Scientists depressing new discovery about the brain

Forget the dream that education, scientific evidence or reason can help people make good decisions
By Marty Kaplan

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/the_most_depressing_discovery_about_the_brain_ever_partner/

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper is called “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney’s piece about it in Grist: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.”

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.
Here’s some of what Nyhan found:
•People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.
•People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.
•People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.
•But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.

In Kahan’s experiment, some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table – containing the same numbers – about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime. Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people’s positions on gun control, they couldn’t do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream. The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.

I hate what this implies – not only about gun control, but also about other contentious issues, like climate change. I’m not completely ready to give up on the idea that disputes over facts can be resolved by evidence, but you have to admit that things aren’t looking so good for a reason. I keep hoping that one more photo of an iceberg the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland, one more stretch of record-breaking heat and drought and fires, one more graph of how atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen in the past century, will do the trick. But what these studies of how our minds work suggest is that the political judgments we’ve already made are impervious to facts that contradict us.

Maybe climate change denial isn’t the right term; it implies a psychological disorder. Denial is business-as-usual for our brains. More and better facts don’t turn low-information voters into well-equipped citizens. It just makes them more committed to their misperceptions. In the entire history of the universe, no Fox News viewers ever changed their minds because some new data upended their thinking. When there’s a conflict between partisan beliefs and plain evidence, it’s the beliefs that win. The power of emotion over reason isn’t a bug in our human operating systems, it’s a feature.

 

"In Kahan’s experiment, some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table – containing the same numbers – about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime. Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people’s positions on gun control, they couldn’t do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream. The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem."

Beautiful.


"Lead with values and give the facts a fighting chance."

 

"Do facts matter?" Facts being the operative word. The problem isn't political bias, as much as it is the bullshit that passes for "facts", which then plays into your bias. Lot's of opinions, very few facts. Lot's of wild eyed speculation, not much on facts. This is true whether it's gun control, the economy, or the ever present climate change argument. When you finally get through all the B.S., real scientists will tell you they just don't know for sure. The hacks...well they are absolutley certain.

 

You're just proving the point, when the conclusion is against one's values, the facts must be in error.

 

Whose facts? Your facts? My facts? Some other guys facts? Everybody is full of facts these days. REAL scientists are very hesitant before claiming something to be fact.
Fact: The climate is warming.
Fact: We really don't know how much man contributes to this warming in the overall scheme of things.
Fact: Using 120 years of data to prove ones speculation for this warming on a planet which is billions of years old, a planet which has had many previous climate shifts, most of them much more dramatic than this one, ALL of those climate shifts prior to industrialzation, without making any real effort to explain those previous climate shifts, can only be seen as caving in to blatent political bias.

 

The demonstration in the article was done with the same figures, just labeled differently.

 

Somebody could do one hell of a study right here on this forum clearly showing how bias produces facts.
But like the Capn says, they'd have to sift through a whole lot of BS to find any real facts, and when they did- my guess is those facts will likely be questionable.

 

Did they bother switching the order of the story/labels on the table and testing to see if the results were the same.

Could be that the results are order-dependent, and conclusive of nothing at all... Whatever the subjects were exposed to first is what stuck in their brains...

 

Along these lines the Federal Reserve Board has assured us that they're not blowing bubbles, and there are actually still people out there that don't believe them. Amazing!

 

Salon is filled with the worst type of leftists.. ones that write their propaganda well.


This guy goes through an excellent setup... for his crooked payoff... climate denial... Sort of using the reverse technique of the study... very effectively. it all seems sort of sciency...

yet... when he was really supposed to deliver the goods showing us how man made co2 causes climate change... he instead leaves the rabid leftist drone with emotions instead of fact.
Calving ice bergs and co2 measurements.

at least the professor quoted the other day... got the issue right.
We are dealing with systematic causation issues.

These leftists drones see an iceberg and a co2 chart and yell man made global warming.

Its not even a math issue... is a leftist drone low iq issues stirred by emotions instead of fact.