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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:03PM (9 children)
> Using the word "believe" is just another way of saying you're religious.
Then everybody is religious because it is impossible to function in life without accepting unverified knowledge from others.
For example, do you "believe" in electricity? Have you ever seen an electron? What about nuclear bombs? Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion? Have you ever seen radiation poisoning? How do you know the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice-versa? How do you know that human evolution is real rather than a really well-orchestrated con-job?
The overwhelming majority of the things we "know" are really just beliefs we accept with various standards of proof. It all comes down to commonly accepted standards of proof which are in turn the result of community agreement. Post-truth is really different communities picking and choosing different standards. And if those communities end up with significantly divergent standards, then society can not survive because it becomes two (or more) distinct societies as defined by those standards.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @05:13PM (7 children)
For example, do you "believe" in electricity?
No. Nor do I "know" electricity exists. It seems likely, given what I have observed, but it is always possible to learn more, for example, if someone proposes an alternate explanation.
Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion?
I've seen films. Yes I'm aware they could have been faked. That is why I neither "believe" or "know" nuclear bombs exist. It seems likely. I don't need absolute certainty. It seems religious people do, and since the world doesn't provide that, they turn to belief.
As a test case, to clarify my own thinking, I've asked myself whether the World Trade Center was really destroyed. (Not proceeding at this point to who did it or why.)
I have stood on the top of the World Trade Center, so assuming my senses and memories are valid (unproven) I think it is extremely likely that the World Trade Center did exist in the past.
I have observed thousands of people saying the World Trade Center was destroyed, and nobody disputing the claim. I have seen pictures (could have been faked) of the vacant space and then the new structure built in its place. But I haven't returned to New York to see for myself. So for now the conclusion is still tentative, although I rate the probability as well above 99.99%.
Does that help?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:24PM (6 children)
> Does that help?
No. Not a bit.
You told some stories about yourself in response to a bunch of rhetorical questions while completely sidestepping the thesis of my post.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @05:27PM (5 children)
The thesis of your post seems to be that everyone suffers from belief because "it is impossible to function in life without accepting unverified knowledge from others."
I gave you examples of how I function in life without accepting (believing) unverified knowledge from others.
Did I misidentify your thesis?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:44PM (4 children)
> I gave you examples of how I function in life without accepting (believing) unverified knowledge from others.
That's not at all what I read.
What I read was you admitting that there are different standards of evidence that you accept.
And you implicitly saying that some sources are of higher quality than others.
Exactly as I described.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @06:01PM (3 children)
So we agree, except I am saying you can do all that without "belief".
Believers fasten to some outlandish claim as Absolute Certainty, totally devoid of supporting evidence. Even questioning the belief can get you blackballed or worse.
Scientists recognize that all knowledge is tentative, nothing is certain, because tomorrow we will probably learn more. Some people just can't handle that.
But your generalization from "some people need belief to get through the day" to "everyone does" is what I tried to show as false, by example of someone who doesn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:57PM (1 child)
Different AC here but I could just wish that you were a bit more self-aware. You just can't seem to bring yourself to admit that you--yes, you!--can't get through the day without taking some of your beliefs on faith. No, there is no reason to be ashamed of this; we all do it. Of course, this in no way implies that all beliefs are equally valid. The sad part is when we are confronted by someone who stubbornly refuses to change their beliefs when presented with new evidence and logic (cf., Trump and his supporters).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:10PM
Different AC here but I could just wish that you were a bit more self-aware. You just can't seem to bring yourself to admit that you--yes, you!--can't get through the day without taking some of your beliefs on faith.
"On faith" is not a bit you set. Belief that 911 destroyed the World Trade Center is not as much on faith as belief in a deity with particular properties that we can't ever observe.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 17 2017, @11:59PM
Epistemology is a stone-cold bitch, isn't it? :) We're essentially trying to look at the back of our own heads by rolling our eyes up and back as far as they'll go, which is a losing proposition.
Personally, I am a type of foundationalist. This means I have axioms, as few and as basic as possible, which cannot be *directly* disproven and would have to be asserted in order to be denied. These you might recognize as Aristotle's old classics: Law of Identity (A is A), Law of Noncontradiction (A is not not-A), and Law of Excluded Middle (A thing is either A or not-A but not both). I also have an emergentist view of logic and cognition, that being that they emerge or arise from lower, nonlogical, nonconscious substrates, which seems to imply that these axioms are good for a limited set of purposes only, and attempt not to go beyond these boundaries.
The problem with axioms is that, because they *are* axioms, you can't destruct-test them like you can with other hypotheses. So far, and here's where I get rather more Coherentist than Foundationalist, I limit the propositions I consider axiomatic to the set of "those propositions which, in order to deny them, you must assert them) because this has produced the fewest errors of any other approach, using the admittedly limited and flawed human mind and sensorium.
For example, if you were to deny the Law of Identity, it would be impossible to make any statements in the first place. Deny non-contradiction, and no deduction is possible. Deny the excluded middle, and no conclusions to arguments can be made. Now if an axiom gives rise to self-refuting theorems, it may be that it should not be taken as (that is, does not fulfill its function as) an axiom, and should be amended or discarded, but this is inductive rather than deductive.
As an aside, I've dealt with a few apologists who think they're reeeeeeeal fuckin' clever, who glom onto this and more or less say "Hurrrr, well then I take it as an axiom that my God exists! Checkmate, infidel!" This brings up one other aspect of an axiom: they should be as simple and irreducible as possible. Despite all wittering claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as "divine simplicity," certainly not if we're speaking of the kind of omni-$ATTRIBUTE being the Abrahamic God is said to be. This sort of God is a specific instance of the class "disembodied mind" with a very complex set of properties indeed. Now the Deist or Taoist God-concept, the one I hold, could conceivably with as an axiom, perhaps THE axiom, as it's not a person but the "ground of all being." This would never satisfy the bloodthirsty Muslim or Christian or Jew, of course, but it has the advantage, as a concept, of not stepping on its own unwashed Bronze-Age crank and tumbling down the stairs.
A little humor and a little humility is helpful. At the end of the day, we're limited and finite, and we really have no answer to the Cartesian Demon paradox. All we can do, as Pratchett says, is to look at the shadows outside the mouth of Plato's Cave and say "Oh, do Deformed Rabbit, it's my favorite!"
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 23 2017, @09:57AM
I'm pretty sure we actually agree on everything, but here goes anyway:
For example, do you "believe" in electricity? Have you ever seen an electron?
Not a great example. I see the effects of electricity every day, and trust in the scientific explanations of it. Believing in the competence and honesty of a scientific community (particularly when there are such testaments to their competence as modern electronics) isn't religious faith.
Have you ever seen radiation poisoning?
Again, I charitably assume I'm not being constantly lied to. Not quite the same thing as, say, taking 'on faith' the existence of a magical sky fairy who cares if I touch myself.
How do you know that human evolution is real rather than a really well-orchestrated con-job?
A better example, but being a serious solipsist takes more blind faith than not being one. Why would I be the only real human? I sure look and behave a lot like the others.
It all comes down to commonly accepted standards of proof which are in turn the result of community agreement.
Just so. That is what really defines 'religious'. Or at least, it's part of it.