Based on the research to date, Newman suggests our gut reactions swivel around just five simple questions:
Does a fact come from a credible source ?
Do others believe it ?
Is there plenty of evidence to support it ?
Is it compatible with what I believe ?
Does it tell a good story ?
We tend to trust people who are familiar to us, meaning that the more we see a talking head, the more we will begrudgingly start to believe what they say. “The fact that they aren’t an expert won’t even come into our judgement of the truth,” says Newman.
Then there’s the “cognitive fluency” of a statement – essentially, whether it tells a good, coherent story that is simple to imagine. “If something feels smooth and easy to process, then our default is to expect things to be true,” says Newman.
An interesting twist on Occam's Razor. One can also use seemingly simple "facts" to "debunk" complicated issues. E.g., CO2 can't be causing climate change because it's good for trees. I suggest a modification. It's usually formulated as, "the simplest explanation is usually the correct one." Perhaps instead it should be, "the simplest explanation is the one you should test first". More complicated explanations are usually more adaptable and can be altered to fit the available data more readily. Simpler explanations are better not because the Universe is simple or elegant - like hell it is - but because they are easier to falsify. Which emphasises that if someone comes up with a wonderfully simple, elegant model, you should be eager to test it, not believe it.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160323-why-are-people-so-incredibly-gullible
The article seems to dismiss the emotional attachment to myths that people develop once they are one of those spreading the lie. People find it deeply uncomfortable to admit they propagated a myth, and so they resist unbelieving.
ReplyDeleteDogmatic Pyrrhonist I don't think it necessarily dismisses this, just ignores it. It's focused on why people start believing weird things to begin with, which is a bit different to why they keep believing them in the face of evidence.
ReplyDeleteHot Jupiters falsified pebble accretion, but a resilient theory won't be put down by evidence alone.
ReplyDeleteAs a former police officer, I've had experience with what the article refers to as "The Cognitive Miser", or, as we were trained to recognize it, "The Preconception Trap". As an investigator, one must be trained to believe what one sees, not see what one believes. We were taught to strive for rigorous skepticism, particularly when confronted with witness statements which, while they may have rung true on the ear, were uncorroborated and/or appeared to be out of sync with the physical evidence. We were taught to maintain a suspicious, mistrustful worldview, and to never take things at face value. People lie, they obfuscate, they will shape a narrative to service their own agendas, and the more skilled among them can twist the facts until they have you believing that Spring begins in September and that's not the The Super Bowl you're watching in early February, but the World Series.
ReplyDeleteKeith The Tormented One Not only that, but most of them will believe their own lies within minutes of inventing them.
ReplyDeleteIsn't "cognitive fluency" just a sciency word for truthiness?
ReplyDeleteRobert Minchin http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/03/youll-have-your-eye-out-with-that.html
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