Changing Our Beliefs

If you thought that the way to get people to make the right choice was to provide them with more information or even better, teach them analytical skills, then you would be disappointed by what Yale law professor Dan Kahan found. Erza Klein describes his findings in the article:

“People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right...More information, in this context, doesn’t help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away.”

Kahan says he is not surprised that “we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it”! But why are we like that?

Perhaps Mary Douglas has the answer in her book, Purity and Danger:

“In perceiving we are building, talking some cues and rejecting those which fit most easily into the patter that is being built up. Ambiguous ones tend to be treated as if they harmonized with the rest of the pattern. Discordant ones tend to be rejected. If they are accepted, the structure of assumptions has to be modified...As time goes on and experiences pile up, we make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels.”

And hence, to “protect” our investment:

“Uncomfortable facts which refuse to be fitted in, we find ourselves ignoring or distorting so that they do not disturb these established assumptions.”

Taken to an extreme, Sartre warns that:

“There are people who are attracted by the permanence of stone. They would like to be solid and impenetrable, they do not want change: for who knows what change might bring?”

All of this leaves Klein wondering:

“Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?”

How indeed? Douglas' book has a suggestion:

“Granted that disorder spoils pattern, it also provides the material of pattern...So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite.”

To put that differently, we should learn to embrace the chaos and let the new order emerge!