Interesting New York Times Article Regarding Belief and Evidence
Sep 17 2009
Holding Tight to Belief
If you have a free moment, stop by the New York Times and visit this article. It is an interesting read comparing the 1909 Cook/Peary North Pole controversy with modern conspiracy theories and peoples’ general resistance to changing their minds despite contrary evidence.
The article includes a particularly fascinating snippet regarding a recent study done by fMRI on the 2004 US Presidential election:
With our rational faculties muted, sometimes the unwelcome evidence doesn’t even register, and sometimes we use marvelous logic to get around the facts.
In one study, Republicans who blamed Saddam Hussein for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were presented with strong counterevidence, including a statement from President George W. Bush absolving Hussein. But most of the people in the study went on blaming Hussein anyway, as the researchers report in the current issue of Sociological Inquiry.
Some of the people ignored or rejected the counterevidence; some “counterargued” that Hussein was evil enough to do it; some flatly said they were entitled to counterfactual opinions. And some came up with an especially creative form of motivated reasoning that the psychologists labeled “inferred justification”: because the United States went to war against Hussein, the reasoning went, it must therefore have been provoked by his attack on Sept. 11.
It has been often said that you can’t reason someone out of something that they did not reason themselves into. This study looks like it supports that idea.
