Wednesday’s New York Times ran a brief article by Katharine Q. Seelye in the national section which I’ll reproduce below in its entirety because I can’t find a link to it on the the Times’ website. (The survey cited in the article can be found here).

Whether people believe controversial statements about the health care over-haul depends on their political affiliation, a new survey finds.

The survey, conducted in mid-August for Indiana University, says that when looking at statements the Obama administration says are myths, Republicans tend to believe the statements and Democrats tend to disbelieve them.

But independents go either way.

Here is a sampling of the statements that independents believed and disbelieved, with assessments of each provided in parentheses by Aaron Carroll, directory of the university’s Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research, who helped design the survey.

A majority of independents believe these statements:

The federal government will directly involve in making personal health care decisions for the public. (Myth)

Health care will be rationed. (Debatable)

Taxpayers will be required to pay for abortions. (Myth)

A majority of independents do not believe these statements:

The government will make the elderly decide how and when to die. (Myth)

A public options will put private insurance companies out of business. (Myth)

Illegal immigrants will be covered. (Myth)

The very interesting thing about this survey is that it further highlights the human predilection to believe those things which closely match personally held beliefs: we disregard information which contradicts personal bias and readily accept information that bolsters it. Oddly enough, we seem to be wired to do this by default. It takes real, concious effort and training to be roughly objective, though no individual can succeed. This is why the scientific method implies Science as a group activity: get enough differing bias in a room, hem it in with an emphasis on empirical results and, ideally, you can hit pretty close to the truth. Reproducible experiments ensure you can further mitigate personal bias by expanding the pool of scientists that can demonstrate the validity of a result, even if their personal bias says it should be false.

I digress. The above article reminded me of a passage from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictionalized account of the London plague outbreak in 1665-66. Signed by one H.F. the book is probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe. In this passage the narrator details various signs, premonitions and panics experienced by the people of London just before and just after the initial outbreak of the plague. The folk superstitions highlighted here served to heighten the terror of the outbreak and ensure the unnecessary deaths of several craft-workers in the lower class. Says Defoe:

I saw both these stars, and, I must confess, had so much of the common notion of such things in my head, that I was apt to look upon them as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgements; and especially when, after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like kind, I could not but say God had not yet sufficiently scourged the city.

But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height that others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by the astronomers for such things, and that their motions and even their revolutions are calculated (…)

The apprehensions of the people were likewise strangely increased by the error of the times, in which, I think, the people, from what principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to the prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wive’s tales that ever they were before or since. Whether this unhappy temper was originally raised by the follies of some people who got money by it (…) Nay, some where so enthusiastically bold as to run about the streets with their oral predictions, pretending they were sent to preach to the city; and one in particular, who, like Jonah to Nineveh, cried in the streets, “yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed.” I will not be positive whether he said yet forty days or yet a few days. Another ran about naked, except a pair of drawers about his waist, crying day and night, like a man that Josephus mentions, who cried, “Woe to Jerusalem!” a little before the destruction of that city. So this poor naked creature cried, “Oh, the great and the dreadful God!” and said no more, but repeated those words continually (…)

These things terrified the people to the last degree, and especially when two or three times, as I have mentioned already, they found one or two in the bills dead of the plague at St. Gile’s.

Next to these public things were the dreams of old women, or, I should say, the interpretation of old women upon other people’s dreams; and these put abundance of people even out of their wits. Some heard voices warning them to be gone, for that there would be such a plague in London, so that the living would not be able to bury the dead. Others saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to say of both, I hope without breach of charity, that they heard voices that never spake, and saw sights that never appeared; but the imagination of the people was really turned wayward and possessed. And no wonder, if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had nothing in them but air, and vapour. Here they told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city; there they saw hearses and coffins in the air carrying to be buried; and there again, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied, and the like, just as the imagination of the poor terrified people furnished them with matter to work upon.

So hypochondriac fancies represent
Ships, armies, battles in the firmament;
Till steady eyes the exhalations solve,
And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve.

I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other. One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than as I have said in St Giles’s), I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness; ‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one; ‘there’s the sword as plain as can be.’ Another saw the angel. One saw his very face, and cried out what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful judgements were approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.

The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them. So I left them; and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.

Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard, by a row of alms-houses. There are two churchyards to Bishopsgate church or parish; one we go over to pass from the place called Petty France into Bishopsgate Street, coming out just by the church door; the other is on the side of the narrow passage where the alms-houses are on the left; and a dwarf-wall with a palisado on it on the right hand, and the city wall on the other side more to the right.

In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the palisadoes into the burying-place, and as many people as the narrowness of the passage would admit to stop, without hindering the passage of others, and he was talking mightily eagerly to them, and pointing now to one place, then to another, and affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such a gravestone there. He described the shape, the posture, and the movement of it so exactly that it was the greatest matter of amazement to him in the world that everybody did not see it as well as he. On a sudden he would cry, ‘There it is; now it comes this way.’ Then, ‘Tis turned back’; till at length he persuaded the people into so firm a belief of it, that one fancied he saw it, and another fancied he saw it; and thus he came every day making a strange hubbub, considering it was in so narrow a passage, till Bishopsgate clock struck eleven, and then the ghost would seem to start, and, as if he were called away, disappeared on a sudden.

I looked earnestly every way, and at the very moment that this man directed, but could not see the least appearance of anything; but so positive was this poor man, that he gave the people the vapours in abundance, and sent them away trembling and frighted, till at length few people that knew of it cared to go through that passage, and hardly anybody by night on any account whatever.

This ghost, as the poor man affirmed, made signs to the houses, and to the ground, and to the people, plainly intimating, or else they so understanding it, that abundance of the people should come to be buried in that churchyard, as indeed happened; but that he saw such aspects I must acknowledge I never believed, nor could I see anything of it myself, though I looked most earnestly to see it, if possible. These things serve to show how far the people were really overcome with delusions; and as they had a notion of the approach of a visitation, all their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague, which should lay the whole city, and even the kingdom, waste, and should destroy almost all the nation, both man and beast.