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Inspiring Youll want to put into practice what youve read immediately. "And they were just practically bombarding me with information," says Maranda. Any subject. Clear explains: "Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. You read the news; it boils your blood. You are simply fanning the flame of ignorance and stupidity. How can we avoidlosing ourminds when trying to talk facts? In many circumstances, social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth of a particular fact or idea. As everyone whos followed the researchor even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Todayknows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. I found this quote from Kazuki Yamada, but it is believed to have been originally from the Japanese version of Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami. 3. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. If weor our friends or the pundits on CNNspent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, wed realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. Among the many, many issues our forebears didn't worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Such a mouse, bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around, would soon be dinner. In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then its hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. They began studying the backfire effect, which they define as a phenomenon by which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question, if those corrections contradict their views. Red, White & Royal Blue. Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. James, are you serious right now? 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. In such cases, citizens are likely to resist or reject arguments andevidence contradicting their opinionsa view that is consistent with a wide array ofresearch. "A man with a conviction is a hard man to change," Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in their book When Prophecy Fails. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Not whether or not it "feels" true or not to you. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? Hot Topic Youll find yourself in the middle of a highly debated issue. A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. Have the discipline to give it to them. 8. Though half the notes were indeed genuinetheyd been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroners officethe scores were fictitious. . In, Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds, an article by Elizabeth Kolbert, the main bias talked about is confirmation bias, also known as myside bias. It isnt any longer. It feels good to stick to our guns even if we are wrong, they observe. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views (prejudices) one would like to be true. This does not sound ideal, so how did we come to be this way? What HBOs Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong. People's ability to reason is subject to a staggering number of biases. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter whod been put on report by his supervisors several times. The what makes a successful firefighter study and capital punishment study have the same results, one even left the participants feeling stronger about their beliefs than before. So she did. Im just supposed to let these idiots get away with this?, Let me be clear. 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. Our rating helps you sort the titles on your reading list from solid (5) to brilliant (10). Instead of just arguing with family and friends, they went to work. For example, "I'll stop eating these cookies because they're full of unhealthy fat and sugar and won't help me lose weight." 2. getAbstract recommends Pulitzer Prizewinning author Elizabeth Kolberts thought-provoking article to readers who want to know why people stand their ground, even when theyre standing in quicksand. 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. As a result, books are often a better vehicle for transforming beliefs than conversations or debates. Because, hey, if you cant beat it, you might as well laugh at it. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. Kolbert tries to show us that we must think about our own biases and uses her rhetoric to show us that we must be more open-minded, cautious, and conscious while taking in and processing information to avoid confirmation bias, but how well does Kolbert do in keeping her own biases about this issue at bay throughout her article? For experts Youll get the higher-level knowledge/instructions you need as an expert. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone elses were actually their own, and vice versa. Discover your next favorite book with getAbstract. Soldiers are on the intellectual attack, looking to defeat the people who differ from them. Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. It makes a difference. When youre at Position 7, your time is better spent connecting with people who are at Positions 6 and 8, gradually pulling them in your direction. However, the proximity required by a meal something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. Friendship does. We look at every kind of content that may matter to our audience: books, but also articles, reports, videos and podcasts. Im not saying its never useful to point out an error or criticize a bad idea. Enjoy 3 days of full online access to 25,000+ summaries Gift a book. New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. 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. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasurea rush of dopaminewhen processing information that supports their beliefs. 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. 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. samples are real essays written by real students who kindly donate their papers to us so that In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students in the second group thought hed embrace it. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The author of the book The Sixth Extinction, (2014) Elizabeth Kolbert, wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine in February 2017 entitled: "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds: New Discoveries about the Human Mind Show the Limitations of Reason," (New Yorker, February 27, 2017). For beginners Youll find this to be a good primer if youre a learner with little or no prior experience/knowledge. The most heated arguments often occur between people on opposite ends of the spectrum, but the most frequent learning occurs from people who are nearby. The book has sold over 10 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. This shows that facts cannot change people's mind about information that is factually false but socially accurate. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. She even helps prove this by being biased in her article herself, whether intentionally or not. 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. Here is how to lower the temperature. 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. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. In marketing, it is essential to have an understanding of the factors that influence people's decision-making processes. Heres how the Dartmouth study framed it: People typically receive corrective informationwithin objective news reports pitting two sides of an argument against each other,which is significantly more ambiguous than receiving a correct answer from anomniscient source. One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for peoples natural inclinations. The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. She has written for The New Yorker since 1999. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. 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. Those whod started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those whod opposed it were even more hostile. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. Providing people with accurate information doesnt seem to help; they simply discount it. Begin typing to search for a section of this site. 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. These short videos prompt critical thinking with middle and high school students to spark civic engagement. As Mercier and Sperber write, This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.. As Julia Galef so aptly puts it: people often act like soldiers rather than scouts. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldnt have amounted to much. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person . As proximity increases, so does understanding. []. Why dont facts change our minds? (Dont even get me started on fake news.) But some days, its just too exhausting to argue the same facts over and over again. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.10. Select the sections that are relevant to you. In this case, the failure was particularly impressive, since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from. In Kolbert's article, Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds, various studies are put into use to explain this theory. You can get more actionable ideas in my popular email newsletter. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime. But I knowwhere shes coming from, so she is probably not being fully accurate,the Republican might think while half-listening to the Democrats explanation. So, why, even when presented with logical, factualexplanations do people stillrefuse to change their minds? Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise . Thanks for reading. Even after the evidence for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs, the researchers noted. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World. In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. Mercier and Sperber prefer the term myside bias. Humans, they point out, arent randomly credulous. When most people think about the human capacity for reason, they imagine that facts enter the brain and valid conclusions come out. Some real-life examples include Elizabeth Warren and Ronald Reagan, both of whom at one point in life had facts change their minds and switched which political party they were a part of one from republican to democrat and the other the reverse. We live in an era where we are immersed in information and opinion exchange. Your highlights will appear here. On the Come Up. Author links open overlay panel Anne H. Toomey. . Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker Feb 2017 10 min. "Why facts don't change our minds". Science reveals this isn't the case. Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. To change social behavior, change individual minds. The Dartmouth researchersfound, by presenting people with fake newspaper articles, that peoplereceivefactsdifferently based on their own beliefs. To understand why an article all about biases might itself be biased, I believe we need to have a common understanding of what the bias being talked about in this article is and a brief bit of history about it. Researchers have spent hundreds of hours studying how our opinions are formedand held. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. 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. With a book, the conversation takes place inside someones head and without the risk of being judged by others. By Elizabeth Kolbert. This is conformity, not stupidity., The linguist and philosopher George Lakoff refers to this as activating the frame. Ideas can only be remembered when they are repeated. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it this way, People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true. 2. For example, our opinions on military spending may be fixeddespite the presentation of new factsuntil the day our son or daughter decides to enlist. Others discovered that they were hopeless. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that theyd earlier been satisfied with. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. The power of confirmation bias. 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. It led her to Facebook groups, where other moms echoed what the midwife had said. This is why I don't vaccinate. 2017. 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. The packets also included the mens responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. This, I think, is a good method for actually changing someones mind. Clear argues that bad ideas continue to live because many people tend to talk about them thus spreading them further. Curiosity is the driving force. Theres enough wrestling going on in someones head when they are overcoming a pre-existing belief. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. The Gormans dont just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. So clearly facts change can and do change our minds and the idea that they do is a huge part of culture today. Princeton, New Jersey Of course, whats hazardous is not being vaccinated; thats why vaccines were created in the first place. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. Two Harvard Professors Reveal One Reason Our Brains Love to Procrastinate : We have a tendency to care too much about our present selves and not enough about our future selves. You cant know what you dont know. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraines location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.). Finding such an environment is difficult. Humans' disregard of facts for information that confirms their original beliefs shows the flaws in human reasoning. But how does this actually happen? There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. In other words, you think the world would improve if people changed their minds on a few important topics. You can't expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. 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. All of these are movies, and though fictitious, they would not exist as they do today if humans could not change their beliefs, because they would not feel at all realistic or relatable. Eloquent Youll enjoy a masterfully written or presented text. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. To get a high-quality original essay, click here. "Telling me, 'Your midwife's right. Most people argue to win, not to learn. Consider whats become known as confirmation bias, the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. 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, rather than relying on facts. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. The belief that vaccines cause autism has persisted, even though the facts paint an entirely different story. Engaging Youll read or watch this all the way through the end. 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. The desire that humans have to always be right is supported by confirmation bias. Your time is better spent championing good ideas than tearing down bad ones. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two. But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of alternative facts. These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. 08540 Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. We have helped over 30,000 people so far. You cant expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. The Stanford studies became famous. 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. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. This was written by Elizabeth Kolbert shortly after the election, so it's pretty political, but addresses an interesting topic and is relevant to the point above. 6 Notable. 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. Mercier and Sperber prefer the term myside bias. Humans, they point out, arent randomly credulous. When confronted with an uncomfortable set of facts, the tendency is often to double down on their current position rather than publicly admit to being wrong. Any deadline. Eventually, she did more research and realized that the purported link between vaccines and autism wasn't real. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. You already agree with them in most areas of life. is particularly well structured. A group of researchers at Dartmouth College wondered the same thing. Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. Surprised? This app provides an alternative kind of learning and education discovery. Books resolve this tension. Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have written a book in answer to that question. In conversation, people have to carefully consider their status and appearance. Inevitably Kolbert is right, confirmation bias is a big issue. 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. Things like that.". In an ideal world, peoples opinions would evolve as more facts become available. Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. A helpful and/or enlightening book, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. Why facts don't change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research. Insiders take Youll have the privilege of learning from someone who knows her or his topic inside-out. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. 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.". I don't think there is. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people cant think straight was shocking. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. Why don't people like to change their minds? Its no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. Order original paper now and save your time! This website uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. Presumably, you want to criticize bad ideas because you think the world would be better off if fewer people believed them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. 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. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups. Jahred Sullivan "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds" Summary This article, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, explores the concepts of reasoning, social influence, and human stubbornness.