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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

New Yorker: "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds" (The Less We Know, The More We Believe)

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
Excerpt: "Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.) Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write."

WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.





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