unSpun (9 page)

Dangerous Ignorance

Teenagers put their health at risk by getting the facts wrong about sex. In 2005 researchers from the University of California–San Francisco reported in the medical journal
Pediatrics
on a survey of 580 ninth-graders, whose average age was just under fifteen. Of that group, 14 percent stated there was “absolutely zero chance” of contracting chlamydia through oral sex, and 13 percent said it was impossible to contract HIV through oral sex. In fact, studies have shown herpes, hepatitis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and even HIV can be transmitted through oral sex, the study's authors said. Here, ignorance can lead to a nasty infection or even a life-threatening disease.

Figures from the same study illustrate another type of dangerous sexual ignorance: teens thought others were having sex far more than was actually the case. Only 13.5 percent of the ninth-graders said they had experienced vaginal sex, for example, but the group estimated that 41 percent of others their age had done so—three times the actual number. So it's probably no coincidence that 26 percent said they intended to have vaginal sex soon, within the next six months—double the percentage that had already experienced it. Peer pressure and peer acceptance are important to adolescents, so thinking that three times as many of their peers are having sex as is really the case probably leads some to try it who might not if they knew the truth.

A similar ignorance prevails among college students. A 2003 study at Virginia's James Madison University surveyed attitudes about casual sexual behavior while “hooking up”—on a first date with no future commitment. Students were asked how comfortable they felt about engaging in a variety of acts during a hookup, from petting above the waist to sexual intercourse. “Our study suggests that men believe women are more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than in fact they are, and also that women believe other women are more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they are themselves,” the authors said. “As a consequence, some men may pressure women to engage in intimate sexual behaviors, and some women may engage in these behaviors or resist only weakly because they believe they are unique in feeling discomfort about engaging in them.”

In other words, if teens and college students got their facts straight about what others were really doing and how those others really felt, fewer might feel pressured to have sex. Unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and even sexual assaults could well decline.

Psychologists call this gap between perception and facts pluralistic ignorance, and it doesn't apply only to sex. Consider heavy drinking, for example: college students tend to think others are more comfortable with it than is actually the case. Studies suggest that male students, especially, may become heavy drinkers because they think—wrongly—that it's expected. Some college campuses are trying a campaign called Most of Us to provide students with statistical evidence about the true attitudes of their peers regarding booze, in the hope that abuse of alcohol will decline when those with more cautious attitudes realize they are in the majority.

Killer Facts

What you don't know can kill you. But some life-saving information is on the way.

Federal health researchers estimate that 125 to 150 persons die each year because of anaphylaxis caused by food allergies. They also estimate that 1 out of every 50 adults and 1 out of every 20 infants suffer to some degree from food allergies, which send an estimated 30,000 persons each year to hospital emergency rooms.

People don't always know what they're eating. An FDA survey in 1999 and 2000 found that 25 percent of sampled baked goods, ice cream, and candy contained peanuts or eggs although these were not included on the ingredients list. However, in January 2006 a new federal law took effect, the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, which requires that manufacturers label for eight types of allergens that together account for 90 percent of allergic reactions: soybeans, eggs, milk, fish, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts (such as almonds and walnuts), and crustacean shellfish (such as shrimp and crab).

But be careful: the new law only applies to packaged foods, not to food sold by restaurants, neighborhood bakeries, kiosks, carry-out establishments, or street vendors.

Facts Change History

Misperceptions of the truth about majority opinion may even have held back the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, surveys showed Americans grossly underestimated the strength of public support for desegregation, even in the Deep South. One famous study, by the sociologist Hubert J. O'Gorman, showed that in 1968, for example, only one in three white Southerners said he or she actually favored segregation, but nearly two in three said they believed a majority of whites were segregationists. To put it another way, desegregationist whites were a big majority in the South but thought they were a minority. Would they have spoken up sooner and pushed their political leaders harder for more liberal civil rights and voting laws if they had known their own political strength? Would Alabama's George C. Wallace have carried five southern states in his 1968 presidential campaign had all whites known how others felt about segregation? We can never know for sure, but O'Gorman's study suggests that history might have been different if people hadn't been mistaken about how the majority felt.

We also have reason to speculate that mistaking the true attitudes of others might have contributed to the rash of business scandals and corporate crime that started coming to light in 2001. After the Enron scandal, a study conducted at the University of Oklahoma showed that lawyers think other lawyers are more likely to be unethical than they themselves are. Likewise, business students believed that businesspeople have less stringent ethical standards than their own. One implication, said the authors, is that “if they were to observe an ethical infraction, they might be less likely to speak up.” Or, to turn that around, there might be more whistle-blowers and less corruption if more business executives and lawyers realized that the ethical standards of others aren't as lax as they suppose.

Fighting Words

Getting the facts wrong can—in fact, often does—lead to the worst of human calamities, war. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is only the most recent example. Six weeks before it began, 76 percent of Americans in a
Time
/CNN/Harris Interactive poll answered “yes” when asked, “Do you think Saddam Hussein currently provides assistance to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist network, or don't you think so?” Only 15 percent said “no.” The widespread belief that Saddam was aiding Al-Qaeda was later declared unfounded by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Nothing that can fairly be called evidence has ever surfaced to support the notion. And of course, now we know that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his nuclear weapons program and gotten rid of stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons, contrary to what the public was told by the president and the CIA before the war.

But the Iraq War isn't the first one Americans have fought on the basis of false beliefs. We've been making that mistake for more than a century.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the hull of the American battleship U.S.S.
Maine
and sank her in Havana harbor with the loss of 266 lives. Soon the cry “Remember the
Maine,
to Hell with Spain” was on the lips of war hawks; the incident led to the Spanish-American War and the loss of another 3,000 American lives. But did the Spanish sink the
Maine
? Probably not.

Spain always denied any responsibility, and indeed had no sane reason to provoke the militarily superior Americans into a war that eventually cost it Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. A century of historical inquiry has produced no documentary evidence of a Spanish plot. A mine might have been set by somebody else, perhaps a Cuban trying to provoke the United States into attacking Spain. But even that is now considered unlikely.

To be sure, two official naval inquiries, in 1898 and 1911, did conclude that the
Maine
was sunk by a mine. But in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover (the legendary officer who pushed through the development of the nuclear-powered submarine) conducted a private inquiry that concluded that the sinking was an accident. “We found no technical evidence…that an external explosion initiated the destruction of the
Maine,
” Rickover wrote, adding, “The available evidence is consistent with an internal explosion alone,” probably a coal fire that touched off a powder magazine. Coal fires, smoldering undetected, were a common hazard in the navies of that time.

Rickover's conclusion was questioned by a 1998 study commissioned by
National Geographic
magazine, using advanced computer modeling. But the study was inconclusive: “The sum of these findings is not definitive in proving that a mine was the cause of the sinking of the
Maine,
but it does strengthen the case in favor of a mine as the cause,” the magazine said. Even that tentative statement was quickly contradicted by Otto P. Jons, executive vice president of Advanced Marine Enterprises, the very engineering company that conducted the
Geographic
study. Jons emphatically disagreed with his subordinates. “I am convinced it was not a mine,” he said at a panel convened by the U.S. Naval Institute on April 22, 1998.

The United States has gone to war on the basis of false factual claims more than once since then. In August 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to give him practically unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam, he believed the enemy had attacked two American destroyers, the U.S.S.
Maddox
and the U.S.S.
Turner Joy,
on the night of August 4, 1964. We now know they hadn't. The
Maddox
had indeed been attacked the previous day, and there were bullet holes and photographs to prove it. But the second “attack” on the two ships was the result of jittery nerves and spurious readings of radar and sonar signals by U.S. sailors. Though the Navy claimed to have sunk two enemy PT boats during the second engagement, it never produced photographs, bodies, or wreckage to support that claim.

Later, a Navy pilot, James B. Stockdale, recalled in his memoir that he had “the best seat in the house” that night as leader of a flight of jets sent from the carrier U.S.S.
Ticonderoga
to help defend the destroyers from their supposed attackers. He said he could see the two destroyers' every move vividly, but saw no enemy. “There was absolutely no gunfire except our own, no PT boat wakes, not a candle light let alone a burning ship,” he wrote. Stockdale later retired with the rank of admiral, and was Ross Perot's running mate in the 1992 presidential campaign.

Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was one of the last to concede the mistake. In June 1996, he told interviewers for CNN: “I think it is now clear [the second attack] did not occur. I asked [North Vietnamese] General Giap myself, when I visited Hanoi in November of 1995, whether it had occurred, and he said no. I accept that.”

Disinformation also accompanied the first U.S. war against Iraq, in 1991. One example is a chilling eyewitness account given by a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl who described the Iraqi troops invading her country as baby-killers. In her widely reported testimony before a body of the U.S. House of Representatives, “Nayirah” said she had been a hospital volunteer when the invasion happened: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators and left the babies to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.”

“Nayirah” 's testimony was endorsed implicitly by Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican John Porter, the chairmen of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, who sponsored her appearance. They said her last name must be kept secret to prevent reprisals against her family in Kuwait. Furthermore, the independent human rights group Amnesty International produced a report saying that 312 premature infants had died after Iraqi soldiers turned them out of incubators. President George H. W. Bush repeated the baby-killer story again and again. Seven U.S. senators cited it in speeches backing a resolution to go to war with Iraq.

But the story was false. “Nayirah” turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, the daughter of the country's ambassador to Washington. She had been fobbed off on the Human Rights Caucus by Hill and Knowlton, a public-relations firm paid by Kuwait to whip up anti-Iraq war fever among Americans. Staffers at the Kuwaiti hospital in “Nayirah” 's story said the things she described hadn't happened. After more investigation, Amnesty International said it “found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them from incubators,” and Amnesty withdrew its earlier report.

The truth wasn't revealed until after the United States had expelled Iraq from Kuwait, allowing the ABC reporter John Martin to reach the hospital and interview staff. He broke the news on March 15, 1991, more than five months after “Nayirah” testified. Her identity as the ambassador's daughter wasn't revealed until nearly a year later, in January 1992. By then the war against the “baby killers” was long over.