Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
New discoveries about the human mind
show the limitations of reason.
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of
undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with
pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random
individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The
students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake
ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task.
Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four
times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note
in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup
was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained
from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The
students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no
more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?mbid=social_facebook
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