Up & Coming Geoscientists - a sample of our AIG Honours Bursary Recipients

The Fold Experiment - Geologists Bias
Figure 9. Most geology text books show pictures of antiforms when they
introduce the concept of folding.
to your undergraduate years, you may recall
that when you were first introduced to folding,
you were most likely shown a picture of an
anticline, not a syncline. If you examine any
number of geological text books, you will
notice that this pattern of biased illustration of
antiforms over synforms is repeated (Figure 9).
Implications of the ‘Fold test’
I’m suggesting that the antiform bias that
we geologists have is a consequence of
unintentional brainwashing, and a sure
sign of brainwashing is that those who are
brainwashed have no idea that they were
brainwashed. Perhaps there is a bias in the way
academic geologists preferentially illustrate
antiforms in textbooks, as Chadwick (1975)
had speculated, but I think this effect is further
amplified by geology students who absorb
and then repeat this pattern without thinking.
If this extreme bias that we see in our
geological community is due to passive and
unintended brainwashing, then consider the
outcome if a message is pounded into us
intentionally and repeatedly by an enthusiastic
and charismatic academic or industry leader.
These ideas could be mineralisation models
(eg Shear-Zone Hosted Gold, SEDEX, VMS), or
some geological theory (eg Plate Tectonics,
Expanding Earth), or they may be a habitual
analytical process, as I’ve addressed recently
about mineral resource estimation downgrades.
This brainwashing is no different to that
used in product advertisements—after a while
you become oblivious to what you are told
repeatedly, and eventually it just becomes
part of your language and even thinking. You
don’t question it, but simply accept it, and the
ideas are interwoven with your beliefs, without
you ever realising that you were brainwashed
in the first place. Any ideas that are counter
to what you are told are rejected without any
rigorous testing. Everyone else exposed to the
same brainwashing messages is in the same
boat and everyone agrees with each other.
But what if the message you were told for
decades was actually wrong? What if the
exploration model that your company uses
is incorrect and cannot represent nature,
yet everyone around you is brainwashed
to believe it? This could be costing your
company a lot of money, perhaps millions of
dollars every year.
It would be a difficult job to turn your
thinking around because you’ve been told the
message over and over again. It just becomes
part of you so you vigorously defend it, even if
it was an idea invented by someone else. It’s
been in your system for so long that it simply
becomes part of your thinking. In fact, it
becomes part of the community so when the
bias is pointed out (such as the fold bias), you
don’t quite grasp the extreme (9/10!) nature of it.
With this sort of bias and entrenched
thinking, it’s not surprising that major
scientific breakthroughs don’t happen very
often.
This is the scary implication of the fold
bias if extrapolated to other parts of our
professional lives, but how can we learn and
make practical use of the realisation that such
biases exist?
AIG NEWS Issue 123 · February 2016 47