Un-spun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation
fackcheck.org HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY OTHER PEOPLE ARE SO UNREASONABLE and hard to convince? Why is it that they disregard hard facts that prove you're right and they're wrong? The fact is, we humans aren't wired to think very rationally. That's been confirmed recently by brain scans, but our irrational reaction to hard evidence has been the subject of scholarly study for some time.

...the discomfort at being confronted with evidence of error is a universal human emotion. It's just no fun to admit we've been wrong. So we strive to avoid that unpleasant feeling of psychological conflict-what Festinger calls cognitive dissonance-that occurs when deeply held beliefs are challenged by conflicting evidence.

 

You base your belief, not on evidence, logic or reason, but simply because you want to believe so badly, the thought of it being wrong invalidates your very existence and that makes your head hurt."

 

In the past half century, the science of psychology has taught us a lot about how and why we get things wrong. As we'll see, our minds betray us not only when it comes to politics, but in all sorts of matters, from how we see a sporting event, or even a war, to the way we process a sales pitch.

 

Humans are not by nature the fact-driven, rational beings we like to think we are. We get the facts wrong more often than we think we do. And we do so in predictable ways: we engage in wishful thinking. We embrace information that supports our beliefs and reject evidence that challenges them. Our minds tend to take shortcuts, which require some effort to avoid. Only a few of us go to moonbat extremes, but more often than most of us would imagine, the human mind operates in ways that defy logic.

Psychological experiments have shown, for one thing, that humans tend to seek out even weak evidence to support their existing beliefs, and to ignore evidence that undercuts those beliefs. In the process, we apply stringent tests to evidence we don't want to hear, while letting slide uncritically into our minds any information that suits our needs. Psychology also tells us that we rarely work through reasons and evidence in a systematic way, weighing information carefully and suspending the impulse to draw conclusions. Instead, much of the time we use mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that save us mental effort. These habits often work reasonably well, but they also can lead us to conclusions we might dismiss if we applied more thought.