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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 17 2017, @03:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-don't-believe-you dept.

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]


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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 17 2017, @11:59PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday March 17 2017, @11:59PM (#480703) Journal

    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!"

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