Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

[Rockstar]

three things brought me to post this: my own faults, recent posts of internet arm chair psychological diagnosis of others without ever having met the patient, and the 737 max crash.



https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,”

[Platapus]

I once read a report on Confirmation Bias.


Didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

[Skybird]

Cognitive bias is hardwired in neural networks - our brains, probably also that of higher animals. Once having been a perception and judgement filter that probabaly aserved as a mechanism helping to make quick, or sustaining, survival decisions, it now is an issue in forensic and cogntive science that hgas far-leading cosnequence son the way we approach new branches and fields of increidbly diverse formats: influencing decision making, over opinion forming on issues that have no consequnces for the subject at all, to the ways we form new questions, direct and limnit their scope from early on - anmd thus lmt8ng the answers, the knowledge we can gain from learning.



Its very far leading, and far from being thoroughly understood. But there must be a material condensate on the neural level, since we have come to underatand that even after childhood the brain brain is "malleable" (? = plastisch), and neurons cna change their wiring even at later age (different to what was believed possible last century). Research on it mostly has been descriptive, less so explanatory. But I am not at all up to date, neurology may have seen advances there in the past 15 years.



So much in psychology has come down to the "hardware" level in the past 20, 25 years, far more than what we then young students ever expected then. Psychologists cannot like that development too much, their studied profession alone is not too well-suited for the way "psycho science" has unfolded. We had two good profs back then, however, who warned us that it would go this way. We did not like to hear that, of course.