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.Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html#ixzz2Jj9gHZWl
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.
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.
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