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 buil...