Article Analysis of Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds by Elizabeth Kolbert Every person in the world has some kind of bias. Years ago, Ben Casnocha mentioned an idea to me that I havent been able to shake: The people who are most likely to change our minds are the ones we agree with on 98 percent of topics. Six of Crows. Its no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our hypersociability.. Last month, The New Yorker published an article called 'Why facts don't change our minds', in which the author, Elizabeth Kolbert, reviews some research showing that even 'reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational'. (They can now count on their sidesort ofDonald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.). Finding such an environment is difficult. Theres enough wrestling going on in someones head when they are overcoming a pre-existing belief. It's because they believe something that you don't believe. This app provides an alternative kind of learning and education discovery. "And they were just practically bombarding me with information," says Maranda. Every living being perceives the world differently and creates its own hallucination of reality. If you want to beat procrastination and make better long-term choices, then you have to find a way to make your present self act in the best interest of your future self. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite wellsignificantly better than the average studenteven though, as theyd just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. You already agree with them in most areas of life. The further away an idea is from your current position, the more likely you are to reject it outright. Often an instant classic and must-read for everyone. A Court of Thorns and Roses. In recent years, a small group of scholars has focussed on war-termination theory. Her arguments, while strong, could still be better by adding studies or examples where facts did change people's minds. Once formed, the researchers observed dryly, impressions are remarkably perseverant.. The best thing that can happen to a good idea is that it is shared. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place. As Mercier and Sperber write, This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.. 100% plagiarism free, Orders: 14 7 Good. you can use them for inspiration and simplify your student life. Your time is better spent championing good ideas than tearing down bad ones. Therefore, we use a set of 20 qualities to characterize each book by its strengths: Applicable Youll get advice that can be directly applied in the workplace or in everyday situations. First, AI needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. A helpful and/or enlightening book that is extremely well rounded, has many strengths and no shortcomings worth mentioning. It suggests that often human will abandon rational reasoning in favour of their long-held beliefs, because the capacity to reason evolved not to be able to present logical reasoning behind an idea but to win an argument with others. Confirm our unfounded opinions with friends and 'like So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others begins. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. The packets also included the mens responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. A third myth has permeated much of the conservation field's approach to communication and impact and is based on two truisms: 1) to change behavior, one must first change minds, 2) change must happen individually before it can occur collectively. E.g., we emotional reason heaps, and a lot of times, it leads onto particular sets of thoughts, that may impact our behaviour, but later on, we discover that there was unresolved anger lying beneath the emotional reasoning in the . The challenge that remains, they write toward the end of their book, is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief., The Enigma of Reason, The Knowledge Illusion, and Denying to the Grave were all written before the November election. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that theyd been misled, and that the information theyd received was entirely fictitious. Im just supposed to let these idiots get away with this?, Let me be clear. You take to social media and it stokes the rage. That's a really hard sell." Humans operate on different frequencies. Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. As proximity increases, so does understanding. Of course, news isn't fake simply because you don't agree with it. A recent example is the anti-vax leader saying drinking your urine can cure Covid, meanwhile, almost any scientist and major news program would tell you otherwise. Hugo Mercier explains how arguments are more convincing when they rest on a good knowledge of the audience, taking into account what the audience believes, who they trust, and what they value. These misperceptions are bad for public policy and social health. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies have found that the exact opposite is often true when it comes to politics: People form opinions based on emotions, such as fear, contempt and anger,. The economist J.K. Galbraith once wrote, "Faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.". In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. It makes me think of Tyler Cowens quote, Spend as little time as possible talking about how other people are wrong.. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. To change social behavior, change individual minds. When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. This shows that facts cannot change people's mind about information that is factually false but socially accurate. Justify their behavior or belief by changing the conflicting cognition. Facts dont change our minds. Enjoy 3 days of full online access to 25,000+ summaries Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Why facts don't change our minds - The psychology of our beliefs. Order original paper now and save your time! You can get more actionable ideas in my popular email newsletter. For example, when you drive down the road, you do not have full access to every aspect of reality, but your perception is accurate enough that you can avoid other cars and conduct the trip safely. One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor, they write, is that theres no sharp boundary between one persons ideas and knowledge and those of other members of the group. In many circumstances, social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth of a particular fact or idea. They dont need to wrestle with you too. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threatsthe human equivalent of the cat around the cornerits a trait that should have been selected against. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Why do arguments change people's minds in some cases and backfire in others? The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context. Concrete Examples Youll get practical advice illustrated with examples of real-world applications or anecdotes. In a well-run laboratory, theres no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. The best thing that can happen to a bad idea is that it is forgotten. The book has sold over 10 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. In fact, there's a lot more to human existence and psychological experience than just mere thought manipulation. I thought Kevin Simler put it well when he wrote, If a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, its perfectly happy to do so, and doesnt much care where the reward comes from whether its pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from ones peers), or some mix of the two. 3. Why is human thinking so flawed, particularly if it's an adaptive behavior that evolved over millennia? Thanks for reading. You read the news; it boils your blood. This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. Why you think youre right even if youre wrong by Julia Galef. I know firsthand that confirmation bias is both an issue, but not unavoidable. Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. These groups take false information and conspiracy theories and run with them without question. You end up repeating the ideas youre hoping people will forgetbut, of course, people cant forget them because you keep talking about them. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. One explanation of why facts don't change our minds is the phenomenon of belief perseverance. Insiders take Youll have the privilege of learning from someone who knows her or his topic inside-out. The midwife told her that years earlier, something bad had happened after she vaccinated her son. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. For lack of a better phrase, we might call this approach factually false, but socially accurate. 4 When we have to choose between the two, people often select friends and family over facts. The article often takes an evolutionary standpoint when using in-depth analysis of why the human brain functions as it does. Things like that.". If your model of reality is wildly different from the actual world, then you struggle to take effective actions each day. When it comes to the issue of why facts don't change our minds, one of the key reasons has to do with confirmation bias. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Institute for Advanced Study As youve probably guessed by now, thosewho supported capital punishment said the pro-deterrence data was highly credible, while the anti-deterrence data was not. This is conformity, not stupidity., The linguist and philosopher George Lakoff refers to this as activating the frame. The word kind originated from the word kin. When you are kind to someone it means you are treating them like family. Changing our mind about a product or a political candidate can be undesirable because it signals to others that "I was wrong" about that candidate or product. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially. The first reason was that they didn't want to be ridiculed by the rest of the group from differing in opinions. The tendency to selectively pay attention to information that supports our beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them. If people counterargue unwelcome information vigorously enough, they may end up with more attitudinally congruent information in mind than before the debate, which in turn leads them to report opinions that are more extreme than they otherwisewould have had, theDartmouth researcherswrote. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way? I thought about changing the title, but nobody is allowed to copyright titles and enough time has passed now, so Im sticking with it. Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperbers argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coperate. The act of change introduces an odd juxtaposition of natural forces: on one . On the Come Up. Shaw describes the motivated reasoning that happens in these groups: "You're in a position of defending your choices no matter what information is presented," he says, "because if you don't, it.