How telling people the facts may not cause them to change what they believe

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full

106 42 16 years ago

vsingh• 16 years ago

"If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t."

This is important. Darwin, on his journeys, was very strict on himself about noting down any information that seemed to contradict his theories, because he knew that the natural tendency of the brain is to turn a blind eye to any such inconvenient facts.

jeromec• 16 years ago

From the article: "The general idea is that it's absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong"

From an article by PG in 2009: "More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants."

PG article link: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Elite• 16 years ago

When I engage in difficult or critical conversations, I try to avoid the word "you" as much as possible. This immediately tends to put people in defensive mode and their response can become combative as they perceive this as an attack on who they are.

Herring• 16 years ago

I've heard there was a logical reason for this (in jaynes' probability book) but i've never gotten around to checking it out.

>The equations also reproduce a more complicated phenomenon, divergence of opinions. One might expect that open discussion of public issues would tend to bring about a general concensus. On the contrary, we observe repeatedly that when some controversial issue has been discussed vigorously for a few years, society becomes polarized into two opposite extreme camps; it is almost impossible to find anyone who retains a moderate view. Probability theory as logic shows how two persons, given the same information, may have their opinions driven in opposite directions by it, and what must be done to avoid this.

ajb• 16 years ago

Jaynes argument is roughly as follows: Consider how you would react to being shown evidence of, eg ESP or faith healing. I (for example) simply have a weaker prior belief in the possibility of faith healing than the possibility of being convincingly lied to. So being shown evidence of faith healing makes me very suspicious rather than causing me to believe in it. This is rational (given the my prior belief weighting).

TGJ• 16 years ago

When you are proven wrong you are no longer taken seriously. People tend to say "See, you were wrong here. So what else are you wrong about too?" In order to circumvent having to justify everything, admit nothing. Or, If I'm never wrong, I'm always right. I would think that people that cling on to their misconceptions might have a hard time releasing the idea that they are not perfect butterflies and are simply like everyone else.

binspace3• 16 years ago

The key is to lessen the value of being right, and heightening the value of exploration and seeking truth.

dunstad• 16 years ago

The problem is actually accomplishing the above, instead of just noticing it.

cromulent• 16 years ago

Politicians suffer dreadfully from this, to everyone's detriment.

anthonyb• 16 years ago

Indeed, but mainly because appearances are pretty much all you have when you're a politician - you may only need one "FooGate" for your polls to slump and then be hounded out of office.

1053r• 16 years ago

Perhaps this is why it generally takes a new generation of thinkers to push political thinking forward. I would postulate that we are more likely to reject the views of our parents than we are to reject our own.

If that is true, it explains, for example, why gay marriage is a hot button issue for baby-boomers and older, but largely less of an issue for people under 30 (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009...).

I'll bet racism data looked pretty similar a few decades ago, but now expressing racist views publicly will get you in trouble even if you are extremely conservative (that Republican politician from the south a couple years ago who got extreme negative publicity for calling blacks "monkeys").

If it is necessary for one generation to die for political views to move forward, that doesn't bode well for progress if Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil prove prophetic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgLRhxvRlKg) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...)

binspace3• 16 years ago

> If it is necessary for one generation to die for political views to move forward, that doesn't bode well for progress if Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil prove prophetic.

I really want to say you are not right here, but I cannot.

Obviously, being able to live longer carries a greater responsibility. One would hope that our ethics and judgement can evolve too.

One a positive note, the rate of cultural evolution has been increasing. Now we often have dramatic shifts in opinion between generations. That wasn't always the case.

alsomike• 16 years ago

"Science advances one funeral at a time." -Max Planck

rdtsc• 16 years ago

Interesting connection with self-esteem and fear:

"if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated."

This theme is developed well in the "Power of Nightmares" documentary by Adam Curtis. The more scared the people are, the easier to control them. I think Leo Strauss and his neocon followers realized this. Deep down they wanted to help their country. But realized that "the informed, rational citizen" didn't exist, aside from a narrow "elite" segment that truly understands how things work. So this ruling elite should create powerful myths for people to believe in. People have to be led by irrational fears and beliefs.

sitmaster• 16 years ago

Maybe this is a natural reaction to the fact that so much of the information we receive is propaganda? Even if, for example, a news story presents a series of facts, other relevant facts are often elided to give a mis-impression.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the [federal] government spends on welfare (1 percent)

If the researchers reported "1 percent" as the actual federal government spending on welfare programs, they were themselves misleading people in the service of an agenda, perhaps by using an incredibly narrow legalistic definition of "welfare".

For 2009, Wikipedia reports $3.1 trillion in US federal expenditures. $224 billion, about 7%, went to Medicaid and SCHIP -- medical assistance to lower-income people -- which would fall under a common, casual definition of 'welfare'. Another $360 billion -- over 11%, went to a category Wikipedia calls "Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending", which appears to include ~$40 billion in unemployment compensation, at least $100 billion in "other income security", and $100 billion in food and housing assistance. Again, most people would consider most or all of this spending 'welfare'.

Even Social Security and Medicare -- as they often subsidize the spending of people with more money than they've paid in, especially low-income people -- have at least some component that would be fair to consider 'welfare'. Together, they are over $1.3 trillion of the federal budget -- more than 40%.

A plain English definition of 'welfare' from Princeton's WordNet is "governmental provision of economic assistance to persons in need". From the items listed above, one could easily make the case 15%-40% of the federal budget fits that definition.

And this is without even going into subsidies for the middle-class and corporations -- the home mortgage interest tax deduction, cash-for-clunkers, financial bailouts, farm subsidies -- which are also economic assistance, and ostensibly justified because the recipients are said to have some pressing need, and sometimes archly labeled 'welfare'.

(While I've used 2009 numbers, the 1999/2000 numbers -- when the Kuklinski UIUC study was published -- aren't that different in overall proportions. The respondents -- with their more-common answers of 5%/8%/11%/15% -- were all closer to the real values than the researchers' preferred 1% answer.)

eli• 16 years ago

You may be technically correct, but I think very few people would consider Social Security part of "welfare."

IMHO, you could rerun the study with the phrase "food stamps" instead of "welfare" and get very similar results.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

I think very few people would consider Social Security part of "welfare."

Okay, so now we have an illustration of mass irrationality in the political system. Looking at how Social Security is funded and distributed fits typical definitions of a welfare program.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

Sure, the classification of Social Security is arguable. That's why I listed the things that almost everyone would agree are 'welfare' -- approaching 18% of the 2009 federal budget -- before going into things that many would not consider 'welfare', or would only consider partially 'welfare' (like Social Security and Medicare).

FYI, food assistance alone is over 1% of recent federal budgets. Food assistance is definitely welfare spending, right?

Digging up the actual paper [1] for the study didn't give me any more confidence it showed much of anything other than the researchers' biases. They don't list the exact questions they asked in their telephone quiz of about 300 people, but if they were worded anything like the headings of their graphs -- "Percent Budget that Goes to Welfare", "Respondent's Factual Estimate" -- then all the responses they categorized as wrong were closer to the actual value than their preferred "1%" answer. And, phone surveys are known to be incredibly sensitive to tiny changes in wording and presentation ordering. You could easily nudge people to be more right, or more wrong -- depending on your desired result.

They do quote the question they asked a smaller different group of 64 students: "From zero to 100 percent, what percent of the national budget do you think is spent on welfare?" Defending on your preferred definition, I think a reasonable person could correctly answer anything from as low as 8% to as high as 60%. But the researchers then told the subjects the true number was 1% to see what effect that had on the students' policy preferences. To me, that's just like a dishonest 'push poll'.

And then they wonder why people resist changing their beliefs when presented with new 'facts' like the wrong 1% number! People have been battered by researchers twisting numbers in the service of agendas for so long, sticking to prior ideas is an adaptive defense.

[1] http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:F94ibz5_FKsJ:w...

dmarble• 16 years ago

"[H]aving lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others." -Benjamin Franklin in a speech during the Constitutional Convention of 1787

I'd be impressed to hear a presidential nominee quote this when faced with accusations of flip-flopping. I really respect people who change their positions based on new or better information, or simply more experience, so long as the change is genuine. In fact, I think it's the best way to live. Voters are not so forgiving or understanding, though.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

What I've found:

    - Lots of people will think of your contradictory fact as a 
      Dirty Rotten Trick
    - If your fact contradicts their preconceived notion, they 
      assume you're a liar and a cheat

grellas• 16 years ago

The theme of this piece is that democracy itself is premised on the idea of an enlightened citizenry, or at least one capable of becoming enlightened through the spread of information. The unstated premise is that rule by elites may be preferable to rule by the people if science should someday discover that average people will be irredeemably swayed by their prejudices and will not make their political decisions based on their intellects. The remaining unstated premise is that good government will follow when people can think like policy wonks and can accurately absorb and act upon detailed factual information about their government.

I think all this misses the point of the U.S. system of politics. That system is based on a constitution adopted over two centuries ago and premised on the idea that good government consists of a government of limited powers with proper checks and balances in place to make sure it remains limited. The idea back then was to move away from the old systems of rule by royalty and to adopt a form of government that philosophically was based on the idea that all legitimate forms of power ultimately derived from the popular will but only as checked by systems that were designed to curtail the effects of mob rule, prejudice, and passions. Thus, the federal government was set up as a tripartite government, with a legislature, an executive, and a judicial branch. The legislature was to have a popularly elected component (the House of Representatives) but also one in the Senate that served to check the popular (Senators were not even elected by popular vote until the 20th century). The executive power was to be sharply curtailed by the specific grants given to it in the constitution and was not allowed to enact new laws but only to enforce those enacted by the legislature, with its tie to the popular will. The judicial branch, in turn, was to enforce the rule of law in a way that was far removed from popular sovereignty, with federal judges appointed for lifetime tenures (subject to approval by the Senate) and capable of being removed only on the narrow ground of committing an impeachable offense. Finally, with the federal power having been so defined and circumscribed, the constitution provided that all powers not expressly granted to the federal government were to be reserved to the states and to the people. A bill of rights was superimposed on top of all this, making clear that certain supervening rights of the individual could not be impaired by federal governmental authority (this eventually being broadened to encompass action by the states).

If you read the Federalist Papers, which were in essence arguments propounded at the time in support of adopting the U.S. Constitution, there is no naive assumption in these documents that pure popular rule would somehow become a pristine way of running a government. Indeed, it was just the opposite. In one after another of these documents, it is assumed that rule by pure popular will is basically evil and dangerous because people will be driven by baser motives to accomplish their ends. Thus, there is all sorts of concern about not allowing unswayed prejudices to run unchecked through the course of government. The point of the arguments was to recognize that this is the reality of how people think and act and to set up a system that deals with it while preserving freedom and holding public officials ultimately accountable to the people.

I think this system ultimately had a theistic base in a Judeo-Christian tradition that saw man as a fallen and fallible creature who was prone to all sorts of mischief when given a chance. This may be open to debate but it certainly was one important component of that era. In any case, the founders appeared to have no assumptions about the ability of people to rule themselves based on becoming progressively enlightened. Their approach was realistic and pragmatic and dealt with how to contain power so that it does not corrupt those given the authority to rule.

This piece has interesting elements in it about how people resist changing their minds based on new information but I think it is off in its implications of what this means for good government.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

Yes. I agree, with this addition.

American Democracy is about the consent of the governed. It always has been. If you read both the Federalist Papers and the people who were arguing the other side, it's quite clear that the anti-Federalists had some really good points. Many of the predictions they made about the future course of the country were proven correct. Their arguments caused so much concern that a Bill of Rights was a precondition to adoption of the Constitution.

There has always been two strains of thought in America. Strain 1 says that people should be led by their betters. Heck, even Jefferson privately acknowledged that there is a natural aristocracy among men. These people feel that with the right people in charge, working the right system, the sky is the limit. If things are wrong, it's a problem of not having the right person. Government consists of doing whatever it takes to make the quality of people's lives better.

Strain 2 feels that all systems of government are broken, mainly because it's impossible to have a government that doesn't involve men, and men are fallible. I agree that this has some religious roots, but it also has roots in a study of history. As Thomas Paine pointed out -- not the religious person by any means! -- a man who has a king for a tyrant knows who oppresses him. But a man who is a serf to a complex system of bureaucrats is just as oppressed, only he has nobody to point a finger at. Strain 2 believes that every time structure is added, the system becomes more and more broken. That even if you had a super smart person, they'd more as likely be a dictator than a savior. Government consists of doing as little as possible to prevent people from harming each other.

This fight continues today. The constitution was a compromise between these two strains of thought. That's why it's worked for so long. Good government consists of a balance between these two schools of thought, with some kind of reset option every now and then when the system gets too much cruft in it(in my opinion)

So Joe Sixpack who knows nothing votes, but he votes instead of marching in the street with guns. Clyde Wineglass (Joe's cousin who went to Harvard) votes, and by voting he also blows off steam. The major parties exist solely for giving the illusion that things are changing every few years, which makes Joe and Clyde feel better about voting. Over time, each of them builds up a long narrative about how their party almost did this or that, but the other party stopped them. By having a "good" party and a "bad" party in their mind, each of them is able to deal with their frustrations about government without actually becoming angry with the government. This allows our civilization to continue.

It's interesting to observe how different the idea of parties (or "factions" as I think Madison called them) turned out to be compared to what the founders thought would happen. Sometimes you get it right even when you screw up :)

Sorry if that was a little cynical, but that's the way I currently understand it. And I agree with grellas, these guys are off-base. This entire line of science-of-irrationality, as it applies to politics, is a threat to this system of consent, because it threatens to put people in boxes. In addition, it continues to politicization of science. Either of these would be bad by themselves. Combining the two? Ugh.

gtt• 16 years ago

could you point me to the futher reading on strains 1/2 and differences between them?

zargon• 16 years ago

American Democracy is about the consent of the governed.

Except, the USA government does not obtain consent before governing a person.

Salvatore• 16 years ago

"The unstated premise is that rule by elites may be preferable to rule by the people if science should someday discover that average people will be irredeemably swayed by their prejudices and will not make their political decisions based on their intellects."

I disagreed. In my opinion, the argument of the paper suggests nothing of the kind. While your idea is interesting, I believe it delves too far between the lines and looks for some deeper meaning. The Boston Globe is not challenging our form of government. They're merely commenting on the research that suggests people are hard headed, generally speaking.

While your paragraphs about the US Constitution and system of Checks and Balances are spot on, they have nothing to do with the article in question.

This is simply my humble opinion.

not_the_same• 16 years ago

I agree that the article is not implying a preference for "rule by elites", especially in light of this statement:

  And if you harbor the notion...that the solution is more education
  and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall,
  well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study...showed
  that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new
  information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually
  right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly
  impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

Quoted for truth. Reading the Federalist papers is one of the most enlightening things any resident of the United States can do to understand why America operates the way it operates.

I'm reading Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist right now to get a twenty-first century take on some of the same issues. It's plain enough that human beings in general have very limited rationality, but that doesn't make it plain that human beings should be generally constrained in their freedom by an elite few.

thesethings• 16 years ago

It's very cool that political scientists are doing studies about this. From what I understand, cognitive science ID'd this a long time ago.

They call it, "confirmation bias." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

Framed in this post: "If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t"

The point by both cognitive scientists and political scientists is this determination to believe something is completely sincere, not about deliberate deceit or spinning (though that does occur, it's a different phenomenon ). Anything that disputes your view is seen as exceptional circumstances/ invisible. "Yeah, but that's an edge case," "yeah but he went to Yale," "yeah, but she moved from France when she was 3."

We may even see it happening on our favorite news aggregator sites.

More reading (from cog sci perspective): http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/

SoftwareMaven• 16 years ago

People tend to draw patterns from single data points on what they believe and to call anecdote on pieces of real patterns for what they don't.

Your post is just an anecdote in my world. ;)

ars• 16 years ago

The researchers ignored something.

The people may have heard the new fact and simply did not believe them.

And that's the right thing to do because most so called "facts" are actually lies.

You can't just tell people something - unless you are first. You need to prove it, or at least demonstrate with reasonable evidence.

The first mover has an advantage though - people will accept a new fact if you are first.

But the second guy needs to work harder.

ams6110• 16 years ago

I also didn't think it addressed a longer term perspective. I think that if someone throws out a "fact" that challenges some tenet I hold, I might be inclined to dismiss it at least in the immediate term. However as evidence mounts most reasonable people will at some point see that they have been mistaken and change their minds.

jerf• 16 years ago

Suppose I am a perfectly-rational Bayesian. Over the course of my long life I have acquired a false belief with a high degree of confidence. Through sheer statistical flukery and the vicissitudes of living in the real world, a perfectly-rational Bayesian should actually expect that in their enormous stock of beliefs lies at least one of these. We all have access to only a tiny shred of the full totality of reality, and it isn't even a uniformly-randomly-chosen shred.

So you come up to me and present to me a fact that demonstrates I am objectively wrong in my belief. This being the real world, let us suppose that it isn't entirely unexplainable in my belief system. I take your fact, discount it with my strength of belief in your reliability, and update my Bayesian belief. It can stay quite strong, even if I behave with perfect rationality. With the way the Bayesian rule works, you can only utterly destroy my belief with something that is utterly impossible under my belief structure, but your ability to provide that evidence is capped by my inability to believe you that strongly in the first place. I must consider that you might be trying to fool me, or that you yourself might be wrong and bringing your own fallacious interpretation into what you may very well believe are objective facts.

If even a perfectly rational person may not be convinced by you simply telling them a few facts, how do you expect mere humans to behave?

I'm not necessarily defending people. If you think this country is going to hell in a handbasket because we're funding too many Bridges to Nowhere, but I provide evidence that Bridges to Nowhere (for whatever your definition is) account for only .04% of the Federal budget, you've still got at least a little cover left in wondering whether or not I'm using a different definition than you or just lying. Of course, this sort of belief should be susceptible to change over time as you are presented with numerous falsifications of your belief, but my point is not that people are secretly acting rational, but rather that this isn't really that mystifying, nor can one imagine it changing.

mynameishere• 16 years ago

Do they really think that the bit about federal expenditures for welfare means anything? I mean, if you ask your typical Boston liberal whether they are in favor of increased or decreased military spending and they say, "Decreased" is that opinion suddenly ignorant or wrong or anti-democratic because they then guess that current expenditures are 50 percent (too high)?

Seriously, forget balance sheet trivia. Let's worry about the basic cognive skills of journalists first.

known3• 16 years ago

Their belief may serve their immediate needs.

known3• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness

known3• 16 years ago

Between Truth, Fact & Belief, lesser mortals will choose Belief because it serves their needs.

How telling people the facts may not cause them to change what they believe

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