I could quote parts of the article, but it's easier to summarise thusly :
It's harder to change the mind of a stupid person, but the old adage that repeating a lie makes it more believable is backed by data.
More interestingly :
One possible explanation for this finding is based on the theory that a person’s cognitive ability reflects how well they can regulate the contents of working memory—their “mental workspace” for processing information. First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.
What would be really interesting - and I'm sure there's research on it but I don't have time to Google it right now - is to see if education really makes a difference. Does deliberately trying to teach rational analysis and critical thinking actually work, or does it just give people the weapons needed for rationalising their own beliefs instead ? Are there any education strategies which produce a positive effect or is it mainly or wholly down to nature ?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cognitive-ability-and-vulnerability-to-fake-news/
It fits with an article about artificially created memories, in countless experiments it showed that if the target found [example from the article] it plausible that he had stumbled and knocked a punchbowl full of punch over the parents of the bride at the wedding of his or her family [False, never happened] after a few suggestions and some convincing an amazing majority believed it [after a few days] to be a true memory.
ReplyDeleteThis must be part of the mechanism that makes False News so dangerous, it can be accepted as the total truth, one of the things used in the experiment was repetition of said false fact.
As long as it is what you except as possible has happened/is true the mind can integrate that without a hitch. Scary stuff when you realize how simple this was done, and what that shows about interviewing suspects for example.
If enough pressure is used on someone that thinks it possible [even when he/she has not done it] to be guilty, a false confession could be given, because the brain will fill in the blanks that are left over.
I was talking to a friend of mine about this recently. She teaches A/AS level philosophy and she was sure her kids are less credulous, more open minded and most importantly, more amenable to intellectual change by the end of her courses. That's both anecdotal and subjective, of course, but still.
ReplyDeleteI'm a firm believer in the idea of teaching philosophy, at all levels from primary school onwards.
Mat Brown Related : http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/05/oh-humanities.html
ReplyDeleteG Your "word dumps" are among the most erudite vignettes one can hope to encounter. Don't stop. :D
ReplyDeleteI agree, critical analysis can be taught using just about any subject. It's often said that we need more science education to encourage more rational thinking and analysis in general, but this is not so. At University level, science probably does demand this kind of thought. But this is not at all necessarily the case at primary or high school level, as it too often degenerates into rote learning : Newton's Laws, a whole series of chemical reactions, equations of constant motion, etc. These things are important, and they can be used to foster a wider attitude to rational analysis. But it's also all to easy for them to degenerate into a simpler exercise in memorising formulae. Just as history can be a wonderful exercise in interpretation, but usually becomes about memorising the exact dates, protagonists and casualty figures of assorted battles for no apparent reason.
To a large extent, rather than dictate specific topics with the aim of encouraging critical thinking, it may be better to control the methods. Science experiments should be designed to show why one hypothesis works and another does not - or better yet, is more unnecessarily complex. Literature analysis should encourage examining different interpretations of the same works.
I would tentatively suggest that there are some areas where this is harder to do badly than others. Philosophy is one - it's very hard indeed to teach philosophy without asking questions. Language and statistical methods are perhaps others. And to some extent I think a bit more a blunt force approach ("Here are the ten worst methods advertisers lie to you !") has benefit. Once you're actually expecting problems, they're generally easier to spot. And being able to articulate precisely what they are, I think, is of great benefit when explaining to others what you think is going on.
Rhys Taylor Teaching is mostly about memorizing, as long as I can remember, things were expected to be learned and spit out to get grades.
ReplyDeleteInterpretation of knowledge, knowing how one got to that specific solution you have to know is pretty much what separates good teachers from bad.
In a huge part the whole system is to blame, the amount of in-between exams the children get here in Holland is kinda insane, and all of those ask you to simply store stuff, not use that knowledge.
My wife is a History teacher, and often runs into this, they can spit out dates and places, no problem, but show them a political satirical cartoon from for example the second World War, and interpret what they see there, and the machine runs screaming into a sand dune.
Lots of them can do it, but the results can be errr interesting, and the conclusions they jump to sometimes hilarious.
And this is the stuff they have learned about for about their whole school career.
What i try to say, the whole schooling system is heavily one-sided, learning facts and not think about it and what it means, there is simply not enough time in the curriculum to do this.
Wilco Roos My experience of education covered pretty much the whole gamut of usefulness. Purely in terms of critical thinking - obviously there's more to life and subjects than this, but for the purposes here - :
ReplyDelete- History had a well-designed syllabus, lots of considerations of the value of different sources of evidence, trying to empathise with the people at the time etc., but was poorly executed. The content was delivered haphazardly with zero chronological structure and most of the subject matter was boring. British Empire ? Not mentioned. Industrial revolution ? Literally reduced to canals and turnpike roads. Yay.
- Science had a decent enough syllabus and mostly very good teachers. What it didn't have was much in the way of was alternative theories and why they were rejected. It had some, but not much.
- PSE (personal and social education) also had a good syllabus but (mostly) utterly crap teachers. Consequently no-one cared.
- English pretty much nailed it. Excellent syllabus, excellent teachers. Lots of thinking about what various texts were supposed to mean. We were explicitly told that the evidence we presented was more important than our actual conclusion.
Education doesn't have to be about rote learning, but it's an easy trap to fall in to. Language and literature courses are probably the best in this regard because it's so difficult to reduce poetry to numbers : subjective interpretation may be difficult to assess, but it's still easier than some nit trying to make you give a quantitative analysis.