Curiosity is the driving force. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds - Marcellus The best thing that can happen to a bad idea is that it is forgotten. You cant jump down the spectrum. Every person in the world has some kind of bias. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two. Why Facts Don't Change Minds | Challenge Why do you want to criticize bad ideas in the first place? Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. Once formed, the researchers observed dryly, impressions are remarkably perseverant.. Its something thats been popping up a lot lately thanks to the divisive 2016 presidential election. Decision Making: How to Make Smart Decisions and Avoid Bad Ones Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. Providing people with accurate information doesnt seem to help; they simply discount it. Ana-Sabina Weiscovici on LinkedIn: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds Eventually, she did more research and realized that the purported link between vaccines and autism wasn't real. In the mid-1970s, Stanford University began a research project that revealed the limits to human rationality; clipboard-wielding graduate students have been eroding humanitys faith in its own judgment ever since. In fact, there's a lot more to human existence and psychological experience than just mere thought manipulation. 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. Of course, news isn't fake simply because you don't agree with it. Almost invariably, the positions were blind about are our own. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have written a book in answer to that question. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently. You have to give them somewhere to go. But looking back, she can't believe how easy it was to embrace beliefs that were false. Hot Topic Youll find yourself in the middle of a highly debated issue. Government and private policies are often based on misperceptions, cognitive distortions, and sometimes flat-out wrong beliefs. They wanted to fit in so went along with the majority group, typical of normative social influence. Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World. 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'. 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. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. Dont waste time explaining why bad ideas are bad. Presented with someone elses argument, were quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. As one Twitter employee wrote, Every time you retweet or quote tweet someone youre angry with, it helps them. The Grinch's heart growing three sizes after seeing the fact that the Whos do not only care about presents, Ebenezer Scrooge helping Bob Cratchit after being shown what will happen in the future if he does not change, and Darth Vader saving Luke Skywalker after realizing that though he has done bad things the fact remains that he is still good, none of these scenarios would make sense if humans could not let facts change what they believe to be true, even if based on false information. False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds : r/LouderWithCrowder Science reveals this isn't the case. Because, hey, if you cant beat it, you might as well laugh at it. As proximity increases, so does understanding. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the waterand everything thats been deposited in itgets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. In an ideal world, peoples opinions would evolve as more facts become available. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. Overview Youll get a broad treatment of the subject matter, mentioning all its major aspects. News is fake if it isn't true in light of all the known facts. You have to slide down it. The students were asked to respond to two studies. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others begins. Any subject. Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. The latest reasoning about our irrational ways. The students were provided with fake studies for both sides of the argument. Let's Begin. She started on Google. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an intellectualist point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social interactionist perspective. Such a mouse, bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around, would soon be dinner. Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. This Article Won't Change Your Mind - The Atlantic I allowed myself to realize that there was so much more to the world than being satisfied with what one has known all their life and just believing everything that confirms it and disregarding anything that slightly goes against it, therefore contradicting Kolbert's idea that confirmation bias is unavoidable and one of our most primitive instincts. Why Do Our Brains Love Fake News? | KQED This week on Hidden Brain, we look at how we rely on the people we trust to shape our beliefs, and why facts aren't always enough to change our minds. In other words, you think the world would improve if people changed their minds on a few important topics. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. To change social behavior, change individual minds. Why? As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. You end up repeating the ideas youre hoping people will forgetbut, of course, people cant forget them because you keep talking about them. 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. Its no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. Mercier, who works at a French research institute . They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, whod come to a different conclusion. Understanding the truth of a situation is important, but so is remaining part of a tribe. *getAbstract is summarizing much more than books. 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.. . This insight not only explains why we might hold our tongue at a dinner party or look the other way when our parents say something offensive, but also reveals a better way to change the minds of others. By Elizabeth Kolbert. This Article Won't Change Your Mind: The facts on why facts alone can't An idea that is never spoken or written down dies with the person who conceived it. So clearly facts change can and do change our minds and the idea that they do is a huge part of culture today. The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. What happened? The desire that humans have to always be right is supported by confirmation bias. The rush that humans experience when they win an argument in support of their beliefs is unlike anything else on the planet, even if they are arguing with incorrect information. According to Psychology Today, confirmation, or myside, bias, occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. But back to the article, Kolbert is clearly onto something in saying that confirmation bias needs to change, but neglects the fact that in many cases, facts do change our minds. The Grinch, A Christmas Carol, Star Wars. hide caption. New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. Innovative You can expect some truly fresh ideas and insights on brand-new products or trends. Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker Feb 2017 10 min. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; its the subject of entire textbooks worth of experiments. Such a mouse, bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around, would soon be dinner. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. 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. Consider the richness of human visual perception. In this case, the failure was particularly impressive, since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from. You can't expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. As Julia Galef so aptly puts it: people often act like soldiers rather than scouts. If you divide this spectrum into 10 units and you find yourself at Position 7, then there is little sense in trying to convince someone at Position 1. Change their behavior or belief so that it's congruent with the new information. From my experience, 1 keep emotions out of the exchange, 2 discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3 listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4 show .
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