Interesting article in NPR - if you can get past the fact that its a radio transcript, and they use the phrase “you know” more often than the judges at a valley girl competition - where they discuss the human tendency to hold onto belief more strongly in the face of contradictory facts. I’ve long believed it to be true myself (in spite of a lack of any formal evidence, I might add) and it has interesting implications on the skeptical movement. I _don’t_ think that it reinforces the idea (which I’ve heard some people propose, but don’t believe myself) that skeptic education programs are useless, because they’ll never convince the believers. What I do think it means is that, if you’re trying to get the facts out there, your target audience is not the believers; its the non-believers (who could use some reinforcement) and the undecided. Answering the believers to their faces _is_ mostly useless (though sometimes fun.) Marketing that information flow so that it gets to the right people is something that I think the skepticism movement has done inconsistently at best.
It also means we need to make sure we check our facts ourselves, to keep from falling into the same trap. Which I think we generally do to a reasonable extent, but: Forever Vigilance!
1 response so far ↓
1 bigfrozenhead
// Jul 14, 2010 at 1:51 pm
You beat me to this one… maybe because I have a head cold. Reminds me of a thread on EconLog where Arnold Kling was asking if there was ever an economic study that made people change their minds about something. He also offered up this:
“What causes people to change their minds? On this blog, I have argued that people do not change their minds on ideological issues. I have argued that econometric regression results typically do not change people’s minds. Why is that?
1. Changing your mind could mean acknowledging a loss of status. If you are an academic, and you achieved status because of your articulation of theory X, then you will not give up on theory X, even if years later much of the profession has switched to theory Y. As Max Planck put it, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
2. Changing your mind could mean loss of group identity. I suppose I could use the unkindest cut example. But let me stick with economic beliefs. If your think of yourself as belonging to a group of conservative Republicans, you probably are going to resist any analysis that promotes Keynesian economics.”
Source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/changing_people.html
I think the WHY of people not changing their minds fascinates me even more than the fact that they do it at all.
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