Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

— Frank Herbert

A lady said, “What’s your solution?” I said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” She said, “The people demand solutions!”

— Thomas Sowell

When republic is used in such expressions as “The People’s Republic of ____” or lies refers reflexively to an adversary’s interpretation of the facts, damage is done to the concepts-liberal government, truthfulness-that stand behind the words. Critical thinking is another concept whose value is being diminished by terminological disarray.

I suggest that one of our major responsibilities as skeptics is to maintain a continuous exploration of fundamental questions involving critical thinking, including:

1. What are the essential components of critical thinking?
2. Are those who claim to be promoting critical thinking doing justice to the concept or corrupting it?
3. What is the value of critical thinking, and how do the benefits justify the undeniable costs of studying, teaching, and practicing it?

But haven't we been pursuing such questions for quite a while? Amazon.com lists more than 2,000 titles on critical thinking. Haven't we largely ironed out the conceptual fundamentals by now?

Apparently not. Here are some indicators from my discipline of sociology that illustrate some of the work that needs to be done. I draw these examples from four mainstream, college-level introductory sociology textbooks, three of which are best-sellers in a crowded market. As is true in virtually all such texts, the preface and promotional material of each book explicitly assure instructors and students that the book attaches much importance to critical thinking.

Is This Critical Thinking?

A text that’s currently in its fifth edition discusses the influence of social forces on definitions of aging by stating (Kendall 2006, 101):

Negative images also contribute to the view that women are “old” ten or fifteen years sooner than men. . . . The multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry helps perpetuate the myth that age reduces the “sexual value” of women but increases it for men. Men’s sexual value is defined more in terms of personality, intelligence, and earning power than by physical appearance. For women, however, sexual attractiveness is based on youthful appearance. By idealizing this “youthful” image of women and playing up the fear of growing older, sponsors sell thousands of products that claim to prevent the “ravages” of aging.

Certainly, there is some truth to this, but is it fair to say that it is a myth that age reduces the sexual value of women more quickly than for men? After all, a society that generally considers older women as physically attractive as younger ones has yet to be discovered, whereas the attractive older man is an anthropological commonplace. The author is ignoring the more fundamental possibility that sexual value has something to do with reproductive value, making nature partly (largely?) responsible for the double standard of aging. A more educational analysis might suggest that a huge cosmetics industry is both cause and effect of the link between youth and female beauty.

However, the idea that sex differences in reproductive biology could underlie sex differences at the psychological and sociological levels is ideologically off-limits to most sociologists. Of course, textbooks are entitled to emphasize a certain theoretical point of view. But are we still practicing and teaching critical thinking if we actually direct students away from likely pieces of the truth?

A book that for many years has been one of the leading introductory sociology texts cites the Israeli kibbutz (a utopian agricultural settlement) as evidence of the cultural construction of gender (Macionis 2006, 253):

In kibbutzim, both sexes share most everyday jobs. Both men and women take care of children, cook and clean, repair buildings, and make day-to-day decisions concerning life in the kibbutz. Girls and boys are raised in the same way and, from the first weeks of life, children live together in dormitories. Women and men in the kibbutzim have achieved remarkable (though not complete) social equality, evidence of the wide range that cultures have in defining what is feminine and what is masculine.

The kibbutz as evidence of the wide latitude cultures have in defining gender? This interpretation would astonish Spiro (1996) and Tiger and Shepher (1975), anthropologists known for their research on gender in the kibbutz. These authors (and others) make it clear that the attempt to eradicate gender distinctions is instructive precisely because it did not succeed. Despite intense socialization pressures to the contrary, many familiar differences between the sexes appeared in the kibbutz: boys and girls preferred different toys, activities, subjects in school, and clothing styles; men gravitated toward outdoor work and leadership positions; mothers wanted to spend more time with their children than the design of the kibbutz originally allowed. To his own surprise, Spiro (1996, x) concluded that:

. . . the findings of this study (like those of Tiger and Shepher) constitute a direct, if implicit, challenge to some central assumptions of gender and women’s studies, including [that] gender and gender differences are culturally constructed. . . .

Some critics have claimed that the kibbutz was not a true test of the cultural malleability of gender, but it is clearly misleading to offer the kibbutz as evidence of such plasticity. Perhaps this is simply an innocent error by the author. But complying as it does with the powerful “blank-slate” orthodoxy among sociologists, this tendentious presentation has survived the scrutiny of scores of the book’s reviewers and adopters.

In a discussion of “heredity or environment,” intended to emphasize the role of environment, another highly successful text devotes several paragraphs to a description of two identical twins, Oskar and Jack, who were separated early in life. When reunited in adulthood, they turned out to be quite different in most respects (Henslin 2006, 57). The author grants that the men showed some uncanny similarities (e.g., “Both flushed the toilet both before and after using it”), and he notes that heredity establishes “the limits of certain physical and mental abilities.” But the focus is on the ability of different environments to produce different people, even when their genes are the same.

It is fine to teach that social experience may override the influence of biology on behavior. But what about the rest of the story that has emerged from the study of twins and adoptees? The case of Oskar and Jack comes from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research, headed by Thomas Bouchard. One waits in vain for the text to present-or somehow to acknowledge the existence of-the main outcomes of that research. For example:

1. Adult identical twins reared in the same family are no more similar than identical twins reared apart.
2. Identical twins raised apart are more similar, in almost every physical and psychological trait, than fraternal twins raised together.
3. Even after growing up in the same home, unrelated adults are no more alike in intelligence than complete strangers.
4. Twin studies of various kinds consistently find that between 40 and 80 percent of the variance in intelligence is due to genetic factors.

As Bouchard (1997, 54) notes, “Such findings fly in the face of the emphasis on the role of the environment in child development that has pervaded American psychology until very recently.” Results like these have drawn widespread attention to the twin studies at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere. They are a foundation of the field of behavioral genetics. But they are nowhere to be found in this text’s discussion of “heredity or environment.”

A text that promises to emphasize how to think more than what to think fires a broadside at the field of evolutionary psychology by listing its fallacious claims (Brym and Lie 2004, 65-67). These alleged errors include “men are promiscuous and women are not” and “what exists is necessary.” In rebuttal, the authors assert, “it would be wrong to conclude that variations among people are due just to their genes,” “genes never develop without environmental influence,” and “the pattern of your life is not entirely hardwired by your genes.”

But this is waging war on straw men-tired ones. No contemporary evolutionary psychologists support the crude biological determinism imputed to them here. And no young reader of this text would imagine that the bourgeoning study of evolution, genes, and human behavior has attracted many sophisticated scholars from a variety of disciplines.

This is teaching students how to think?

Toward a Sharper Definition

When academic textbooks come to resemble hymnals that celebrate a religious denomination’s theology, and when this goes by the name of critical thinking, it is time for some definition adjustments.

No one should pontificate a definition of critical thinking, nor should we expect to achieve unanimity. But I offer the following definition for consideration: Critical thinking is the use of rational skills, worldviews, and values to get as close as possible to the truth. Here, critical thinking is conceived as consisting of three essential dimensions: skills, worldview, and values.

The Skills Dimension

By critical thinking skills, I mean the various higher-order cognitive operations involved in processing information, rather than simply absorbing it: analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, explaining, evaluating, generalizing, abstracting, illustrating, applying, comparing, recognizing logical fallacies.

It is primarily the skills dimension that most people appear to have in mind when speaking of critical thinking. This narrow focus has permitted critical thinking to become a hot topic in American education-reasoning skills can be taught in virtually any academic course at any level, and, importantly, they can be taught without venturing into sensitive areas. We can, if we wish, restrict our critical thinking skills to the safe and sanitary.

Proficiency in the skills dimension is necessary but not sufficient for anyone who claims to be a critical thinker. One could excel at reasoning while failing at other dimensions of critical thinking. Indeed, this is not uncommon. A more fully developed conception of critical thinking that includes the worldview and values dimensions is both more difficult to teach and more dangerous to display than a narrow conception that focuses on logical reasoning.

The Worldview Dimension

In his classic Invitation to Sociology, Peter Berger (1963, 23) states, “It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this-things are not what they seem.” I would alter the wording slightly-things are not always entirely what they seem-and propose it as the first wisdom of critical thinking. The recognition that the world is often not what it seems is perhaps the key feature of the critical thinker’s worldview.

From this perspective, the world is a deceptive place-not just occasionally but inherently. Such a worldview goes beyond the usual suspects (e.g., deceptive TV ads and phony crop circles) to incorporate a broader recognition of the deceptive nature of the world, including such insights as:

• Like fish who are unconscious of the water that envelops them, we are often unaware of the constraints imposed on our thinking by the taken-for-granted social forces surrounding us-not to mention the gene-based forces within us.
• Some aspects of the social world appear natural, but are actually human contrivances. And vice versa.
• The social roles we play can shape not just our behavior but our identity-often we unwittingly become what we play at.
• We are often ignorant of our ignorance. And the more incompetent we are, the more likely we are to overestimate our competence.
• It is normal for seemingly contradictory things to occur together.
• All good things have costs. Many bad things have benefits.
• Issues frequently appear black-and-white, when in fact they usually consist of grays.
• We typically mistake pieces of the truth for the whole truth.
• Partial truths can be just as misleading as outright lies.
• We are more likely to be misled by people who sincerely believe what they are saying than by liars.
• Self-deception can be an even bigger problem than deception by others.

In short, since it is so easy to misperceive reality, a critical thinker is disinclined to take things at face value, suspicious of certainties, not easily swayed by conventional (or unconventional) wisdom, and distrustful of the facades and ideologies that serve as the ubiquitous cosmetics of social life.

In other words, critical thinkers are necessarily skeptics. Skepticism can be summarized as concisely as this (Skeptic 2005):

1. Skeptics do not believe easily. They have outgrown childlike credulity (Dawkins 1995) to a greater extent than most adults ever do.
2. When skeptics take a position, they do so provisionally. They understand that their knowledge on any subject is fallible, incomplete, and subject to change.
3. Skeptics defer to no sacred cows. They regard orthodoxies as the mortal enemy of critical thought-all orthodoxies, including those that lie close to home.

Convincing people that their worldview underestimates the extent to which things are not what they seem requires a wide range of no-holds-barred examples such as these:

• From the beginning, AIDS has been exaggerated as a significant threat to heterosexuals in the U.S.
• It is far from clear that Abraham Lincoln cared deeply about social equality between whites and blacks.
• Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his doctoral dissertation and on his wife.
• We fall out of love with our children less often than with our lovers/spouses because our children carry our genes.
• Despite what is widely assumed by professionals in the counseling and education industries, self-esteem has not been shown to be causally related to academic and behavioral outcomes.
• Whatever intelligence tests measure is related to many academic, occupational, economic, and behavioral outcomes-and it is substantially heritable.
• It is far from clear that many returning Vietnam vets were spat upon.
• It is far from clear that child sexual abuse produces devastating and long-lasting effects in nearly all of its victims.
• Studies have found that many gender stereotypes contain an element of truth.
• There may be credible UFO sightings that science is currently unable to explain.
• Chance alone caused the forty-sixth word from the beginning of Psalm 46 to be “shake” and the forty-sixth word from the end to be “spear” in the King James Bible, which was published in the year Shakespeare turned 46 (Myers 2002).

Developing a skeptic’s worldview means that one’s foundational assumptions will be disturbed, not to mention those of others. Toes will be stepped on, tempers could flare, mortified members of the audience may stagger from the room. Hence, there is still more to full-fledged critical thinking.

The Values Dimension

Imagine a juror in the trial of a defendant accused of murdering a child. The juror listens to the prosecution’s case, which is accompanied by grisly photos, testimony from a detective who becomes visibly shaken when describing the crime scene, and audible sobs from the victim’s family. Then, roiled by emotions ranging from grief to outrage, she is called upon to do something remarkable: listen to the defense just as receptively as she did to the prosecution.

To do her job well, she will need more than good reasoning skills and the sturdy skepticism that is appropriate when listening to dueling lawyers. She will also need a certain set of values that will motivate her to do the difficult things necessary to reach an honest verdict. It takes a principled person to force aside her personal suspicions and preferences long enough to determine whether the prosecution has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Like the honest juror, the critical thinker is ethically committed to the concept of due process-intellectual due process-as the best way to increase the likelihood of finding the truth. This code of intellectual conduct demands giving ideas their day in court before rendering an informed and reasoned verdict. It requires such traits as these:

• Being unwilling to subordinate one’s thinking to orthodoxies that demand to be swallowed whole-at the risk of being charged with heresy
• Refusing to dismiss possible merits in ideas that otherwise may be deeply repugnant-at the risk of appearing immoral
• Being capable of saying, “I don't know"-at the risk of appearing unintelligent
• Being willing to judge the truth value of ideas sponsored by demographic and cultural groups to which one does not belong-at the risk of being accused of prejudice
• Being willing to change one’s mind-at the risk of appearing capricious
• Being open to the arguments of adversaries-at the risk of appearing disloyal
• Having an acute awareness of the limits and fallibility of one’s knowledge-at the risk of seeming to suffer from that dreaded malady, low self-esteem

In short, this aspect of critical thinking can be the most difficult of all. Subjecting ideas to intellectual due process can require more integrity, humility, tolerance of uncertainty, and courage than most of us find easy to summon. No wonder we will join a wild-eyed, slobbering lynch mob from time to time.

Benefits

Is critical thinking worth the costs? Consider for a moment how costly uncritical thinking can be. Stephen Jay Gould (1997, x, xii) calls attention to two precious human potentials that together constitute “the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known”:

Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities-the side of human nature that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason . . . we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action . . . Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism-and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

According to this striking claim, critical thinking is one of the most important resources a society could develop. This is because bad things do not emanate only from bad people. Bad things can also occur because of the mistaken thinking of decent people. Even when a bad idea originates with a psychopath, the real danger occurs when it is accepted by the gullible and condoned by the sincere who have little more than a child’s understanding of what intellectual due process entails.

It is likely that an important link exists between critical thinking, broadly defined, and democracy itself. The American jurist Learned Hand (1952, 190) described this connection as follows:

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . . The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias.

So by cultivating genuine critical thinking, we strengthen the crucial underpinnings of democracy (Kuhn 2003). People who are careful about the truth are less likely to be fooled by the ideologies that justify illiberal practices or promise simple solutions. Moreover, such people are more likely to recognize the value of intellectual and ideological diversity-they understand that the truth comes in pieces and is unlikely to be found all in one place. They are the best counterweight to true believers of all stripes. Ultimately, intellectual due process is no less integral to democracy than is due process of law.

Within a democracy, the social world remains a deceptive place-for the sophisticated and the innocent alike. The tendency of leaders and large numbers of citizens to underestimate this fact is a source of enormous human misery.

Here is an example. In his book a few years ago and in the 2003 Oscar-winning documentary by Errol Morris, The Fog of War, former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara (1995) identifies the mistakes made by him and others that led to calamity in Vietnam. His account describes confident, mostly decent men who did what they thought was best, but who fell prey to a chilling list of errors that could serve as chapters in a textbook on critical thinking: dualistic thinking, wishful thinking, absence of intellectual humility, underestimating complexity, groupthink, childlike credulity, rigid adherence to orthodoxy. These were intelligent, educated men whose logical reasoning skills were far above average. Yet McNamara finds it “incredible” that “[w]e failed to analyze our assumptions critically.”

Perhaps the architects of the Vietnam war went wrong because they indulged in what Thomas Sowell (2002) calls “shibboleths” as substitutes for critical thinking. A shibboleth is a belief that serves the purpose of identifying the believer as one of the good guys, prominently planted on the side of the angels. Shibboleths “transform questions about facts, causation, and evidence into questions about personal identity and moral worth”:

Mere facts cannot compete with shibboleths when it comes to making people feel good. Moreover, shibboleths keep off the agenda the painful question of how dangerous it is to have policies which impact millions of human beings without a thorough knowledge of the hard facts needed to understand just what that impact has actually been. . . . Shibboleths are dangerous, not only because they mobilize political support for policies that most of the supporters have not thought through, but also because these badges of identity make it harder to reverse those policies when they turn out to be disastrous.

Like many other forms of uncritical thinking, shibboleths derive their power from the fact that humans are designed to be social animals more than truth-seeking ones. For all the societal benefits of critical thinking, at the individual level, uncritical thinking offers social and psychological rewards of its own.

Promoting Critical Thinking

If the societal benefits of multidimensional critical thinking are great, so is the task of raising the level of such thinking in our society. On whose shoulders does this responsibility fall?

Thomas Gilovich (1991, 193-194) has argued that social scientists, by virtue of their “way of looking at the world, the habits of mind that they promote,” are in the best position to educate others about the importance of “question[ing] our assumptions and challeng[ing] what we think we know.”

This is not encouraging, since social scientists appear to be as prone to orthodoxies, wishful thinking, ad hominems, and shibboleths as anyone else (Horowitz 1996; Berger 2002; Goldberg 2003). As our glimpse inside the sociology texts suggested, there are problems with trying to teach genuine critical thinking in disciplines that are several parts social for each part science.

Are the hard sciences doing much better? In the first place, science education is not producing high levels of scientific literacy in the population (National Science Foundation 2004). Besides, there appears to be only a weak relationship between science knowledge and disbelief in various forms of nonsense (Walker and Hoekstra 2002; Johnson and Pigliucci 2004).

As many have noted, we teach science as a collection of facts and theories about a certain category of phenomena, rather than as a set of principles for understanding the world. A course in “Science, Pseudoscience, and Anti-science” would stimulate broader critical thought than the typical Chemistry 101 class. But the problem is deeper than this. Full-blown critical thinking is not coterminous with good scientific thinking. Critical thought is the principles of scientific thought projected to the far reaches of everyday life, with all the attendant demands and complications. This expansive generalization of the scientific method is hardly spontaneous or self-evident for most people. Just as learning the truth about Santa does not shatter the typical child’s credulous worldview, learning the principles of science can easily fail to fully penetrate the larger vision of science students-and indeed, of scientists. By themselves, science classrooms are poor competition for the powerful obstacles to highly developed critical thinking that reside in human social life and in the wiring of the human brain.

Multidimensional critical thinking is not simply a byproduct of something else. It must be taught. Well, then, what about the “critical-thinking” trend that has permeated American education across the curriculum at all levels? Are these efforts succeeding in materially strengthening the quality of critical thinking in society at large? Again, the various indicators of uncritical thought in our society suggest not. It is doubtful that what students learn from those classrooms and texts does much to alter their worldviews and values regarding the truth. A primary cause of this shortfall is the antiseptic nature of the “critical thinking” typically taught to students. Either most teachers and authors do not possess a highly multidimensional conception of critical thinking themselves, or they are reluctant (perhaps with good reason) to approach the perilous territory-way past logical fallacies and weeping Madonna statues-to which full-fledged critical thinking inevitably leads. The result is the commonplace teaching of quasi-critical thinking.

It is naive to expect social-science education, natural-science education, or education in general-at least in their present forms-to elevate critical thinking to something more than a pedagogical fashion that everyone applauds but few conceptualize very deeply. This leaves the skeptical community. We identify ourselves as champions of science and reason. But this is a broad mandate. We should avoid concentrating our skepticism too narrowly on the realms of superstition, pseudoscience, and the supernatural-for the ultimate challenge to a critical thinker is posed not by weird things but by insidiously mundane ones. If we hope to realize the promise of critical thought, it is important that skeptics affirm a multidimensional definition of critical thinking -- reasoning skills, skeptical worldview, values of a principled juror -- that exempts no aspect of social life.

References

• Berger, Peter. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
• —. 2002. Whatever happened to sociology? First Things, 126 (October): 27-29.
• Bouchard, Thomas. 1997. Whenever the twain shall meet. The Sciences 37(5): 52-57.
• Brym, Robert, and John Lie. 2004. Sociology: Your Compass for a New World, 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
• Dawkins, Richard. 1995. Putting away childish things. Skeptical Inquirer 19(1): 31-36.
• Gilovich, Thomas. 1991. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.
• Goldberg, Steven. 2003. The erosion of the social sciences. In Steven Goldberg, Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences, 15-34. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Gould, Stephen Jay. 1997. The positive power of skepticism. In Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, ix-xii. New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Hand, Learned. 1952 (1944). The spirit of liberty. In Irving Dillard, ed., The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Henslin, James. 2006. Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-earth Approach, 6th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
• Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1996. Are the social sciences scientific? Academic Questions 9(1): 53-59.
• Johnson, Mathew, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2004. Is knowledge of science associated with higher skepticism of pseudoscientific claims? The American Biology Teacher 66(8): 536-548.
• Kendall, Diana. 2006. Sociology in Our Times: The Essentials, 5th ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
• Kuhn, Robert. 2003. Science as democratizer. American Scientist 91(5): 388-390.
• Macionis, John. 2006. Society: The Basics, 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
• McNamara, Robert. 1995. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Random House.
• Myers, David. 2002. The power of coincidence. Skeptic 9(4): 28.
• National Science Foundation. 2004. Science and Education Indicators 2004. Arlington, Virginia.
• Skeptic.  2005 (every issue).  What Is a Skeptic? 
• Sowell, Thomas. 2002. The high cost of shibboleths. Townhall.com. February 15. (Accessed December 1, 2006.)
• Spiro, Melford. 1996. Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. (Originally published by Duke University Press, 1979.)
• Tiger, Lionel, and Joseph Shepher. 1975. Women in the Kibbutz. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Walker, W. Richard, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl. 2002. Science education is no guarantee of skepticism. Skeptic 9(3): 24-27.

I was particularly interested in the legend that was scheduled for May: Count Dracula, the world’s most famous vampire. Such is the enduring power of Bram Stoker’s classic horror story, first published in 1897 and never out of print, that modern-day Transylvania in Northern Romania has become a tourist Mecca.

Fans of the fictional count flock there by the coachload persuaded that in the land of mist-shrouded mountains, they will find clues to the source of the greatest vampire of them all: the Transylvanian nobleman who left his remote homeland to spread his evil plague.

For the true believer, the boundaries between Stoker’s creation and historical fact have become blurred, like all great legends. Many people believe that the immortal count was based on a real person: a medieval Romanian warlord called Vlad Tepes, also know as “Vlad the Impaler” and “Vlad Dracula.”

Was this famous national hero the man behind the legend? That was the first question we were going to investigate during our stay in Transylvania. [1]

Son of the Devil

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was by no means the first vampire story. It was the culmination of a writing tradition of Gothic horror stories that had begun nearly eighty years earlier with “The Vampyre,” by John Polidori. (Was he a relative of mine, I wonder?) Others followed, like “Varney the Vampire” (1847), a serial that ran in magazines called “penny dreadfuls” for more than two years, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871), which centered around a lesbian vampire.

But Dracula was a departure. In Stoker’s hands, the vampire became all-powerful, the embodiment of evil-and a creature whose immortality was bound up in a rich cocktail of blood, sex, and death.

Ironically, though the novel was first published in English in 1893, Romania’s most famous fictional resident, Count Dracula, was almost unknown there until 1992. Only with the fall of communism was Bram Stoker’s classic finally translated and published in Romania.

A view of Bran Castle, strongly promoted by the tourist board as the real ”Castle Dracula“; in reality, Vlad may have stayed here as a guest at some point during his reign, but it was certainly never his castle.

But the question remained, could Vlad Tepes have been the model for Stoker’s infamous Count?

What is known of Vlad the Impaler comes from a series of lurid stories dating back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They depict a man surrounded in corpses, a tyrant and madman, who literally drank the blood of his enemies. There are good reasons to think that Stoker was struck by this evil character and borrowed his surname, “Dracula,” because he thought it meant “son of the devil,” to create his own vampire. In fact, it meant “son of the dragon,” and this was because Vlad’s father had joined an order of knighthood called the Order of the Dragon. Dragon is written dracul in Romanian, and so Dracula literally means “son of Dracul.”

But to many Romanians, Vlad is a national hero, a saviour. They reject the tales of a psychopathic tyrant as vicious propaganda promoted by Vlad’s enemies. They honour him as the legendary king who, like Britain’s King Arthur, will one day return to save his country.

Part of the reason for this lies in places like Sigihisoara, a town built by Germans, or better, Saxons, who had moved to Transylvania to become merchants. They took hold of the region and didn't even let Romanians enter the town-they had to pay a toll first. Vlad resented this and sided with the Romanians. In his lifetime, he also fought bravely against the Turks, who had conquered parts of Europe already, and this spread panic among the Christian kings. So Vlad was considered a crusader. Europe, then, first knew him as a hero.

However, Vlad lost his battles and was defeated by the Turks, and his legacy was set by the victors. There are still many pamphlets surviving, printed by the Germans soon after his death, in which his exploits are recounted in gory detail and he is portrayed as a devil-like figure.

It’s ironic that the man whose name helped inspire one of the most famous fictional horror stories of all time, written in the nineteenth century, was also the subject of some of the very first printed horror stories in the fifteenth century. And this also shows the power of propaganda: for a brief moment, he'd been the hero of Europe; then, after his death, his enemies destroyed his reputation.

During the reign of communist dictator Nicholae Ceausescu, Vlad Dracula was again venerated as a hero. They portrayed him as a nationalist icon, a man who united and protected Romanians from their enemies, imperialist Turks and capitalist German merchants.

His brutal methods were either dismissed as enemy propaganda or, when they couldn't be explained away, as a necessary evil. In fact, Ceausescu was so enamoured of Vlad that he is even reported to have once said: “A man like me comes along only every 500 years.”

Death of a Strigoi

Having ascertained that the real figure of Vlad Tepes was only a loose inspiration for Stoker’s fiction, we wondered if local folklore provided the inspiration for his haunting descriptions of vampiric rituals.

Stories of vampires are, in fact, very old in Romania; however, they prefer to call these creatures strigoi. They are seen as ghosts, undead, immaterial things; they are usually a recently buried member of the family, who returns to haunt his relatives and drain their life forces, sometimes in dreams. In order to bring peace to the family and to the undead itself, some “rituals” need to be performed.

These are very secret practices that, I was surprised to learn, still continue today. In January 2004, one such episode became public and created a scandal.

After Petre Toma of the village of Marotinu de Sus died in a field accident in December 2003, his relatives complained that a child’s illness was to blame on Toma, since some neighbors claimed they had seen him posthumously walking in his yard. Something had to be done.

Six local men then volunteered to enact the ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma’s grave.

It seems that the destruction of a strigoi has some parallels with the methods used by Stoker’s heroes to destroy Dracula. But rather than drive a stake through the creature’s heart, the six men dug Toma up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body, and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burned the heart, put the embers in water, and shared the grim cocktail with the sick child.

The author explaining to a television crew how Vlad used stakes.

For a little while, it all seemed to have worked well. Eventually, the sick girl got better again, so the ritual must have worked, or so many in the village thought.

Local police appeared to be less understanding. After Toma’s daughter complained, they arrested the men and charged them with illegally exhuming the corpse. They were sentenced to six months in jail, but did not serve the time.

What really surprised me, however, was why Toma’s daughter was angry at her relatives. It was not because they had desecrated the body of a dead person that deserved more respect, but because she had not been invited to the ritual!

“These are very ancient practices indeed,” anthropologist Fifor Mihai, who served as a consultant during the trial, told me. “And they are about communicating with the dead, laying the dead to rest. The media and newspapers have made much of the gory aspects, but these people have been doing this sort of thing for many, many centuries, and in the past, the authorities have turned a blind eye.”

These beliefs are very different from those held by people who are Dracula fans; with them, it’s all about image, the immortality, and sexiness of vampires. But for the people in Romania, these are deeply held views, as strongly held as religious faiths. Whether that means customs such as digging up a body and removing its heart should somehow be preserved, I'm not so sure.

In the end, our investigation found Romania to be a country of striking contrasts and rich traditions. We've examined the character of Vlad Dracula, but found the evidence that Bram Stoker based his fictional vampire on him wanting. Certainly, he used the name. There are also some uncanny similarities, such as the use of stakes, Vlad’s bloodthirstiness, and his victories against the Turks, that suggest Stoker knew something about the real Dracula, but probably little more than what was given in the tour books of his day.

And today, so long as tourists want to go to Romania, and filmmakers want to make Dracula movies, that confusion between the real and fictional Draculas will continue, and for many Romanians, that’s not a bad thing.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Nigel Miller, Shaun Trevisick, and Alex Obradovich for their invaluable help in the research and documentation for this article, and Tessa Dunlop, Ronald Top, Peter Harvey, and Mick Duffield for being great partners in the investigation.

Note

1. I am of course referring to our TV investigation, for this and other questions have already been dealt with and answered by some good historical work done in the past by researchers such as Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally.

Haunted Cemetery

It is a memorable sight: “a city within a city,” as one writer describes it (Winter 2001). Actually, it is a city of the dead, a necropolis consisting of narrow alleys lined with ornate crypts and mausoleums. Given its roster of burials of the rich and powerful, it is said that “For the living and dead alike, Recoleta is Buenos Aires’s most prestigious address” and “one of the world’s grandest graveyards” (Bernhardson 2004, 72). (See figure 1.)

I visited the memorable Cementerio de la Recoleta on September 14, in part to view the crypt of Eva Peron. (The late actress-turned-controversial-first-lady is discussed in the next section of this article.) An Internet search had turned up a cautionary remark: “Everybody will tell you the stories about this interesting place, but don't believe all of them; ghosts don't walk there at night” (Fodors 2004). Sure enough, two days after my visit, a local guide told me just such a tale about the cemetery.

As the story goes, one night a man met a woman in the neighborhood, and the pair went to the cemetery for a tryst. She borrowed a jacket from him but then suddenly ran away. He followed, searching for her. Eventually, he found his jacket at a crypt bearing a picture of a young woman who was entombed there. It was the same young lady!

The guide who related the tale, Paola Luski (2005), told me she was dubious of it. She said one reason to question the story was the general absence of pictures of the deceased at the tombs of Recoleta.

More important, the tale seems especially doubtful because of its obvious similarity to the widespread “Vanishing Hitchhiker” urban legend (albeit without that story’s automobile). Shared narrative elements (or motifs as folklorists say) include the meeting of the pair, their linking up, the young lady’s disappearance, and the cemetery as the final destination and scene of revelation. The jacket (like the coat, sweater, etc., present in some versions of the proliferating hitchhiker tale) is clearly intended to provide verisimilitude (a sense of truthfulness) to the story, and it represents an unmistakable link with the famous roadside-phantom narrative.

Thus, the Recoleta tale is simply another variant of the ubiquitous legend which has antecedents as far back as 1876. As American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand (1981, 21) points out, multiple versions of a tale provide “good evidence against credibility.”

Popular Saints

Until quite recently, Roman Catholicism was the official religion of Argentina, and it still dominates the daily lives of its people. In addition to their formal faith, however, Argentinians often seek help from a number of popular, unofficial saints. They represent a spreading folk Catholicism that often diverges from orthodoxy and even includes spiritualist practices.

Like official saints, the popular variety are often believed to work miracles. For instance, there is “the Robin Hood of Corrientes,” the gaucho, Antonio Gil. An army deserter in the 1850s, Gil was hanged on an espinillo tree but before dying he supposedly warned the commanding sergeant that his son would become deathly ill and could only recover by means of the sergeant praying for Gil’s soul. Upon the boy’s recovery, his repentant father carved an espinillo cross which he placed at Gil’s death site. Today, as many as 100,000 pilgrims visit the site on the anniversary of his death and credit Gaucho Gil with miracles and life-transforming experiences (Bernhardson 2004, 186, 273, 606).

Even more popular than Gil is legendary Maria Antonia Deolinda Correa, known as the Difunta (meaning “Defunct” as the deceased are called in the countryside). A pious legend tells how she followed her husband, a conscript during the civil wars of the nineteenth century, and died in the desert of thirst. However, when her body was discovered by passing muleteers, her infant son was found alive, “miraculously” feeding at her lifeless breast.

Adding to the implausibility of an infant surviving on milk from a corpse is the limited evidence that the Difunta even existed. Nevertheless, the legend was so resonant among the local folk that they transformed the waterless site into a shrine. Today it is visited by pilgrims who stand in line to visit a chamber which holds an effigy of the prostrate Difunta with her infant at her breast (Bernhardson 2004, 273-274).

There are many other popular saints including the faith healer Madre Maria Salomu. Sardonically, novelist Thomas Eloy Martinez has called his fellow Argentines “cadaver cultists” for being so devoted to the dead (Bernhardson 2004, 606-607). Not all of the unofficial saints, however, are widely believed to work miracles, and perhaps the most famous-or infamous-of all has had her status slip.

Alternately reviled and beloved as “Evita,” Maria Eva Duarte Peron (1919-1952) was the controversial first lady of Argentina from the election of her husband Juan Peron in 1946 until her death from cancer in 1952. A former film actress, she lent her charisma and ambition to the popular causes of assisting the poor, of improving education, and helping to achieve woman’s suffrage. Nevertheless, Peron’s increasingly demagogic methods cost him the support of the Catholic Church, and his wife’s death diminished his appeal among workers. He was ousted by the military in 1955.

In her last speech, she had stated, “I will be with my people, dead or alive.” Peron helped the mythologizing process by having her body mummified and placed on display while a monument was being prepared. A popular movement sought to have the Church make her a saint. Her followers installed altars to “Santa Evita” in their homes, and over 100,000 requests for her canonization flooded the Vatican, many crediting her with the requisite miracles (McInnis 2001; Fouche 2002; Evita 2005; Mosca 2005).

Instead, after Peron was deposed in 1955, the Church conspired with the new regime to spirit away her body. It was buried in Milan, Italy, by the sisters of the Society of St. Paul. There, under the false name Maria Maggi, it reposed for fourteen years. Meanwhile the anti-Peronists attempted to efface her memory, tearing down statues of her and burning copies of her autobiography, The Sense of My Life.

In April 1971, however, the Argentine president ordered what has been called “the world’s most beautiful corpse” returned to Peron, who was living with his third wife, Isabel, in Madrid (Which Coffin 1978). According to journalist Wayne Bernhardson (2004, 73), Per—n’s “bizarre spiritualist adviser” Jose Lopez Rega-known as “The Witch"-"used the opportunity to try to transfer Evita’s essence into Isabelita’s body.” (After Peron’s brief return to power in 1973 and his death the following year, Isabel succeeded him but was soon deposed by the military.)

I visited several related sites, including the Museo Evita, where the controversial First Lady is honored. It appears that claims of miracles have largely abated. However, one writer concludes (Morrison 2005):

Though efforts to have her made into a saint have been turned down by the Vatican, Evita still holds near to saint status in Argentina. Slogans proclaiming Evita Vive! (Evita Lives!) can be seen everywhere even today in a new century. At her family crypt in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, supporters and pilgrims still leave flowers, and a continual guard is kept to prevent vandalism.

Questions remain: Were none of the miracles by Santa Evita authentic? Were they rejected for lack of merit, or dismissed out of hand for political reasons? How does the Church reject her but canonize Mexico’s Juan Diego? (He is the legendary-possibly fictitious-figure on whose cloak the Virgin Mary “miraculously” imprinted her image, but which is, in fact, painted [Nickell 2002].) Are any miracle claims credible, officially sanctioned or not?

El Chupacabra

The face of the Argentine pampas (plains) was altered in the sixteenth century by the arrival of feral livestock that displaced the native rhea (American ostrich) and guanaco (ancestor of the llama and alpaca). The Spaniards brought such domestic animals as horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry (Bernhardson 2004, 633).

In recent years, the “animal mutilation” hype that burgeoned in the mid-1970s in the United States struck Argentina. Like its northern counterpart, the South American version of the phenomenon was often attributed to extraterrestrials, especially the bloodthirsty El Chupacabra ("goat sucker”). That creature was described by the Cox News Service (April 1996) as “part space alien, part vampire, and part reptile, with long sharp claws, bulging eyes, and a Dracula-like taste for sucking blood from neck bites.”

The chupacabra is traceable to Puerto Rico, where it “spawned something near hysteria"; then the myth spread to Mexico and still later to Florida-all via the Spanish-language media. Its further migration is no surprise. Involving major livestock areas, the reported mutilations sparked conspiracy theories by UFOlogists, journalists, and local workers. Typical of the reports I collected was “Chupacabras Attack Ranches in Argentina” (Trainor 2000).

Actually, however, animal mutilation claims have consistently been countered with prosaic explanations. For example, a rash of cattle mutilations in the western United States during the 1970s was carefully investigated and attributed to the work of predators and scavengers (Frazier 1980; Nickell 1995, 115). And when the chupacabra scare reached Mexico in April 1996, a scientific team staked out farmyards where the goatsucker had reportedly struck. Wild dogs were caught each time (Nickell 2004, 29).

As I would discover, Argentina was no exception. I was able to spend a day at a horse ranch in the pampas north of Buenos Aires. In addition to having an open-pit barbecue lunch, going horseback riding, and experiencing other entertainments, I was able to talk with the head gaucho who told me (with my guide translating) that the chupacabra claims were nonsense and that there were certainly no such mutilations of horses at this ranch or any credible attacks on cattle or other livestock nearby (Romero 2005). One of the five brothers who owns the ranch was similarly dismissive of the idea that chupacabras were on the loose (Rossiter 2005).

Figure 2. A “mutilated” ram. (Photo by Argentine journalist Gabriel Alcalde.)

At the conference, I met journalist Gabriel Alcalde of Santa Rosa who generously shared his knowledge of the local phenomenon. He related that almost 100 cases of animal mutilation were reported in La Pampa and Buenos Aires provinces between May and August 2002. (See figure 2.) However, he noted that research conducted by the National Service for Food and Agriculture (SENASA), with the Veterinary College of National University of the Center of the Province of Buenos Aires (as well as other universities in the area where mutilated livestock were found), had found mundane explanations. In a report SENASA concluded:

The deaths can be attributed to natural causes. Under direct and close observation it could be ascertained that the injuries to the tissues and organs were caused by predators. Histological studies done on the carcasses showed conclusively that no special tools had been used to produce the cuts, e.g., cauterizing scalpels.

The conclusion was that the animals’ deaths were due to natural causes, such as alimentary deficiencies, and that the mutilations were subsequently caused by predators, including field mice. The report stated that “in all the cases under review there were traces of bird, carrion (fox), and rodent (mice) feces on the carcasses and near the dead animals.”

And so the chupacabras were vanquished, although Gabriel Alcalde pointed out that many Argentines denied the scientific evidence and “continued to believe the spellbinding stories concocted by the media.” He told me that he felt the real mutilation was that which had been done to critical thinking.

Acknowledgments

Benjamin Radford accompanied me on some of my travels. Center for Inquiry librarian Tim Binga provided research assistance and David Musella helped with editorial matters.

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am especially grateful to Alejandro J. Borgo and Hugo Estrella for their cultural assistance, and-of course Paul Kurtz, Barry Karr, and dedicated CFI staffers for launching a great conference.

References

• Alcalde, Gabriel. 2005. Personal communication, October 20.
• Bernhardson, Wayne. 2004. Moon Handbooks Argentina. Emeryville, California: Avalon Travel Publishing.
• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Evita biography. 2005. Available online HERE; accessed September 9.
• Fodors.com. 2004. From a message that appeared on an online travel forum, dated July 10. Available online HERE; accessed Nov. 2, 2005.
• Fouche, Gwladys. 2002. Eva Peron. Guardian, July 26.
• Frazier, Kendrick. 1980. Cattle mutilations: mystery deflated, mutologists miffed. Skeptical Inquirer 5:1 (Fall), 2-6.
• Granero, Mario J. 2003. Evita: Life & Images. Buenos Aries: Maizal Ediciones.
• Luski, Paola. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell, Sept. 16.
• McInnis, Judy B. 2001. Review of Marta Raquel Zabaleta’s Feminine Stereotypes and Roles in Theory and Practice in Argentina Before and After the First Lady Eva Peron (2002), in De RLAS 2:2 (July 15); accessed Nov. 7, 2005.
• Morrison, Eddy. 2005. The colourful career of Eva Peron. Online HERE; accessed Nov. 7, 2005.
• Mosca, Alexandria Kathryn. 2005. The enduring legacy of Eva Peron. Online HERE; accessed Sept. 9, 2005.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2002. “Miraculous” Image of Guadalupe painted. Skeptical Inquirer 26:5 (September/October), 13.
• —. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 28-30.
• Romero, Luis. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell with guide Paola Luski translating, September 16.
• Rossiter, Patricio. 2005. Interview by Paola Luski for Joe Nickell, September 16.
• Trainor, Joseph. 2000. Chupacabras attack ranches in Argentina. UFO Roundup 5:28 (July 13); accessed Sept. 9, 2005.
• Which coffin holds the world’s most beautiful corpse? 1978. In Perrott Phillips, ed. Out of This World. Paulton, England: Phoebus, 115-120.
• Winter, Brian. 2001. Ghosts of the present haunt Argentine cemetery. Available online HERE; accessed September 26, 2005.

The one question that my students always ask when I introduce the topic of alien abductions is how could anyone possibly really believe that such a thing had happened to them if they weren't just plain barking mad. It takes a fair amount of background in memory and related subjects to understand the psychology of the alien-abduction experience. In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Susan Clancy has masterfully combined this background information with her own important research on alien-abduction claimants. She writes with the skill of an experienced novelist telling an exciting story. Consider the opening paragraph:

“Will Andrews is an articulate, handsome forty-two-year-old. He’s a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wife’s-they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial.”

Following that opening, it took me only a very pleasant fall afternoon to read this book from cover to cover. The title of each chapter is a question, and the first chapter is titled, “How do you wind up studying aliens?” Here, Clancy gives a very open and personal account of how she became interested in the topic of alien abductions. The next five chapters cover the most important questions that people ask about abductions and that abductees ask themselves. Chapter 2, “How do people come to believe they were abducted by aliens?", and chapter 3, “Why do I have memories if it didn't happen?", cover the various factors that go into the creation of an alien-abduction belief. Clancy makes it clear that no one wakes up in the morning with a full-blown abduction experience. Sometimes, the experience is created and molded from the starting point of a dream or hypnogogic/ hypnopompic hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis. Other times, it starts with just a vague feeling that something had happened that needs to be explained.

According to Clancy, all of the abductees she studied “had sought out books, movies, researchers, and hypnotists in an effort to understand the things that were troubling them” (143). Since sleep paralysis and its related hallucinations are almost unknown to the general public, the real explanation is not available. Thus, when someone who has had such an experience reads one of the books touting the reality of alien abductions or hears such claims on television or elsewhere, it seems the only explanation available. If they then fall in with some alien-abduction guru and support group, techniques such as hypnosis and guided imagery are used to reinforce the seeming reality of the event while adding much more detail. As Clancy notes, “Belief precedes memories because developing detailed, personal memories . . . requires intervention on the part of some kind of therapist” (63). Clancy does a marvelous job of describing sleep paralysis, the changeable nature of memory, and how hypnosis and other techniques are used to create false memories that become very real for the abductee.

A common claim in alien-abduction circles is that the abduction stories are highly consistent and thus must reflect real events. In chapter 4, Clancy shows quite clearly that the stories, while having overall similar themes, vary greatly.

In chapter 5, “Who gets abducted?", she reports the results of her own research on dozens of abductees, whom she interviewed and gave psychological tests. In general, these people are quite normal. They are certainly, with an exception or two, not “crazy,” as so many first suspect upon hearing their tales. They are, however, more imaginative, creative, and fantasy-prone than the general population. They also score higher on a trait called schizotypy. This does not mean that they are schizophrenic, but “they're generally a bit odd. They tend to look and think eccentrically and are prone to 'magical' thinking and odd beliefs” (129). When one combines this type of personality with a strange nighttime experience and then adds in the efforts of UFO-abduction “experts,” the memory of an experience that never actually happened is almost inevitable.

In the final chapter, “Why would I want to believe it?” Clancy discusses why some abductees prize their abduction experience, even though it was terrifying. When she asked, “'If you could do it all over again, would you choose not [emphasis in original] to be abducted?' No one ever said yes. Despite the shock and terror that accompanied their experiences, the abductees were glad to have had them. Their lives improved. They were less lonely, more hopeful about the future, felt they were better people. They chose abduction” (149).

Throughout the book, Clancy maintains a respectful tone toward the abductees. She clearly found almost all of them to be pleasant and interesting people. There are vignettes of about half a dozen of her subjects in the book. These illuminate the diversity of abductee experiences and personalities. The book is aimed at the proverbial intelligent lay person but it is well referenced with fourteen pages of notes at the end. Clancy has reported her research findings more formally in the scientific literature, and citations to her published research reports are usefully included in the notes. Clancy has produced a real masterpiece.