Confirmation Bias, The Glossy Shine of A Dining Room Table

[LunaSea]

How We Support Our False Beliefs

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2009) — In a study published in the most recent issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry, sociologists from four major research institutions focus on one of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election: the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Although this belief influenced the 2004 election, they claim it did not result from pro-Bush propaganda, but from an urgent need by many Americans to seek justification for a war already in progress.

The findings may illuminate reasons why some people form false beliefs about the pros and cons of health-care reform or regarding President Obama's citizenship, for example.

-snip-

While numerous scholars have blamed a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration, this study argues that the primary cause of misperception in the 9/11-Saddam Hussein case was not the presence or absence of accurate data but a respondent's desire to believe in particular kinds of information.

"The argument here is that people get deeply attached to their beliefs," Hoffman says.

"We form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in our personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. The problem is that this notion of 'motivated reasoning' has only been supported with experimental results in artificial settings. We decided it was time to see if it held up when you talk to actual voters in their homes, workplaces, restaurants, offices and other deliberative settings."

snip-
"One of the things that is really interesting about this, from both the perspective of voting patterns but also for democratic theory more generally, Hoffman says, "is that we did not find that people were being duped by a campaign of innuendo so much as they were actively constructing links and justifications that did not exist.

"They wanted to believe in the link," he says, "because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters' ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity."


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090821135020.htm

[Jim__]

1. I'd be curious to know whether this changes over time.

I realize there was a lot of time between the 9/11 attack and the 2004 election. However, I'm not convinced that people who believed that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack had been given the overwhelming evidence that he wasn't (e.g. I doubt Fox news made that clear).

The statement given in the article:

The study team employed a technique called "challenge interviews" on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11. The researchers presented the available evidence of the link, along with the evidence that there was no link, and then pushed respondents to justify their opinion on the matter. For all but one respondent, the overwhelming evidence that there was no link left no impact on their arguments in support of the link.

is fairly easy to understand. Most of us, when we strongly hold a position, will not be convinced to abandon it based on the arguments of another person. However, I think a lot of peole when confronted with contrary evidence will research it, and that research may, over time, convince them to change their position.

[caraher]

2. But that's the downside of current media

These days, most people seek only that information that confirms their existing views (we come to DU, watch KO and Rachel; they go to Free Republic, listen to Rush and watch Faux News). That minimizes the likelihood that exposure to contrary views occurs in more than fleeting exposures.

That's always been true, but the downside of the era of bloggers is that it's too easy to find your favorite echo chamber and doze there comfortably. It's especially true for the right, where the ways they forge group identity seem to rely heavily on identification and vilification of common enemies (it happens on the left, too, but generally without the proud anti-intellectualism that further shuts off possible reconsideration of one's position).

[Igel]

4. I think it's entailed that it would change.

People tend to become emotionally invested in a belief and actively find reasons to believe it. Sometimes they construct false evidence; sometimes they merely overlook contrary or contradictory evidence. They'll work as hard to avoid evidence as they do to find evidence.

When confronted with absolute evidence that they're wrong, a fair majority, I'd say, turn away rather than confront the horrible truth: They had so wanted to believe a lie that they deceived themselves and applauded their own self-deceit.

However, all this depends on emotional investment and the desire to hold a certain belief, as well as on the desire to defend one's ego. Emotions and desires can fade over time. Evidence that doesn't challenge the ego, whether because it's novel or in a non-threatening context, can be more dispassionately reconsidered. You're least likely to change your beliefs when confronted and challenged to change them by a foe or somebody you think of as an inferior.

An alternative course is to find a set of evidence that is *not* part of the belief system but which, when pursued to its logical conclusion, does change the belief system. The key is to make sure that the evidence doesn't obviously impact what's already believed and the person makes an inference on it that s/he wants to believe or becomes invested in. You can then take the evidence and show that while it supports a belief that you want to hold, it also challenges another belief, one that you want to hold. Then you have a challenge: you can hold contrary or contradictory beliefs, or allow one belief to cause you to reject the other.

This is a property of humans. It's apolitical.

[Odin2005]

3. This is why Science is about FALSIFICATION, not verification

The big misconception is that science starts with raw observations and then proceeds to abstract theories. But David Hume pointed out the flaw in this assumption 250 years ago; just because you've seen a million white swans, that does not PROVE that all swans are white. All observation is theory-laden, we interpret the world based on the mental models in out heads (an idea first glimpsed by Kant), and thus if we go out looking for confirmations to our theories we will always find them, hence the conspiracy nuts, astrologers, religious apologism, Marxists that think The Revolution is just around the corner, etc.

No, science is based on trying to FALSIFY out theories, only Falsification can weed out pseudoscience.