Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

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

by BerislavLopac • 8 years ago

144 158 8 years ago

newyorker.com

dang2• 8 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764

taneq• 8 years ago

I still think they do.

enriquto• 8 years ago

Ι see what you did there, you Russell.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 8 years ago

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study ... A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study.

We have to wonder if Stanford undergraduate student generalises to the whole population.

It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness.

conistonwater2• 8 years ago

Does it really rely on 1975 Stanford undergrads, though? For example, I think Dan Kahan (Yale's Cultural Cognition Project at http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/) usually says about the same thing about facts and changing minds.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 8 years ago

The first discussion in your link talks about peoples bias for wanting to remove plastic from the ocean remote from the source, rather than at the source.

Surely it's obvious that preventing plastic entering the ocean at the source does nothing to remove the plastic that's already there.

Maybe I should read more of this blog, but that doesn't inspire confidence.

boomboomsubban• 8 years ago

It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness.

Which doesn't matter in this test. Both groups in this study would have the presumed bias, so the differences in scores could still be attributed to the independent variable.

tunesmith3• 8 years ago

We have this weird fetish these last few years with asserting in broad language that people don't change their minds, don't respond to evidence, dig their heels in further when presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived opinions, etc. It's all over pop psychology and the headlines.

Bugs the heck out of me, because if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. And yet, we do.

It's true that perhaps some or many people never change their minds, or that all people might be apt to behave that way when they're not focusing their attention, but that's wildly different language then the headlines use.

This article is obviously guilty as well - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". Like, ever? The content of the article doesn't back up the headline, but the headline is what people remember.

Even some of the content is probably guilty. In the Stanford capital punishment study, is it really true that each and every individual in the study responded as they describe? Because that's how the article is written.

And the problem is it gives people more excuse to give up - to not engage with someone who is wrong, or to dismiss someone who is right (that they think is wrong). Because, studies!

The real lesson is the opposite - that we have to study and learn critical thinking, and practice, as a discipline, changing our minds when the evidence or reasoning warrants it. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible, and in fact the ability to do so is part of what makes us an evolved species - or more generally, our ability to surpass our instincts and evolved traits.

Show me some experiments that demonstrate what conditions need to be in place, in order for people to change their minds after they've proven to be resistant. (Hint: psychological safety and lack of time pressure.) That's what'll be valuable. I'm tired of all these other studies that just say we don't.

DoreenMichele• 8 years ago

My observation is that when the real point of the argument is social pecking order bullshit where proving you got X fact wrong means you are evil (stupid, etc) and now deserve to be treated really terribly, people dig their heels in as the only possible defense against "agreeing" to be crapped on. If that's not what is at stake, people are vastly more willing to learn and grow.

Some social settings are better than others in that regard.

raverbashing• 8 years ago

Agreed

"Facts don't change people's mind" forget about the presentation of the facts, usually in a condescending and over authoritarian way.

No fact is an absolute truth that shouldn't be open to discussion, facts help, but when people get "holier than thou" about them, that's usually when the pushback happens (not only on those occasions, though)

geezerjay3• 8 years ago

I would also add that the word "fact" is often abused to refer actually to strongly-held beliefs instead of actual substantiated and well-accepted info. Thus when those feeling empowered by holding facts criticise others for not changing their mind when faced with their facts, they are actually attacking others for not succumbing to their personal beliefs.

n4r92• 8 years ago

if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever.

Not sure how you've made this leap. The point is not that people never change their minds, just that the way they do so is less evidence-based than one would hope. It even says later in the article:

Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science.

candiodari• 8 years ago

antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science

That's perhaps an argument for the sciences directly built on positivism (the philosophical positivism), but that list ends quickly. Everything else is based on at the very least odds, but mostly consensus, and convincing based on those is required for anything beyond a few basic sciences.

And positivism only covers math, large parts of physics and chemistry (but not all), and ... that's mostly it. I mean, you could argue small portions of economics, biology also qualify, but only small portions.

Consensus itself, like presented in climate science and medicine, is an argument by authority. So if you convince someone of the truth of, say, global warming, you have in fact convinced them mostly of a social fact: that lots of people studying this problem seriously come to this conclusion. You have not convinced them that "because X leads to Y, here's the proof, Y leads to Z, here's the proof, this will now happen". You can't do that. These sciences don't work like that.

Things like climate science, medicine, psychology itself, ... just aren't made up of rational argument but from tying anecdotes into a larger framework and some amount of statistical inference. For all those sciences any positivist would say that

1) there are (very small) odds that the science is entirely wrong

2) the odds that significant parts or specific studies, even when executed entirely correctly and with integrity, is quit large: obviously 1 in 20 should be outright wrong at 95% confidence

sergiosgc• 8 years ago

I tend to model people changing opinion as ships with different inertia changing course:

If you formed your opinion yesterday, it has low inertia, and it is easy to change course. If you formed your opinion a decade ago, it is high inertia, and the best I can do in a conversation is a little nudge in the right direction, hoping it will have some effect later on.

The causes for opinion inertia are known. Long held opinions are part of people's identity (think religion, for example). People actively filter for supporting evidence, eschewing opposing views. It takes a while to breach both barriers.

If you test high inertia opinion change in one sitting, like studies do, it looks immutable.

(don't ever think you are immune to these inertia effects. Everyone is affected)

ams6110• 8 years ago

Another cause is that changing your opinion means admitting to yourself (and others) that you were wrong. And that's hard for many people to do, especially with long-held beliefs.

titanix2• 8 years ago

Well, most of the time the "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds" question could actually be rephrased as "Why Don't Everybody Agree with the Left?" I just skimmed the article, but the mention of Steve Bannon at end is an indication that the article probably belongs to that trend. This turns the issue into the political ground, not the scientific one. Thus, the word "fact" is used as an appeal to authority when its actually an ideological discussion that is at stake. Some facts are carefully ignored or dismissed when not fitting the narrator world's view (in either sides), so it would be better to acknowledge that it's opinions that are discussed, and that their are not absolutely right.

ycombinete2• 8 years ago

I must admit to smirking at the unintended irony created by the title of the article, and the publication it appears in.

That said, Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind does outline a very similar thing. That our 'reasoning' is almost always a post-hoc attempt to explain how we already feel. And Haidt, while claiming neutrality is very definitely on the right end of the spectrum.

Retric2• 8 years ago

The Left has plenty of unsupported ideas.

The question is really why people debate Physics or Chemistry. People that thought the Sun was a perfect sphere would discount things they could directly see with their eyes.

gameswithgo3• 8 years ago

How about "why don't facts change people's minds about global warming"?

or "why don't facts change people's minds about gun control?" (this is an issue with both the left, they are both wrong about many aspects of gun issues!)

These are just two cases that came to mind, where I have friends/family who I talk to about it, and I can explain some facts in great detail that I'm familiar with, and in that moment they will seem to change their mind a little bit. But a couple months later they are right back to their old thinking. Maybe people tend to forget the stuff they would rather not believe.

gjm112• 8 years ago

could actually be rephrased as "Why Don't Everybody Agree with the Left?"

Well, let's have a look at the actual examples in the article: what things are people apparently failing to change their minds about? (I've also included a few things that aren't examples of that but that seem relevant.)

1. Their ability to distinguish real from fake suicide notes. No obvious political slant.

2. What makes a good firefighter. No obvious political slant.

3. The effectiveness of capital punishment. Highly politicized topic, but reported experiment and reported results both symmetrical.

4. Answers to an unspecified set of reasoning problems. Presumably no political slant.

5. Next study described is one in which people actually did* change their minds, when asked to explain in detail things they thought they understood. Also not political.*

6. Next one also isn't about changing minds. Found that a rough proxy for ignorance about Ukraine is correlated with eagerness for the US to intervene there. Definite opportunity for political slant here.

7. General discussion about mutually reinforcing ignorance. Has kinda-gratuitous anti-Trump comment at end.

8. Next one also isn't about changing minds. Found that trying to explain things in detail leads to more moderate opinions, whichever side one's on. Politically contentious questions; procedure and results seem symmetrical.

9. Alleged dangers of vaccination. Anti-vax sentiment tends to skew left, though I think less drastically than is sometimes thought. Brief, semi-gratuitous, Trump comment here, but it isn't particularly negative.

10. Whether owning a gun makes you safer. Politically contentious question.

So. Most of the stuff here is either entirely unpolitical (1,2,4,5) or concerned with political issues but balanced in both procedure and conclusions (3,8). The last section (9,10) describes a book that discusses demonstrably-false opinions held by some people who skew left (9) and some who skew right (10). That leaves 6 (which looks to me -- your opinion might differ -- like an unbiased attempt to investigate a question with political consequences) and that little swipe at the Trump administration in 7. (And, if you really find it offensive, the comment about Steve Bannon at the end.)

I don't think any reasonable person could summarize this as anything even slightly like "Why don't everybody agree with the left?", even though those little swipes make it clear that the author is no fan of Donald Trump. (A characteristic he shares with plenty of Republicans, so it's not exactly a clear indicator of egregious bias.)

pixl97• 8 years ago

"You cannot convince a right person"

This was a realization I came to years ago, long before it was a political topic. And when I say 'right person', I don't mean right in political views, but I mean "A person that believes they are correct in their thinking on the topic".

But that's what politics seems to be these days "Convincing your side they are right", then repeat it often so they don't forget they are right. In this way you can create a person that never changes their mind.

yourbandsucks2• 8 years ago

The thing is, slim majorities of conservatives will answer phone surveys with things like "yes, Obama was born in Kenya" or "no, global temperature isn't rising".

Specious argument can come from anybody, but the "la la can't hear you" portion of the left is measurably smaller compared to the right.

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

The question has political import but there is, of course, no way to write those in without someone skimming the article finding a way to call it a hatchet-job and refusing to consider it.

Perhaps we might call this another way facts don't change our minds: we can't be bothered to consider them if interspersed with even a mild statement of opinion that differs from our own.

dabbledash• 8 years ago

I see it often come up with regard to alternative health topics like vaccine refusal or homeopathy. I could be wrong, but my perception is that people who hold these beliefs are more likely to be left leaning.

It also comes up often in the global warming context, obviously, which goes the other way.

beat2• 8 years ago

I see it differently. It appears to me that large swaths of the political right have gone over to intellectual relativism, where everything is reduced to mere opinion, equally valid to all other opinions, and facts simply don't matter. See any discussion of climate change for that.

To be fair, it's happening some on the left as well, but not to the degree it's happening on the right.

Of course, that's my opinion, and I'm a leftist, so you can just dismiss me out of hand.

hnbroseph3• 8 years ago

could actually be rephrased as "Why Don't Everybody Agree with the Left?

"the left" doesn't mean much of anything other than meaning "those i don't like".

it's a general derogatory phrase used by (for example) commentators like ben shapiro... on most episodes of his show, it's an handwave reference to indistinct millions of people that is almost always followed by chatter about how terrible they are. just the absolute worst. evil people. etc.

being one of "the right" doesn't mean you would like someone like steve bannon.

neilwilson• 8 years ago

A good point.

When I see the word 'fact', I remind myself that even now evolution is still only considered a theory - despite the weight of evidence on its side. Because in science something might just show up that invalidates all that came before, and maintaining that faint skepticism is what separates science from belief.

(And of course evolution is a theory, not a mere hypothesis because of this weight of evidence).

If you want to show me a fact, make sure it comes with a mathematical proof attached.

mrfredward2• 8 years ago

It was mostly a neutral, intelligently written article until that last paragraph.

It's as if the author wrote a good article about confirmation bias, and someone jumped in at the last second and said "wait, add a line implying this is all about shitty conservatives so our readers will like it." I wonder if anyone at the New Yorker appreciates the irony.

Only those idiots who disagree with me have cognitive biases.

PurpleBoxDragon2• 8 years ago

The problem is that the lab isn't isolated, and so facts produced by the lab can have strong political bias. A 'wrongthink' produced by a lab would have a far stronger criticism applied to it than a 'rightthink' using the same methodology. Combined with issues like competing for funding, publish or perish, and the extreme lack of reproduction, it casts a level of doubt on any facts coming from science, especially when they have strong tie in to political areas.

And to specify, the 'rightthink' and 'wrongthink' examples I've studied in the past were cases that didn't breakdown by any common political stance like left or right, but were findings that either agreed or disagreed with positions held strongly by people regardless of political standing. I do think the results would apply as expected when considering a political issue that broken down per party lines, but the reaction is much stronger when there there is more uniform agreement for or against something.

AsyncAwait• 8 years ago

Why Don't Everybody Agree with the Left

As someone on the left, I find it bothersome that when people say "the left" they either mean neoliberals or SJW, neither of which actually stand for leftist ideas. Neoliberals believe in a right-wing economic agenda, while playing identity politics and SJWs want to feel good about themselves from their couch, so they play identity politics.

Both of these, I have a massive issue with, but due to this caricature of the left coming from the right, I cannot honestly debate with the other side.

clairity• 8 years ago

partisanship is a misleading mental shortcut.

rather, loss aversion (a cognitive bias) can explain a fair bit of the behavior here. people with (perceived) status or privilege don't want to lose those statuses/privileges, so seek to rationalize their position. if it means attacking the underpinnings of facts and evidence, so be it (as the bias goes). it's part of our primitive brains to do so, and requires the use of our modern brains to keep in check.

also, facts and evidence live on a continuum, where facts have low margin of error while evidence has high margin of error. the way you address a high margin of error is to gather lots of evidence, so that statistically, you narrow the margin of error to something tiny, and then you can call it a fact. for example, the sun rising tomorrow has a margin of error that's approximately zero, so we call it a fact.

most reasonable people are not interested in arguing facts, especially if those calling into question those facts have no basis of expertise or credible counter-evidence.

you can have your own beliefs, but you don't get to have your own facts. moreover, it's reasonable to discount people who believe something without evidence, especially in the face of evldience to the contrary.

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

Yes. It would help to test how rational the study subjects are to begin with, why / why not they are so, etc. And then, what can / cannot be done to increase flexibility.

That said, be careful that we with for. There is certainly unforeseen consequences here.

brightball• 8 years ago

A few years ago I really enjoyed arguing politics on the internet. Not trolling, but legitimately arguing. I ran into several people who would just link-bomb the conversation.

So one day, when I had a couple of hours free I sat down and read every single link. All of them.

The lack of substance beyond an opening paragraph that claimed a point was appalling. When it was brought to the attention of those link-bombers, they actually agreed that there was no substance and that they hadn't read those links at all. I was really proud of my friend and thought we had actually resolved a political disagreement on Facebook.

Then I saw them dropping the exact same links in another conversation within a couple of days.

Facts without context don't prove anything. Some of the facts but not all of them just frame the story in a particular light.

After years of this stuff, it becomes clear that nobody has time to become an expert on every subject just to be able to identify the critical details that people are leaving out.

Eventually, you just research your positions on the subjects that matter to you and vote accordingly. Now, if something doesn't make logical or mathematical sense, I oppose it. If there's no logic or math involved, I generally take no position at all.

casefields2• 8 years ago

That's called the Gish Gallop and for whatever reason is the mode de jure for winning an Internet argument now.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

I am really souring on such conversations because of the tremendous number of bad-faith arguing tactics people use -- willfully misconstruing your point, racing as quickly as possible to a glib dismissal without really understanding what you said, or, like you said, link-bombing. Another failure mode I find extremely frustrating is failure to understand analogies. For instance, if I were having a discussion about whether potatoes are healthy it might go like this:

A: Of course potatoes are healthy! They're natural!

B: If everything natural were healthy it'd be healthy to eat hemlock.

A: Potatoes aren't hemlock and it's really offensive you'd make that comparison.

johngalt• 8 years ago

In most cases the problem with link bombs is that the stated conclusions don't fit the linked facts, and people can't separate the verifiable fact from their conclusion.

79522• 8 years ago

I agree that people do change their minds, but it is not neccessarily a direct result of facts. Things like emotion, social pressure, and moral arguments are far more persuasive. People just get angry when their facts arn't enough to pursuade someone. But sometimes you need to engage people at a more personal level than just science and statistics.

bilbo0s4• 8 years ago

But sometimes you need to engage people at a more personal level than just science and statistics...

Now I don't know if I would write this off as simple "emotion". Obviously, "emotion" is probably part of it, but so is "social pressure", etc as you point out. I'd probably summarize that collection of factors as "Ideology". Convincing people to change their minds is likely one reason that ideology is actually useful to humans, even though oftentimes it bears little resemblance to the underlying reality we live in. It allows us to understand and interpret the world in ways that are comfortable and intuitive. Being "comfortable" matters.

discreteevent• 8 years ago

I remember reading some article with a former head of Goldman Sachs. He was saying that the best traders aren't necessarily the smartest ones. The best traders are those who don't get attached to a position. So from that example, it would seem that some people are able to change their minds in response to feedback (and do well because of it).

mmsimanga2• 8 years ago

All facts (those that are not lies) are true under specific circumstances/environment. Capitalism is bad. This statement is not always correct and neither is it always wrong. When unchecked, capitalism is bad. Capitalism also gave rise to SpaceX, Apple ...

MrFantastic• 8 years ago

Apple, SpaceX exists because of Free Markets. There is no reason to think they required our current flavor of Capitalism to come to fruition.

technofiend• 8 years ago

And the problem is it gives people more excuse to give up - to not engage with someone who is wrong, or to dismiss someone who is right (that they think is wrong). Because, studies!

I know someone who is the victim of a professional conspiracy theorist. This guy has figured out how to pull people in with explanations of why your typical conspiracy theory is wrong. He'll happily refute that 9/11 was an inside job in public. So his marks think "Great, rational guy! Let's learn more!"

But that's when you have to pay. All "hidden secrets" are on Patreon of course. But now his marks are literally and emotionally invested. I read once some conspiracy theorists feel like they have a special position because they know something the public doesn't.

Between that (if it's true) and the fact you've literally paid for whatever hogwash this guy is selling you'll soon find yourself (as my friend did) explaining that every study quoted by The World Health Organization is flawed because they profit from vilification of Monsanto. How does he know? Studies that refute the studies! Written by whom, you may ask?

In which case you'll be challenged for challenging "the true skeptics" who totally have it figured out. And the burden of proof is left to you: if you can't refute the studies that refute the studies well you must be wrong and now must accept The True Facts.

It feels very much like a conversation with my friends in cyber security who see a boogie man behind every tree. I am willing to entertain rational fears. But when you don't like something new and reject it for an undefinable reason, or even worse because then it could reveal secret squirrel knowledge only cyber may know then don't be surprised if I too am a skeptic.

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

This article is obviously guilty as well - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". Like, ever? The content of the article doesn't back up the headline, but the headline is what people remember.

To me the obvious implication of the title is not that they never change our minds (we all know this is not true), but that they very rarely do -- at least much more rarely than one would expect.

At any rate, this is an article from a weekly magazine; I'd expect somewhat more careful reading than occurs in a newspaper to be the norm.

criddell• 8 years ago

This article is obviously guilty as well - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". Like, ever? The content of the article doesn't back up the headline, but the headline is what people remember.

I think these days most readers, especially of publications like the New Yorker, are more media savvy than you give them credit for. When you read the headline, did you really think it would be an article espousing the view that nobody anywhere has ever had their point of view altered by learning something new?

akvadrako• 8 years ago

Bugs the heck out of me, because if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. And yet, we do.

This is the wrong conclusion to draw from the discussion. People do change their minds, but rarely all at once. What they want is to be consistent, so you have to move the needle a little bit at a time.

One technique to convince somebody of something: first you have to show you understand their position better than they do and are on their side. Then you can lead them towards the correct solution. It's called "pacing and leading".

sephware• 8 years ago

One of my favorite phrases is “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” because it reminds me of the ever-useful principle that if someone has personal (and maybe even irrational) reasons to keep believing something they shouldn’t, like that they have a good chance at winning the lottery this time (no they don’t) and finally get out of the poverty that’s haunted them for decades, or that bitcoin is finally their ticket to entrepreneurial independence (probably not), or that the foreign prince really does want to send them money and all they need to do is buy iTunes gift cards and send him the numbers over the phone, no amount of facts are going to change their minds.

commandlinefan2• 8 years ago

no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. And yet, we do.

"I've never seen anybody change their behavior as the result of a well-reasoned, rational argument. I have seen people change their behavior to avoid ridicule." -- Scott Adams

tunesmith3• 8 years ago

I've seen plenty of people change their behavior as the result of a well-reasoned, rational argument. I'm not sure what Scott Adams' problem is.

dionidium• 8 years ago

It stems from a misunderstanding of what it means to say that you've changed somebody's mind. Hardly anybody ever changes their mind in the moment. That's not how opinions or the stubborn humans who hold them work. People change their mind on issues over time, in response to multiple inputs.

If you expect to see evidence of changing minds literally represented in comment threads or at the end of dinner-table arguments, then you've totally failed to understand the value of those discussions. Intense discussions routinely change minds, but they rarely end with any evidence that a change has taken place.

The notion that contentious discussions on broad cultural disagreements are valueless is, I think, mistaken and the meme is, in general, profoundly damaging.

liftbigweights• 8 years ago

What do you expect from a publication that hired people like Talia Lavin.

https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/new-yorker-fact-checker-ice-t...

Both sides of the political extreme are guilty of claiming their "facts" are real and others are ignorant for not believing them. It's the modern day equivalent is "our god is the one true god" nonsense. But the left just has a much bigger and louder megaphone to shout at people.

It's obvious to anyone paying attention that the New Yorker nor any other publication cares about facts. They care about their own agenda. The New Yorker isn't an objective publication. They are an advocacy group.

Essentially it's the Ministry of Truth attacking people for wrongthink.

Brockenstein3• 8 years ago

I agree. It might be better to say, "People don't change their minds when we want them too. But people do change their minds when they come to their own realizations about the information they have. And sometimes that sucks because it can takes days, months, years, a lifetime."

For example, I'm an ex-Jehovah's Witness and over on the r/exjw subreddit a common thing you see is a person starts posting. They've just realized their long held sacred beliefs are nonsense, but all their friends and family are JWs (which is a problem because JW culture is such that losing your faith makes you a pariah, and possibly shunned by those friends and family) so they want to know how to wake up their friends and family to the fact that JW beliefs are nonsense. But you just can't. Believers have strong faith and ignore contrary evidence and apostate arguments while under the spell of their faith. The believer has to make a lot of decisions for themselves to be able to read a bunch of facts, apply them rationally and decide that their faith doesn't stand on it's own two feet.

And depending on how or what you believe in, not just religion, but any subject, if you have pre-established or long held beliefs about it, information that runs contrary becomes suspect.

After all people will argue until they use up all the oxygen in the room over evolution (because of the perceived implications to their religious faith or other beliefs). But not a goddamn person you've ever met is going to pick the atomic weight ceiling of the heaviest possible atom as the hill they want to die on.

macspoofing• 8 years ago

Don't facts need to be contextualized in a larger belief framework to be useful? "Sun rises in the East" is a fact that is compatible with a heliocentric and geocentric view of the world. So that fact on its own is useless in explaining the world. In politics, your ideology will guide your interpretation. If you have a particular view on, say, immigration, you will highlight certain facts, suppress or dismiss inconvenient facts, and in general interpret all facts through your ideological lens.

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

My problem with the studies described at the beginning is with this conclusion:

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted.

My understanding, from the descriptions in the article, was that it was not the beliefs were _refuted_, it was just that what they were told originally was not true. The subjects had no reason to believe the latter assertion above the former.

geezerjay3• 8 years ago

It is also important to note that facts, in the true sense of the word, represent single observations of a phenomenon, while beliefs are more about models that reflect relationships between observable phenomena and a way to model and predict behavior.

Thus it's easy to understand that a single observation, particularly one which is given at face value, is not enough to scrap whole models.

To provide an example, should we scrap the whole notion of gravity accelerating all dropped objects uniformly independent of mass if someone observes a feather taking more time to fall than a canonball? I mean,that's a fact. Anyone ca see it and reproduce the same behavior. So, should everyone just abandon the notion of gravity acritically because of a single fact was presented?

philipps• 8 years ago

Both this and the previous discussion show that HN readers believe facts (or information) can and do change peoples’ minds. The way I understand the article (and the books it refers to) it suggests that social factors have a stronger effect on opinions than facts. I find this hypothesis plausible when I look at the polarized discussions I see playing out at the societal level, as well as interactions with other people individually. And maybe, rather than refute it, the HN reaction to the article is further evidence for the mechanism the article describes?

Edit: typo

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

If anyone would like to explore the topic a bit further try "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. It was on FT's short list for best of 2017. It's a quick easy read. Gladwell-esque. The difference iis, she is an actual scientest who works in that field. Tho' perhaps that makes her bias? ;)

https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other...

tobr• 8 years ago

For some reason this made me think of the problems with side effects in programming. If we can read and write willy-nilly, it’s very difficult to figure out why the data is the way it is, and we can’t undo/rewind unless we planned for it all along.

When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects.

jokoon2• 8 years ago

People are free to believe what they want. The problem with science is that it cannot change, so it can appear as a problem in politics, people feel science is a prison you cannot criticize.

Also there are good reasons why science is not in control of our lives.

What's worse is that people will also speak in the name of the science of economics to advocate about any kind of policy or tax break.

commandlinefan2• 8 years ago

The problem with science is that it cannot change

Maybe science can't change, but our collective understanding of it changes (hopefully gets better) almost all the time.

jokoon2• 8 years ago

I guess people don't realize how science illiterate people can be. That's the issue I guess. If you don't understand science, you cannot trust it.

hevi_jos• 8 years ago

We should talk about complexity and complication here.

Complex is the opposite of simple. If there is 50 equal elements communicating between them there we have a complex system.

This is important because a thousand ants behave totally different from an isolated ant.

You just can't study an ant and expect to understand the nest or anthill.

Psychologists try to make it all the time and it is totally wrong: They studied isolated rats in order to understand addiction to drugs and they did not understood that they are social animals which travel 20miles-30kms each day.

So they jailed the rats in a cage, because it was easier to study them that way, and extracted conclusions that were totally bogus for human beings. Those conclusions were the basis for the US war on drugs.

Here they do the same. They make a very simple experiment, and extract conclusions about the whole system. In Africa, when humans whatever,more fiction than science.

It is ok to make fiction and speculation, but you should always differentiate what we really know with high degree of confidence from what we do not.

netcan• 8 years ago

This is a tangent.

How much/long does a study like this cost/take? Is it possible/useful to scale this?

From reading into some of the replicability discussion, I've gotten curious about social science generally. What's an expirement like this trying to prove/demonstrate. The journalistic narrative likes the easy "X debunked." I imagine researchers have a more nuanced perspective.

I guess what im asking is what does the larger effort look like? Do these studies eventually add up to a larger understanding of how we do form opinions, where facts do change our minds....

Replicability is one thing. How about generalisability?

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

Which study are you referring to? Several are referenced.

TangoTrotFox3• 8 years ago

The replication rate is social science studies is very poor. And an even larger problem is that the studies themselves do not actually test what they aim to test, often because they simply cannot. For instance do video games cause violence? The only way you could realistically test this would be to have one group somehow prevented from playing video games for their entire life, or at least up to a certain age, and another group obligated to play video games in a similar fashion, and then some control group presumably free to do as they saw fit. And then follow these individuals for decades and see what happens.

That's not really possible. So instead the experiments that are made are toy experiments, but when you're not really testing what you're trying to measure, it becomes impossible to prove anything, and possible to show anything. For instance could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games cause violence? Of course. Could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games don't cause violence? Of course. The experiments are meaningless.

As an example of the problem, 'emotional intelligence' in work is all the rage right now. Yet the keystone study that sparked it is really just quite bad. The author had people split off into groups and perform a variety of tasks such as, literally, planning a shopping list. Using some method of determining who made the best shopping list, the author then determined that the groups who had the highest average IQ did not perform the best, whereas their 'emotional intelligence' as measured by an, again literally, "reading the mind in the eyes test" mapped better to performance - so therefore, it's not merit alone that judges performance but some emotional intelligence, at least as measured by "reading the mind in the eyes" that does. That's just broken logic. At the bare minimum IQ != specific task merit. The most logical way to perform that experiment would be to have created teams of those that performed individually best on any given task to work together against those that did not score so well on merit, but did well on the "reading the mind in the eyes test". Of course she did not do this, the bare minimum to even begin approaching this question, since the result would not be what she wanted. And negative results don't get published. Yet now there have been likely hundreds of articles and spin off studies taking that study's unjustified conclusion as a granted.

So no, there is absolutely no big picture progress in the social sciences.

Chyzwar• 8 years ago

I think there is a way. Facebook/Google have all data to perform studies like that. Problem is that current University system is broken. You are forced to publish short success stories instead doing actual research.

lisper• 8 years ago

I just now (30 minutes ago) changed my mind about something based on a fact, and it wasn't even something that someone pointed out to me. I just realized on my own that I had been wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111870

I wonder if this fact will change anyone's mind about the idea that facts never change anyone's mind.

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

Why such a mindlessly literal interpretation of an title clearly not intended to be literal?

hnbroseph3• 8 years ago

well, it's a time-honored tradition of we geeks on the internet. it helps us feel clever. :)

slx262• 8 years ago

This is very long and complicated, but I'll try to write a quick comment.

Many people know from experience how hard it's to convince anyone to change what they say, the way they behave, etc, from facts alone. I say "behave", because it's very important to realize the difference between "rationally accepting" and "caring about a truth or fact", more to that later.

We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious.

The key point is that we can't easily change how people feels while being respectful with that people and trying to make them change through words only. We are irrational, and we all have different priorities. Even if I accept a fact, it might not be something important to me, even if I rationally say it is, so I won't change the way I act, and it won't matter that much. Otherwise, I might say that I don't accept something just because I don't feel that way, even if I have to discard and ignore (unconsciously) the facts. What "I feel "is more relevant than the facts that I "don't really (want) to understand". As tobr puts very well in another comment too, all these feelings and ideas have a long term effect: "When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects."

I thought it was interesting to write about all this, not only because it really helps a lot understand why facts might or might not help much changing the way people behaves, but it also helps us understand better how to actually make people change their minds. Words might be very effective for those that are already in a similar line of thought, but in other cases we might want to try changing the way people feels about something instead, by trying to making them live, in first person, the contradictions in their own beliefs (unfortunately, for many technical issues, you can't do that without becoming a teacher (and that assuming the other person trusts you enough to let you teach something), but then it's not surprising that people can't trust facts that depend on knowledge they don't have, it's only natural). And all this also help us understand that even though we might accept many rational truths, we all have different priorities, so the ones we end up acting upon deserve some consideration. Sometimes you are so focused on your own causes that don't understand how others don't share it, when it's simply that they have their own ones too, not necessarily that they don't rationally accept and understand what you are doing. And there are a billion worthy causes. For some people it might be about saving the world. Others focus only on their kids. We can do a lot to manage better that collision between rationality and irrationality, between facts and feelings, because both are critical to us as human beings.

emodendroket12• 8 years ago

We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious.

After decades people still believe that global warming is a hoax and vaccines cause autism, despite mountains of oft-repeated evidence that this is not the case.

slx262• 8 years ago

well, not the evidence they are frequently exposed to.

but of course there are many other factors. I already talked about the problem with more technical arguments, but nowadays in many cases we have this aversion to science and mistrust for anything that might come from it. also, many people are mostly exposed to what they think and feel, because when someone else tells them something they don't believe in, they don't hear that, they just repeat their own discourse again for themselves. so they are exposed to that. and in case it was a bit confusing, I didn't say that "people will always change their minds [...]", there are a lot of factors. but that we can very easily doubt ourselves when information comes predominantly from only one direction? for sure. and that direction doesn't necessarily need to be "science" or "media". we are just bad at detecting where the relevant information comes from for a person.

izzydata• 8 years ago

They sure change my mind. I'm just not always convinced what people are saying are facts. At best they are the current best explanation and at worst only opinions.

merpnderp3• 8 years ago

At one end of the spectrum of what constitutes a fact is Richard Feynman's definition, which was anything he'd replicated himself in a lab. He considered everything else he knew to be based on faith (in people, in organizations, in whatever made the claim, but which he held in high enough esteem to actually believe.)

loco5niner• 8 years ago

Agreed. Or even worse. Purposefully misreporting of research data. Example: recently disgraced "scientist" Brian Wansink.

dagaci• 8 years ago

Humans are overwhelmingly emotional creatures. We are a bunch of monkeys with only a fragment of real awareness of why we are doing X and Y.

Human brains judge another persons whole life in milliseconds (we all do it, can't help that), but then struggle with what is quite simple math. That should tell you something about what we are.

My advice is don't ever forget that logic is only the smallest part. Demeanor and a strong image is much more important than it should be, simply presenting a "fact" is not enough.

the_greyd4• 8 years ago

I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes what we say facts are poor research, see ongoing replication crisis in psychology, social science, nutrition etc. The time it takes to change a mind is a long complicated process which is justified. A world where people's minds are easily changed by facts would be a world of fads.

snarf21• 8 years ago

So true. I read this article recently about doctors not switching to the newest techniques. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-docto...]

The interesting thing is that I think the author makes the opposite point of what they were intending. The tl;dr of the article is that a study came out saying doctors should strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. It was very slow to gain adoption. Eventually it started to take hold but a new more rigorous study came out and said this was a bad practice as it was actually causing too many hypoglycemic events and killing patients. The new recommendation was to not strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. The author states that doctors are now not switching back to the strategy they had in the first place. It seems like waiting for a preponderance of evidence might always be the best path forward, especially doctors and other situations where people's lives are at risk.

the_greyd4• 8 years ago

"Imagine if America created an evidence-based centrist party in the 1940s that listened to the scientists how much more advanced things would be. Mandatory frontal lobotomies for hysterical women who show sapphic tendencies. Free cigarettes for kids to smooth their breathing." https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920

bilbo0s4• 8 years ago

Agree with most of what you said, but

A world where people's minds are easily changed by facts would be a world of fads...

is an interesting statement.

Because we live in a world of fads anyway. This even though peoples' minds are not easily changed by facts.

the_greyd4• 8 years ago

Let me rephrase that: it would be a world where we would become extinct quickly. I am convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. So the emphasis on rationality only makes sense in a modern society when you can in some sense override your biological programming since you don't have to fight a bear and hunt etc.

Bartweiss• 8 years ago

One of my favorite points in favor of facts, debate, and persuasion is the observation that you almost never see someone change their mind, but you can find legions of people who have changed their minds.

There are a host of reasons we don't respond to facts with "oh, I guess I'll abandon all my deeply-held beliefs immediately!" Everything from "that's an embarrassing loss of face" to "I'd like to fact-check you before I accept that, but it's rude to say I doubt you" to "brains don't work that way, it's physically impossible to discard a whole belief on demand" factors in. And I agree, this is hardly a bad thing. Taking time to change our minds is a safety feature. Not only are facts sometimes false, or falsified, or misleading, but most of us aren't great at knowing what's relevant when.

On almost any topic, there is someone who could argue me into an embarrassing defeat, or at least an awkward stalemate of "we can't both be right". This is true for most people about all things, and all people about most things. I am overwhelmingly confident that young-earth creationism is wrong, but I've seen its adherents speak; I have a lot of arguments they can't answer, but they have a lot of arguments I can't answer either. I don't know enough about the geology of Mount Ararat to explain why some arcane point about flood sedimentology is wrong, but the correct response to that is not for me to agree that the Earth is 5,000 years old. And that's for a fringe theory that I'm uncommonly well-qualified to rebut - the problem only gets worse when we move to a lay viewer looking at any serious debate.

People today may unprecedented access to facts, but that didn't give us the time or memory or training to evaluate every possible issue from the bare facts up. Everyone who's ever cast a vote is, on a great many issues, working from heuristics and expert opinions and best guesses. With only one lifetime to learn things, that's not avoidable. I'm sometimes alarmed by how harshly people will resist looking into new facts and evidence, but the idea that people should promptly respond to compelling-sounding facts by changing their minds doesn't strike me as a workable one.

the_greyd4• 8 years ago

After reading a bit of evolutionary psychology, I realized to my astonishment that humans have evolved to survive, and not to be perfectly rational. Rational so much so its useful. I'm actually convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. When you realize the universe has no meaning, does it motivate you and your species to keep breeding and take risks? As Schopenhauer said, if you truly considered all the costs associated with having kids before having them, no rational being would ever have kids! No person thinking clearly would ever trade 10-15 minutes of feeling good for a lifetime of costs and responsibilities. Then there's tribalism and ingroup and outgroup psychology which dictates much of what we see. These are survival mechanisms meant for living in small tribes, malfunctioning in a globally connected civilization. I would suggest yuval harrari's recent article on how humans are hackable and how that completely demolishes our concepts of liberal democracy , free market etc which assumes rational actors behaving in their self-interest.

Isamu• 8 years ago

Belief is not generally fact based. Going strictly with the facts is an incredibly disciplined thing. Feynman used to play games to keep himself sharp, to avoid fooling himself because as he said, the easiest person to fool is yourself.

With people in general the belief comes first and then you backfill with supporting evidence and argument.

Also we tend to pull our beliefs into our identity. Then a challenge to our beliefs is a challenge to our identity, and very hard to swallow. So it is also difficult but important to keep yourself from identifying yourself by your beliefs.

dqpb• 8 years ago

This is why cache invalidation is important.

Asturaz• 8 years ago

The study Mercier and some European colleagues did together which is mention in this article seems very similar to The Choice Blindness study.

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/

http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Choice-Blin...

The latest paper which is incredible interesting from that study http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Strandberg-...

merpnderp3• 8 years ago

But what is considered a fact? Richard Feynman only considered a thing a fact if he'd replicated the results himself. Everything else he took on faith.

When the FDA said you should limit fat intake, that was considered a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is now considered a much trickier statement. When the FDA says the flu vaccine is safe, that is a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is not considered a questionable statement. But it isn't hard for a nut to use the first to confuse the latter.

ASinghUK• 8 years ago

The article is basically saying that if we're told we're right, then we're told we're wrong, we will still believe we're right even though we're presented with a contrary fact? The test group aren't asked their answers in response to being told a fact - its more of a psychological game in my opinion

antidesitter2• 8 years ago

Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the key ideas. Fundamentally, it's a problem of incentives: There is little or no incentive for people to be rational about their political beliefs, and there is frequently an incentive to be irrational about them. In particular:

The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that people often choose—rationally—to adopt irrational beliefs because the costs of rational beliefs exceed their benefits. To understand this, one has to distinguish two senses of the word “rational”: Instrumental rationality (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior. Epistemic rationality consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill.

The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that it is often instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational.

The theory of Rational Irrationality makes two main assumptions. First, individuals have non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as “biases”). That is, there are certain things that people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence. Second, individuals can exercise some control over their beliefs. Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally. But since individuals receive almost none of the benefit from being epistemically rational about political issues, we can predict that people will often choose to be epistemically irrational about political issues.

[0] http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

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