Controlling information : part II

Part two in a trilogy examining the spread of ideas and how to stop them. Here I look at how we go about forming conclusions - not quite the same as persuasion, but with an obvious strong overlap. This one focuses very much on the perspective of individuals : how the brain handles information, cognitive ease, and why it very literally cannot just rely on evidence. Part three (which is much, much longer, so be warned) looks at why group dynamics can sometimes make all of this irrelevant.

There are differences between knowledge, belief, and behaviour. For example on a roller-coaster you may know, intellectually, that you're perfectly safe, but you may still scream as though you're in serious peril : you don't necessarily have any choice about what you believe... Even self-knowledge isn't perfect, with well-documented examples of people being deeply mistaken about their own ostensibly very important, powerful emotions, as well as their own morality and sexuality... The point is that the relationship between knowledge and behaviour is horrendously complicated.

In some ways this is reassuring, since implicit bias studies have found that people tend to favour white males over other demographics, even if they're not a member of that group. You might conclude that means they're all secretly deluded, self-hating bigots. Thankfully the brain's ability to graciously host completely contradictory ideas means that that's not necessarily the case, even though people can very well act as though they indeed are self-hating bigots. Behaviour, then, doesn't necessarily tell you what people really think. It's far more complicated than that.

Though our long-term memory does come into play, this is a demanding task, and our default comparisons are much simpler : they are relative, recent, and local. This simple statement has remarkable explanatory power. For example, by rights we ought to be constantly thrilled by our access to clean water, electricity and other modern conveniences our ancestors lacked. But we aren't, because although such things are seen as wondrous for a little while, they quickly become normal and accepted, so we only appreciate them when they're taken away. This also explains why why people in privileged positions become jerks, why we sometimes excuse our bad behaviour by our recent good actions, and, somewhat more unexpectedly, why we put shitty things in time capsules.

Although moral beliefs may be linked with intelligence, they act completely independently of it. So in an argument, you're effectively fighting different, sometimes opposing forces : getting someone to accept something intellectually is a different matter from gaining their ideological approval - and they don't even have any choice about the latter. Perhaps that's part of the difference between knowledge and belief. If I tell you, "don't worry about the sharks, I can easily save you !" and you can clearly see I'll easily be able to rescue you long before the sharks arrive... well, that knowledge is clearly going to do you little good against the belief in the approaching dorsal fins and their associated big nasty teeth.

The brain doesn't have a built-in, objective truth analysis package. Such a thing may even be fundamentally, philosophically impossible. The closest it gets to direct, true objectivity is through direct observation, and even that's not perfect. Most of the time it seems to judge based on consistency. If all available factors agree - ideology, assessment of self-consistency, prior knowledge, direct observation, other trusted people - then belief is very strong. It cannot rely exclusively on evidence because evidence without trust is not evidence at all. It has to use those other factors.