Ignorance stifling fight against Corona

Every conversation you are going to have for the next couple of months is going to follow a predictable curve. It will start responsibly, cordially and amicably: “Warrap”, “Gyebare”, “Mwana guy”, etc.

Then it will swiftly shift to the topic of the day, the Covid-19 pandemic.

It will hover around the light and humorous for a few moments before it takes a sharp dive into the, well, let’s not be coy because, as this article will demonstrate, the word is not necessarily an insult, a sharp dive into the stupid.

The conversation will proceed to plumb such depths of ignorance and superstition that you will wish to social distance yourself completely from these people by switching your phone off entirely. Even draining the battery to zero, and smashing the screen until you cannot read the words they whatsapp.

Someone will say something stupid. Of the dangers that surround this coronavirus outbreak, misinformation and willful ignorance are among the deadlier ones. The facts are readily and easily available, so why are so many people so ignorant?

Honestly, they are stupid
And honestly, we all are. And that is one of the major obstacles that communicators have to overcome in ensuring that the tide of the coronavirus is stemmed and reversed before it does any more damage.

We like to imagine that as humans, we are rational, logical, intelligent beings that think and analyse information then come to the cleverest conclusion, but this is not always the case. In fact, it is often not the case.

The way the human brain works is that it has developed shortcuts and bookmarks, much like a computer does.

Researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman started the ball rolling in the 1970s by identifying a few of what we now call heuristics in both psychology and computer science.
There is just always too much information to carefully, logically assess before decisions are made, so we tend to rely on these heuristics for the sake of saving time and energy.

For example, consider those white plastic chairs we find (or rather used to find, before the age of isolation dawned upon us) at family functions. You do not stress-test each leg of a chair before you sit on it. You just assume, based on your experience so far with chairs in general, that chairs are capable of holding up the weight of all, including yours.

You just, therefore, sit upon the chair.

But, it turns out, the left back leg was cracked a bit and once you sit on it, the whole thing gives way. You collapse comically and spectacularly and the camera person who was filming the kuhingira or whatever function it was gets a nice shot of your underwear as you fall.

The wise thing would be to check each chair’s leg beforehand and not assume they are all strong and sturdy, but we don’t. We just assume and sit. That is heuristics at work.

It should be easy to control this pandemic. The facts are simple and easily available. Plus no one is on the side of the coronavirus; it has no money so it is not even paying agents and influencers to spread rumours.

We all want it under control so we can go back to our lives earning livings and attending either bar or church or both, depending on how hypocritical you like to be at the weekends.

So why do the myths persist to sabotage the dissemination of useful facts?
Because there is a specific category of heuristics, a specific category called cognitive biases, which subvert the success of the system. This is when heuristics go rogue and actually make us think the wrong things. They make us think stupidly, and we all have them. And they are all working on us, especially during this time. Let’s look at a few:

Confirmation bias
This is a common one, especially in the age of social media bubbles. Essentially, it means you tend to seek out and value information that confirms what you already believed. But it has an uncanny and almost magical tendency to make you not just avoid, but actively resist information that contradicts your view.

Scholars of the evolution of societies believe it developed to help strengthen tribal loyalty in primitive days, when survival depended on groups staying together: whatever it took to strengthen the cohesion of the tribe, even if it meant galvanising people by making the group think the same way, was embedded in our thinking structure. You need to believe your group is in the right so you have fewer qualms about fighting others.

It persists even in modern, enlightened civilised times. Say in the case of Bridget Nakabwenzi (not real name), a prolific fornicator from the eastern side of Nakawa Division, Kampala. She says she likes me, laughs at all my jokes, types “Lol” when I whatsapp her and occasionally calls me “Sweetie”, especially just before she asks to borrow my car again.

A lot of people tell me that she is just using me. They say she uses every middle-aged idiot in the area in the same way. But I do not believe them. I believe they are just haters. When she returns the car with Joseph’s underwear under the back seat, that is probably because she was helping him transport his laundry. Bridget and I have something special.

“We ignore information that disputes our expectations and are more likely to remember stereotypical consistencies,” is how social psychologist Catherine Sanderson describes it in her book Social Psychology, also inadvertently describing how it worked against us in Uganda’s fight against Covid-19.

We all expected Chinese importers or travellers from China to bring it to the nation and, in some cases harshly stigmatised East Asians in Uganda.

Watchdoguganda, a local news website, described Arua residents as “terrified” when a Chinese national isolated himself in a hotel there soon after the outbreak. According to the website, the hotel staff wanted the authorities to force the man out, fearing not only infection, but contamination of the entire hotel.

All this, only for the proverbial cat to drag the virus in from Dubai UAE instead.

Confirmation bias is prevalent in politics and religion; some churches persisted in attempting to congregate even after the ban on large gatherings, because they believe that they must pray against sickness.

The pre-existing belief that God will protect the faithful against pestilence biased them against the danger their gatherings posed to the nation as a whole.

God will protect the faithful, and you may believe that as much as you do, but if there are a couple dozen unfaithful in that congregation, and just two of them are incubating the virus, then at the end of one service, you may have 26 carriers going out to spread it further, even if not a single faithful Christian is infected.

But that argument bounced off so many ears that the police had to arrest shepherds and their flocks in different parts of Uganda, as diverse as Kisoro, Entebbe, and Jinja districts since the President asked them to not let the rest of us get sick.

The fortunate thing is that being aware of the possibility of a confirmation bias is often enough to negate it.

Once you know that you might be biased, you can take the measures to neutralise it. Just ask yourself: Do I believe this because it is fact-based, or because the stupidity instinct in my head does not want me to change my mind?

And then stop going to large gatherings.

Availability bias
This one was one of the first biases exposed by Tversky and Kahneman and can be broken down as such: We tend to place greater value on information that comes to us quickly, especially due to media sensation, culture and tradition, and how exciting the news is.

The first things we hear tend to get more credibility from us than subsequent adjustments, and so the rumours that reach us before the myth busting facts are harder to uproot.

An example of availability bias is that incompetent knucklehead boss you once had. He was hired straight from getting the Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Oxford. The chief executive officer (CEO) at the company already knew that Oxford provides excellent education to their graduates and hired him on the spot.

Then even after it transpired that he was vain, petty and mean spirited and was so unpleasant to work with that he was incapable of leading a team to do anything but hate him, the CEO wondered: “How come his department is always underperforming?”

“They are unmotivated because he is a lousy leader,” replied the CEO’s biscuit (every good CEO should have one.)

“But he has an MBA from Oxford!” insisted the CEO, unable to internalise that book smart is not the same thing as talented leadership. That is the availability heuristic bias. We are always told that Oxbridge and Ivy League grads are automatically better at everything.

Philosopher and Psychologist William James put it this way in his book, Principles of Psychology: “The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what we remember best.”

It is the same bias that made us hoard toilet paper (TP) because we saw people doing it on the news even after we were advised that six cubed feet of TP in the garage won’t be of any use during the pandemic.

The same bias causes many of us to continue placing an undue amount of faith in masks; we saw them plastered all over TV, we remember them from dramatic footage of the last coronavirus outbreak-- SARs-- and we therefore assume they are essential.

Face masks can protect you if you are in close contact with an infected person who coughs or sneezes, and must be worn if you are infected and seek to minimise the spread of your infection, the World Health Organisation (WHO) tells us.

“If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected infection,” their official Covid-19 survival guide says, adding: “Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing.”

However, we have many cases where Ugandans wear masks all day, and drag them around their faces when they start to itch or get uncomfortable. The mask can be detrimental to your health because it does cause you to touch your face a lot when adjusting them and moving it around because the person you are talking to cannot understand whether you said “banana” or “kanaana”.

“Masks are effective only when used in combination with frequent hand-cleaning with alcohol-based hand rub or soap and water,” the WHO warns. So, what we should do is, as much as possible, crosscheck all Covid-19 information with reliable sources-- the WHO is so available.
It virtually lives in your phone all day.

Also, let’s keep pumping the facts out, quick and fast so that the myths don’t take root.

Dunning-Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is notorious in times like these, when we have too many self-appointed experts blowing hot air, contaminating the conversation. Named in 1999 (just in time for the advent of the internet) by Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, it can be broken down to this: a person who knows a little about a subject is more likely to preach loud, long and confidently about it, while a true expert is more likely to be cautious and think before they speak.

This is because the more you know means you know more about how much you do not know. It is why you rarely find PhD holders in the more common Twitter arguments-- they leave those wild, lawless, free-for-all slugfests of ignorance for those of us who read the headline and first paragraph of a clickbait article on a gossip website and now swear that swallowing chlorine cures Covid-19.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a pernicious piece of stupidity that we all share, so it is one we need to be very wary of. Always cross-check with the experts.

It is safest to assume we don’t know as much as you think you know. And always assume that you do not know as much as actual doctors.

Optimism bias
The optimism bias or “It won’t happen to me” is a particularly dangerous one, too, though ironically, it is the tendency to believe that the holder is safe. Those who bear this bias are most likely to take the most ridiculous risks while under the impression that the dangers involved will never befall them individually.
This is where courage and the innate stupidities hardwired into our brains meet -- the hunter who would daily take up arms against wild animals needed this heuristic to bat away the fact that constantly risking battle with lions and packs of hyenas, statistically speaking, would eventually mean his demise at their claws and jaws.
Today, it is what makes us text while driving-- pushing tonnes of metal on roads at speeds that will break a child’s spine if they make sudden contact-- instead of keeping our eyes glued to all 180 degrees of the road and pavement as we drive. We instead adopt the attitude that accidents happen to other people, not us.
And more specifically, today, the day of creeping pestilence, the optimism bias will convince the Ugandan that the ‘oronavirus is outside his or her destiny. He or she will saunter past sanitisers and coughs and stride into house parties, crowded markets and night prayers with the cavalier confidence that any virus in the air is there for someone else.
To combat this bias is hard. The fact that the world suffers more deaths from motor accidents in a week than it has from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, in spite of how vociferously we reiterate that careful driving is vital, shows this. Solution?

The most viable is to add a more immediate danger to the equation. If you are not deterred from drinking and driving by the likelihood that you will end someone’s life, the chance of arrest by police will work better.
And if you insist on ignoring social distancing directives, a squad of disinfected police raiding your house party or church can do the trick.
There are various other biases at play in the way we respond to the coronavirus crisis. In essence, the means to fight back Covid-19 very simple, too simple to complicate with heuristics which exist to cope with complex information-- wash your hands, keep your distance, get tested if you have the symptoms, and cross-check every rumour.
Stay safe, reader. And even though we are all stupid, we can still act smart and protect ourselves.

Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect got its name from a quaintly American political campaign tactic. It started in the 1840s when one Dan Rice would lend his literal band wagon to political candidates.

It was a wagon that would roll through towns of prospective voters. The float would have a band playing a funky tune and citizens would be urged to clamber onto the wagon and join, literally, the party.
The cooler name has stuck, even though the tendency has been given other monikers by psychologists: herd mentality, groupthink, and conformity bias, as has the means by which the bias works.

The trick was that wagons which already had plenty of punters on board were more attractive to passersby, leading to the conclusion that we tend to adopt behaviour that we see many others like us adopting in numbers.
The fashion of sanitiser and hand-washing equipment placed at the entrance of shops, offices and even restaurants that still harbour dankly unhygienic secrets in their kitchens, shows a useful application of this heuristic.
Mujama And Sons Restaurant will not be the only one that doesn’t have a sanitiser outside his door, will he?

The Halo Effect
This could be one of the worst, but is actually one of the most promising. The Halo Effect was named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, and coincidentally is best demonstrated by musician Beyonce, who gave us the hit called Halo, a song about how she will trust and accept and embrace someone she is attracted to because of his angelic halo.

This bias causes us to instinctively trust and believe attractive people, just because they are good-looking (upholding the popular belief that Beyonce can do no wrong) because the mind just tends to want to like people who are hot, so it readily ascribes all sorts of positive qualities to them. You are ready to follow cute with smart and funny and talented and nice.
That the Halo effect persists, even after all the evil beauties we have seen in our lives is evidence of it’s potency.

Thorndike’s observations were given a workout in subsequent experiments which led to findings like those of Clifford and Walster, whose study showed that if students were considered cute or pretty or presentable, they tended to get more attention from teachers, better motivation and more was expected of them, than of the shabby, dirty boys in the back who forgot to comb their hair.

Further studies show it works in workplaces, too, as well as politics and, notoriously, in marketing where advertising firms hire pretty liars to tell us that such and such is the best beverage ever concocted in the entire world and that if you don’t drink it frequently, you will bring a plague upon the world.

Speaking of plagues, the Halo effect has already shown a positive use in the spread of accurate and timely information about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Celebrities and stars, actors, singers, and sports personalities with global fame have been active on social media urging their fans to stay at home and keep safe. Ugandan celebrities have also been telling their smitten instagram followers to behave wisely.

The Halo effect suggests that these instagram videos, tweets and snapchats may have a stronger effect on encouraging isolation and social distancing than the President’s speeches.