Telling people facts does not usually help them:
Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our
minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and
2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when
misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to
corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In
fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts,
they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered
antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
Being aware of cognitive biases does not protect against
them. People just project and deny that they are subject to them. The
smarter you are, the more vulnerable you are to it.
When considering the irrational choices of a stranger,
for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see
their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their
systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices,
we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our
motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to
therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.
The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving
forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely
unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and
impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually
compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible
for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these
stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less
we actually understand.
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz2Jj9gHZWl
No Such Thing as Character:
So what to make of this? Well, the fact that for most people facts
don’t change their minds, they are self-deceptive and lack consistent
morals should not detract from the fact that there are folks that do not
match the trend. In other words, there are always outliers.
Also, I would imagine that there are circumstantial variables that
could be introduced in order to help people respond more rationally to
facts, to be less defensive, to look at their own behavior in a more
clearsighted way, and to act in a more consistently admirable way. I
think that is the trick of our trade. Priming our clients for honesty
and goodness, to embrace the good, the true and the beautiful, for
sweetness and light, and the best the human race has produced. After
all, there is something in man that inclines him to greek, there is
something in him that inclines him to philosophy – there is something in
him that admires truth and beauty – else many of the great works of art
and science would have never been created, discovered or appreciated
throughout the ages. But they do and they have, and so there is still
hope for the human race.
