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There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you.
The theory of cognitive dissonance—the extreme discomfort of simultaneously holding two thoughts that are in conflict—was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In a famous study, Festinger and his colleagues embedded themselves with a doomsday prophet named Dorothy Martin and her cult of followers who believed that spacemen called the Guardians were coming to collect them in flying saucers, to save them from a coming flood. Needless to say, no spacemen (and no flood) ever came, but Martin just kept revising her predictions. Sure, the spacemen didn't show up today, but they were sure to come tomorrow, and so on. The researchers watched with fascination as the believers kept on believing, despite all the evidence that they were wrong.
This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe—they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs.
[...] People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they're asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich.
[...] In 1877, the philosopher William Kingdon Clifford wrote an essay titled "The Ethics of Belief" [PDF], in which he argued: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence."
[...] All manner of falsehoods—conspiracy theories, hoaxes, propaganda, and plain old mistakes—do pose a threat to truth when they spread like fungus through communities and take root in people's minds. But the inherent contradiction of false knowledge is that only those on the outside can tell that it's false. It's hard for facts to fight it because to the person who holds it, it feels like truth.
[...] In a New York Times article called "The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship", Amanda Taub writes that sharing fake news stories on social media that denigrate the candidate you oppose "is a way to show public support for one's partisan team—roughly the equivalent of painting your face with team colors on game day."
This sort of information tribalism isn't a consequence of people lacking intelligence or of an inability to comprehend evidence. Kahan has previously written that whether people "believe" in evolution or not has nothing to do with whether they understand the theory of it—saying you don't believe in evolution is just another way of saying you're religious. Similarly, a recent Pew study found that a high level of science knowledge didn't make Republicans any more likely to say they believed in climate change, though it did for Democrats.
[...] People also learn selectively—they're better at learning facts that confirm their worldview than facts that challenge it. And media coverage makes that worse. While more news coverage of a topic seems to generally increase people's knowledge of it, one paper, "Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment," showed that when the coverage has implications for a person's political party, then selective learning kicks into high gear.
[...] Fact-checking erroneous statements made by politicians or cranks may also be ineffective. Nyhan's work has shown that correcting people's misperceptions often doesn't work, and worse, sometimes it creates a backfire effect, making people endorse their misperceptions even more strongly.
[...] So much of how people view the world has nothing to do with facts. That doesn't mean truth is doomed, or even that people can't change their minds. But what all this does seem to suggest is that, no matter how strong the evidence is, there's little chance of it changing someone's mind if they really don't want to believe what it says. They have to change their own.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/
[Related]:
The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: [PDF]
THE POLITICS OF MOTIVATION [PDF]
Behavioral receptivity to dissonant information
"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change" [PDF]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:30AM (11 children)
Everybody will think it's talking about 'the other side.'
And I think there's a simple explanation. Most things we have no way of knowing as a personal fact. We're left to rely on information from others to inform us. Yet the media has really deteriorated in recent years in no small part thanks to the rise of social media. To compete in a world where 500 organizations are reporting on the same story and only the most "exciting" gets visibility on social media yielding those revenue generating clicks, media as a whole has begun to turn very click baity. Depending on your own bias: "TRUMP BANS MEDIA HE DOESN'T LIKE FROM WHITEHOUSE PRESS BRIEFINGS" or "FORMER NOAA CLIMATOLOGY SCIENTIST ADMITS ALL DATA FABRICATED." These articles often revert back to the much less interesting truth in the text, but in modern times that doesn't really matter. Nobody reads their stories - just the completely fake headlines which are taken at face value. Since I think most Soylentals lean left they probably know why the latter headline is false, but might still think the former is true. What actually happened is that a small one-off off camera Q&A session was held in the press secretary's office. Only a handful of hand-picked organizations were allowed in. CNN was not one of these organizations so they decided to run stories trying to imply that they'd been banned from all White House press briefings. They were and still are at each and every press briefing.
Search engines don't really help matters here. They, as they should, tend to sort data focusing primarily on popularity. But then in searching for information you end up getting news that is to information as 'Justin Bieber' is to music. Giving 'be a belieber' a whole new meaning? And most social media is even worse. Some sorts such as Facebook work by datamining individuals and then trying to link people to content that the data indicates they will be agreeable with. So you get an intentionally filtered slice of reality. Reddit-like voting systems suffer similar problems with selection bias in the voting schemes. Most people don't sit around for hours a day waiting to upvote news that they agree with. Those that do tend to have extreme views. So you get this radical left picture of reality on Reddit. You get this radical right picture of reality on Voat.
I don't know of a precise solution, but I think one good idea is to surround yourself with views you disagree with. When you start to see things from the 'other side's' point of view, you generally reach the medium between two extremes where the truth actually lay. But this is tough to get people to do since it requires about skin about 5" thick and lots of tolerance for stupidity. But you also get to experience how things are manipulated and presented when trying to appeal to one side. And you see the same thing happening on 'your' side. Like this article mentions it's much harder to see that when the manipulated content is stuff that you already tend to naturally agree with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 17 2017, @07:58AM (2 children)
Extremist know this, so put forward even more extreme views to get what they really want. Classic negotiating tactic.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday March 17 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
There's something else going on that's more complicated than that. This is the concept known as the "Overton Window", which is the range of ideas deemed reasonable and acceptable. If you're trying to change what happens, you change what the Overton Window is. The way most organizations try to change the Overton Window is by talking about what might have been once a fringe idea incessantly, ideally with good-looking people on the TV who can't be responded to, challenged, or demonstrated to be wrong. That's a lot of how propaganda works.
I also take exception to the concept of "extremist", for one simple reason: Who gets to decide who's an "extremist"? Declaring somebody an extremist is a clear attempt to effectively silence somebody without actually disproving their point.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:57PM
The internet is a curious monkey wrench there, wouldn't you say? I think it's working to chip away peoples' concerns of appearance and simply to pursue what they think is correct. Even if you choose to believe something that's objectively wrong, you can probably find millions that would support you in said belief thanks to the internet. So while it may be helping to mislead more people than before, I think people that are misled are being misled of their own accord. They claim to believe such things not because they worry what people would think otherwise, but because that is what they truly have been led to believe.
I think Sanders and Trump could be used as examples here. Their views were far outside the apparent Overton Window of society at the time and had people been left to receive information more unilaterally (as in just from the media) I think both of these candidates would have never received more than a fraction of any vote. But with the internet and people able to anonymously discuss issues and see others hold similar beliefs, it empowers people to give less regard to the social implications of supporting people that other people may think are simply unacceptable. Of course it still has a substantial effect, but I think ideally it would become a tautological notion that comes down to 'popular beliefs are popular'.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:15AM (4 children)
False equivalence. It's believable because Trump is prone to extremely petty and haphazard actions. Lo and behold, it did happen [cnn.com]. The normal daily briefing was replaced by the one-off session that day, CNN reporters were physically blocked from entering (you make it sound like they didn't try to get in), and some news outlets boycotted it because of it. The only inaccurate part of the headline is the plural "briefings". Search the headline you wrote and none of the top 20 "clickbait" headlines or CNN's own seem to make that mistake. Even Milo Y has the headline "LIBERALS FURIOUS AFTER WHITE HOUSE BANS CNN, NYT & BUZZFEED FROM PRESS BRIEFING".
Where's the archive link? Or are you ready to admit you are wrong?
Trump has called the press an enemy of the people and criticized them for using unnamed sources. Maybe he has a point, because unnamed sources [nytimes.com] in his White House are used to confuse the press. His people are creating fake news by using fake leaks. Maybe the media should just ignore what the White House and everyone in it have to say and do real investigative journalism instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:41AM (3 children)
It was not a press briefing. Note how your CNN URL refers to it as a "gaggle" which is what the event was called to clearly distinguish it from a press briefing. Yet they ran the headline as a press briefing. It was an atypical no-camera brief session held not in the press room, but in Spicer's office. It was also only open to a handful of invitees. This [npr.org] article states a reporter, during the 'gaggle', stated as part of a question, "This banner on CNN right now that says CNN and others have been blocked from media briefings."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:14PM (2 children)
It was not a press briefing. Note how your CNN URL refers to it as a "gaggle" which is what the event was called to clearly distinguish it from a press briefing.
You just keep grasping at straws don't you?
Motivated reasoning at its worst.
From the CNN article:
The meeting, which is known as a gaggle, was held in lieu of the daily televised Q-and-A session in the White House briefing room.
When you cancel the standard press briefing and replace it with an off-camera exclusionary meeting, it doesn't matter what you call it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:43PM (1 child)
Press gaggles [whitehouse.gov] are not the same thing as press briefings. It's a term that has been used for decades now. They're smaller, informal, off camera, and generally come with minimal content from the white house. This event was not scheduled as a press briefing, but as a gaggle. CNN intentionally misrepresented this in their headline. "CNN not invited to limited attendance Q&A session." would have been appropriate, but generated a tempered debate instead of appealing to pathos to spark emotion. Note the reaction was invariably a mix of, "omg Trump's a fascist hitler nazi" and "yay hope he bans all those other fake news outlets while he's at it." That is a result that's in no small part due to the means of reporting on both sides. You'd be hard pressed to find actual calm considerations of whether or not this is something that ought be allowed and if not then how ought "worth" for admittance to limited access venues be fairly assayed? The media is manipulating people who want to hear their side of "reality" on both sides and driving them to idiocracy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:47PM
Dude, you are out of straws.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday March 17 2017, @08:23AM (2 children)
Like all things, there is another side of what you say. While you pin-point the flaw of individual, I will point out a flaw in the whole society - that we seem to constantly have a bunch of people who are powerful and are good at commanding power, while rest of the people are powerless in their life, both inside and outside of their home. In my humble opinion, media is one way to gloss over this power-gap. So, in my view, the rise of consumer side of media (from breitbart/fox to buzzfeed/guardian) creates a false sense of power among the powerless.
It is an age old problem. So old, that we actually setup a system which only looked at fact, and hoped to make it better over time. It was called judiciary, and it had known flaws. I am not sure when, but it seems we have put down all our cards and given up our hands in making it better. Now judiciary doesn't bother to balance the powerful and powerless in search for truth, it is more interested in maintaining its own power and authority to pass closed-door judgements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:59AM (1 child)
I do completely agree with you. I think there are a lot of possible solutions here, but many are so revolutionary that they probably cannot really be patch-worked into our current system even if we wanted to. And in reality they obviously never would be since it would entail the current power-system losing their grasp. The most obvious idea, and one I think we as a species will gradually trend towards, is direct democracy. And forget this 51% is enough. 80% to pass a law, 30% to overturn one. Other ideas include treating political service in a fashion similar to jury duty. The traditional argument there was that we'd end up with less than optimally meritorious representatives yet in the end they would be representative of the people. And in any case, I think we can all agree that our current system of elections also don't necessarily yield the most meritorious candidates... But these ideas all have so many further implications and nuance that I don't think they're viable except from the very advent of a nation (Mars perhaps...?) A true direct democracy entails a far greater level of responsibility and power than people have had. And like giving a man who's never dealt with much money a million dollars, it'd be little surprise to see that power misused. It's through no inherent flaw of the individual - but rather throwing somebody into an entirely new situation and expecting them to start 'playing' properly right away. That's just not realistic.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2017, @03:21PM
80% to pass a law, 30% to overturn one.
80% is a bit steep but okay. I'd probably lean towards 70%.
But 30% to repeal? For examples why that doesn't work see Weimar Germany [wikipedia.org], or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [wikipedia.org], or even our own government under the Articles of Confederation. [wikipedia.org]
A true direct democracy entails a far greater level of responsibility and power than people have had.
Athens and Switzerland weren't things?
The world is a lot more complicated now than it was in the early 1800s, and we have access to a lot more information so there's really too much for a single person to stay well-informed about, unfortunately. But the really great part comes when your representatives are voting on multi-hundreds-page-long bills that *they* aren't even informed on. In secret. With only a couple days' deliberation so the public doesn't find out. Oh shoot, somebody tipped them off: well then put it on the backburner for a couple years and we'll try again later.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"