believes that factual correctness is a lower order of correctness than emotional correctness (something feeling true).
Cultural Consensus
An individual who establishes cultural consensus as their primary standard of evidence will dismiss all other standards of evidence—whether they be something they personally experience or something their religious text clearly states—should that evidence go against the norms of the subculture with which they identify.
Cultural consensus as a standard of evidence almost never refers to the consensus of society as a whole, but instead the consensus of one’s personal subculture. If one’s subculture—such as a religious community—has another standard of evidence as its cultural norm—such as religious doctrine—one may appear to be following this other standard of evidence (instead of what they are actually doing, which is deferring to the consensus of the subculture with which they identify).
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This standard of evidence is almost as much of a human default as personal emotional experience. Study after study has shown that people will trust “the group” over their own personal experiences. The Asch conformity experiments go so far as to show that when everyone in a room is saying the line on the left is the same length as line B, only 25% of people ignore the consensus in favor of what their senses are telling them. Among the 75% of participants who are influenced to follow the group, follow up studies demonstrate that some perceived what the group was saying as being literally true and saw the line as being the same length as line B because they heard a number of other people say it was. 1
This standard of evidence has become the predominant standard of evidence within large swaths of the academic community (something that can come as quite the shock to individuals who have never worked in academia). For example, well over half of 335 social psychologists responding to a study conducted by Buss and Von Hippel reported that if their research—or that of a colleague—found a biological basis for sex differences, the findings should be obfuscated.[[38]](#_ftn38) These finding demonstrate a particular subculture’s belief that the equality of all humans should take precedence over any scientific evidence to the contrary. (One of this book’s sequels, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, explores how subcultures within politics within academia have twisted the mainstream interpretation of sexuality into something that does not align with the data).
None of this should come as a surprise. Humans are social animals, with brains designed for social conformity. Consensus with one’s personal subculture is by far the most common primary standard of evidence amongst the general population.
Expert Consensus
An individual who holds expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence is willing to disregard even deeply held beliefs if an educated, expert community (as they have defined it) deems them inaccurate. Individuals who hold expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence may turn to consensus among physicists for information on how the fabric of the universe works, turn to the heads of the religious community for information on what will get them sent to hell, and turn to a respected newspaper for information on what is happening in the Middle East.
Two people who rely on expert consensus may have very different ideological trees depending on who they consider to be “experts” on different subjects. For example, consider the issue of autism and vaccines. Some people consider the medical community to be experts, and therefore do not believe that vaccines cause autism. Others consider online researchers to be experts, and therefore believe that vaccines cause autism.
Even those referring to the same expert community can come away with very different beliefs depending on their thresholds for consensus. One individual may update his beliefs based on a single well-conducted study published in what he deems to be a respectable peer-reviewed science journal whereas another may wait until thought leaders in a particular field update their beliefs.
Ironically, it is almost impossible for a great scientist or thought leader to establish expert consensus as his primary standard of evidence. To truly become great, a scientist or thought leader must be able to vastly alter mainstream conceptions in a field based on personal experiences. This individual may have to believe for years or decades that almost every other expert in his field is fundamentally wrong about how their field works.
An archetypical example of this would be Charles Darwin, who, drawing from his personal experiences in the Galapagos, essentially rewrote everything that was previously accepted about biology. If Darwin had genuinely held contemporary scientific consensus as his standard of evidence, he would have dismissed any personal experiences that conflicted with that consensus. Therefore, many individuals who hold expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence make an exception for fields in which they consider themselves to be experts.
Scientific Method
A person who holds this standard of evidence will disregard the consensus of the scientific community if they believe the body of research produced by that community does not align with the expert consensus in the community. For example, if such a person encountered an extremely well designed and executed study with a huge sample size come to a conclusion that is radically different from the scientific community’s present consensus, such a person would alter their viewpoint on the topic before the community itself did.
This is an extremely rare standard of evidence to realistically execute on: It requires regularly consuming vast amounts of information, developing a deep understanding of what constitutes a well conducted experiment in a large number of different fields, and a knowledge of the experiments around which the community has built its present consensus (because no matter how good an experiment is, such a person would only change their view if that experiment presents better data than the sum of all data from all other experiments conducted on the subject).
This standard of evidence is more dangerous than most would assume. It is common for individuals who hold it to not invest the time necessary to truly understand why the scientific community sides with the existing body of evidence over a random study this person found online or in an obscure journal. Studies that get shared a lot are not more likely to be true; there are just more likely to be counter intuitive, salacious, or otherwise shocking. This is why communities that hold this standard of evidence so often end up performing bizarre practices, such as eating sticks of butter every morning after reading one study that suggests it will be healthy. If you are not able to constantly monitor all major work being released in a field or do not have a robust understanding of experimental design, we would recommend you just default to expert consensus over conclusions drawn from specific studies.
I (Malcolm) would see such a primary standard of evidence as being completely unfeasible for a real person to maintain in a responsible way (who is not a practicing scientist in a field) if I did not know that the other author (Simone) regularly reviews every major cognitive psychology study released then adds anything she finds pertinent to her worldview to a master document she maintains as well as a note on the strength of the experimental design. If you are not a practicing scientist making judgment calls within your field, maintaining this standard of evidence with any fidelity will require at least reading every major study in a field on a weekly basis.
I should note my views on this subject have changed considerably since we first published this book. In one of our subsequent books, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we dug deep into just how much politics have affected the current academic consensus. This has disillusioned me to the point where I now make a point of funding my own studies to sanity check parts of the academic consensus that are likely to be politically motivated. The results of these personally funded studies have led me to lose faith that the consensus within a few domains of social science is based on an analysis of data and thus I more aggressively distrust other domains I have yet to personally research.
Doctrine
An individual who accepts doctrine as their primary standard of evidence allows evidence from a selection of written works (or cultural history) to trump all other forms of evidence. Though religious doctrine is the most common source material, political ideologies are sometimes used as well, particularly in communist and fascist countries.
An individual who establishes a doctrine as their standard of evidence almost by necessity does not have a “reason” for following their doctrine, as the doctrine itself is the highest order of truth. Because of this, such individuals often have a difficult time persuading others to their way of thinking due to a tendency to rely on arguments like: “This book is the word of God; you can see right here in the book—it says that this is the word of God, so your book is not.”
Such arguments are only persuasive to an individual already using that particular text as their standard of evidence.
While doctrine, particularly religious doctrine, may seem common as a primary standard of evidence, it is in fact fairly rare. The primary standard of evidence for most religious individuals is cultural consensus within their religious subculture or expert consensus among their clergy—not religious doctrine.
An archetypical example of expert consensus and religious doctrine clashing can be seen during one of the lines of argument during the Protestant Reformation, in which some Christians began to argue that the beliefs of the experts within their religious community were not in line with the religious text.
These thinkers framed the core schism between Protestants and Catholics as a disagreement about which standard of evidence people should use, specifically: Is something true because it is in the Bible, or is something true because the highest-ranking individuals within the religious community generally agree it is true? Essentially, can an average person come to a better understanding of the Bible by reading it themselves, or by asking someone who spent their entire life studying it and thinking about it?
Like these early Protestant thinkers, almost any individual who follows religious doctrine as a standard of evidence will be seen as an iconoclast (even within their own religious community) because the mainstream culture of any religious community strays from its core tenants over time. Religious communities deviate from their doctrine with time, as individuals who value personal self-interest over doctrinal fidelity inevitably gain power within communities. Such people have the ability to represent a religion as something more palatable or profitable (giving them more marketing dollars) than its true doctrine would. After all, the church that tells you your friends aren’t going to hell is usually going to outcompete the uncompromising church amongst all but the truest of believers.
An individual who sets religious doctrine as their standard of evidence will ironically not find a comfortable home among most practitioners of their religion, as the way they will approach their religion will inevitably force them into conflict with the majority of the religion’s practitioners who are instead following a cultural consensus. This confrontation is a threat to the power structures within an established religion, hence individuals who take doctrine as their primary standard of evidence are typically publicly shamed as extremists to decrease their influence.
The most used primary standard of evidence amongst those who identify as religious—cultural consensus—is an objectively bad primary standard to use. However, it is less obvious whether using doctrine or expert consensus as one’s primary standard is a superior approach for the average believer.
As discussed above, some religious traditions even regard expert consensus as superior to doctrine. This is typically found in any religious tradition with a single governing body and allows for such traditions to update their beliefs by decree, like the Church of Latter-day Saints updating its views on polygamy or the Catholic church updating its views on evolution. However, even outside of the kinds of religious traditions that hold councils of experts to update their beliefs, holding expert consensus as a standard of evidence greater than doctrine should not be interpreted as making an individual “a bad believer.”
Many people, perhaps correctly, lack the confidence to believe that they have the training and the intellect to notice something in the texts of their doctrine that centuries of experts did not.