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Excerpt from The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters

Our information environment is noisy. Insanely noisy. It has been estimated that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created each day. That is a monstrously huge number, roughly equal to 212,765,957 DVDs. Approximately 4.8 billion people are on social media. Approximately two million academic articles are published every year. There are 8.5 billion Google searches and thousands of news articles published every day. Over five hundred hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And many of us check our phones hundreds of times each day.

We are bombarded with information through our smartphones, tablets, TV shows, and internet searches. It has been estimated that humans process about seventy-four gigabytes of information every single day. Neuroscientists Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil have noted that just five hundred years ago, “74 GB of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime, through books and stories.”

It would be impossible, obviously, to pay attention to and meaningfully engage with all the information that we encounter every day. And being constantly faced with information-rich choices can be stressful. It makes feeling certain about anything difficult. In such an environment, guideposts that promise a shortcut to decision-making—a path past the information chaos—can be tremendously alluring and influential, especially if they play to our desire to do what is right for ourselves, our community, and the world. Enter what I call the goodness illusion.

We all have our own definition of what is good, and I will make no attempt in this book to tell you what that ought to be, because I can’t, shouldn’t, and that isn’t the point. The point is that the version of good being promised by, for example, entities marketing products, influencers creating brands, or commentators and politicians pushing agendas is often misleading or, worse, an outright lie. Deceptive goodness-sounding slogans are rolled out to exploit our desire to do good and to feel certain that we’ve made the right choice. I recognize that goodness is a loaded word, touching on virtue, social norms, and morality. But I think it captures much of what is going on in our information environment. The goodness illusion is a messaging strategy designed to make us think (but don’t think too much, please) that a particular choice fits with what is viewed as the right thing. In a narrow sense, it can be applied to choices we make about individual health; in a broader sense, it can be applied to choices we make that are related to, say, the environment or constructive social change. The goodness illusion offers the seductive promise of a clear, certain, and allegedly evidence-informed way through our chaotic information environment.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the closely related ideas of conspicuous consumption and virtue signalling. There is a large and interesting literature that illustrates how people (all of us) make choices in part because we want the world to see us in a certain way, including as someone who is and does good. A classic economic study on this point, published in 2011, found that consumers were willing to pay thousands more for an ugly Prius—yup, the first version of which certainly wasn’t going to win any beauty contests—simply to signal, through an act the authors called conspicuous conservation, their environmental bona fides. This particular form of conspicuous consumption came to be known as the “Prius effect.” Virtue signalling—which, rightly or not, is now viewed by most as an insult meant to highlight performative posturing—is also about representing yourself to others. While these concepts are relevant to the goodness illusion phenomenon I’m exploring here, I’m more interested in a straightforward critique of the claims behind the goodness slogans.

The best and most obvious example of the goodness illusion, and the one I’ll start with in this section of the book, is the growing use of health halos. Terms like natural, organic, non-GMO, and locally grown are meant to be shorthand for “this is good and virtuous.” But, as we will see, the available science often paints a more nuanced and complex picture. The truisms behind the slogans are, it turns out, not so true. An exploration of the goodness illusion is also an opportunity to see how a strong desire for a particular outcome—that is, doing what is perceived as good—can skew the conduct and representation of the relevant research. When people believe science is being done in service of a righteous goal, like allowing people to live a healthier life, misleading biases and distortions can creep into the work itself, how it is published, and how it’s represented in pop culture.

Not only is goodness-illusion-filled messaging—about GMOs, organic food, chemical-free products, etc., etc.—deceptive and exploitive, but it also has an adverse impact on the very health and social concerns that the claims purport to address. They aren’t making us healthier. They probably aren’t helping the environment. And they are likely hurting public discourse and distracting us from taking science-informed actions that can make a genuine difference. Goodness? Not so much.

Timothy Caulfield (CurtisTrents)

Timothy Caulfield is a professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. A member of the Order of Canada, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and co-founder of #ScienceUpFirst, he has published four previous books and many academic articles.

Excerpted from The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters by Timothy Caulfield. Copyright © 2025 by Timothy Caulfield. Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters was published on January 7.

By: Timothy Caulfield

January 22nd, 2025

1:56 pm

Category: Excerpt