Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities

DallasMay writes "This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.'"

Comments

Hurr.

[bmo]

>Both groups made their decisions based on the same information.

No they didn't.

They based their decisions on information gathered from outside the experiment - their own life experiences, and applied those experiences to their arguments.

This is surprising?

--
BMO

Re:Hurr.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

What you say in your reply post is entirely reasonable. But casting it as a "restatement" is disingenuous at best. Your original post was a broadside against scientific practice; now that you've been called on it, you're retreating and saying "well, what I really meant was ..." when you're actually saying something quite different and much more limited.

Re:Hurr.

[chrb]

Scientists see results in their studies that they are looking for.... This study is pretty bad

Interesting. You came to this article with a preconceived belief that scientists are idiots and/or self-deceiving, and then you applied that belief to the scientists in question without properly evaluating their research - I assume you haven't bothered to read any of the peer-reviewed journal published papers from this research group, and are just relying on a few quotes from the media and a Slashdot summary to confirm your predetermined bias?

Re:A partial solution:

[bmo]

>Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished

As if religion is the only place this occurs or the only reason why people think what they think.

I put it to you that some fringes of environmentalism are *exactly* like religions.

--
BMO

Re:A partial solution:

[TapeCutter]

The fringes of any *ism are dogmatic, that's why they're on the fringes.

Confirmation Bias Confirmed

[bazald]

Thanks for confirming confirmation bias for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...

Re:You need a study for that?

[NeutronCowboy]

Newsflash: science works by subjecting everything to the scientific method. Including things that we think are obvious. Sometimes it confirms the obvious (like here), sometimes it throws everything into complete upheaval (like special relativity).

Next time I hear someone say "Durrr! Everyone knows that!" I'm going to smack them.

Re:More to the point...

[poopdeville]

People who embrace authority are "individualistic"? Who came up with that definition?

Re:A partial solution:

[The Famous Brett Wat]

As if religion is the only place this occurs or the only reason why people think what they think.

You start well, but you don't go far enough. It's not just "fringe environmentalism" and other fringes where this is a problem. It's a pervasive problem throughout human thinking generally, and it is just as likely to impact mainstream science as it is the fringes. To compound the problem, humans are notoriously blind to their own biases, tending to think that their evaluation of matters is rather objective and well-founded, and that any reasonable person should come to the same conclusions. This is why people are inclined to label those with radically different views as either mentally incompetent or maliciously deceptive. These two factors intertwine: most people want to believe they are right, and so selectively see the evidence supporting the hypothesis that they are.

The grandparent post used the term "magical thinking" -- a term that I associate with Dr Wallace Breen from Half Life 2. I submit that "magical thinking" is just a rationalist pejorative applied to the thought processes of those with whom they disagree. In other words, "magical thinking" is what those people do: the people who hold fast to some ridiculous theory. After all, thinks the rationalist, I used evidence and reasoning and came to a totally different conclusion, so their methods must consist of woolly thinking at best.

So long as everyone is just arrogant enough to assume that their own reasoning is pretty darn reliable, this problem will persist. Maybe we should all practice a little more recreational sophistry in the hope that it will teach us to take our own straight-faced in-earnest theories a little less seriously.

Re:A partial solution:

[Ethanol-fueled]

So long as everyone is just arrogant enough to assume that their own reasoning is pretty darn reliable, this problem will persist...

I just added rightwingnutjob as a friend because the rest of his comments made sense to me, even if I don't always agree with him. Same with Moryath and a few others.

Maybe we should all practice a little more recreational sophistry in the hope that it will teach us to take our own straight-faced in-earnest theories a little less seriously.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle

It's all cute when we're on slashdot and we can mentally masturbate all night long. But while there are people knocking on my door tryng to get me to turn to Jesus, people in congress voting for stem-cell research bans, legislators in my country asking to give creationism and "intelligent" design* as much face-time as evolution in science as opposed to philosophy classes, then I can say with a straight face that religion is a problem more than it is a romantic set of ideas; even if its idealogues aren't bombing my busses.

* My nipples, for example.

Re:A partial solution:

[bit9]

You start well, but go too far.

With regard to biased thinking being a pervasive problem, you are spot on. However, you throw the baby out with the bath water when you assert that all human thought is hopelessly biased, and that rationalism (and presumably, all other epistemological frameworks as well) is nothing more than a convenient way to disguise one's biases. If that's true, then science, philosophy, and all other human endeavors which involve the pursuit of truth and knowledge are merely various forms of bias masquerading as rational thought. I don't deny that we humans are all, by our very nature, incapable of 100% pure rational thought. However, most of us are, at least, capable of short spurts of mostly rational thought. Unless you believe that all of mankind's progress over the last few thousand years can be attributed to the "monkeys with typewriters" effect, I don't see how you can conclude that rationalism and biased thinking are merely two sides of the same coin.

Furthermore, both you and the grandparent completely misused the term "magical thinking". Magical thinking is not merely a synonym for bias, it is (in the words of the Wiki article) "causal reasoning that applies unwarranted weight to coincidence and often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world (see the philosophical problem of mental causation), and correlation mistaken for causation."

Re:A partial solution:

[slimjim8094]

I'm not so sure I care. I'm an atheist, but was raised Catholic. I didn't disappear - I just realized that we turn to dust when we die, there's no reason behind anything, and we should make the most of our lives. It might be depressing if I wasn't happy with my life and how I'm leading it.

Going off heroin can kill you too. And I even concede that in a hypothetical world where religion disappeared one night, people might kill themselves. But the next generation would be raised with no ingrained religious misconceptions about the world, so the benefit would come fairly quickly.

In any case, how many religious people kill themselves because their life sucks, and it occurs to them that their lifelong friend God couldn't possibly be on their side?

Re:A partial solution:

[bit9]

I'd say you've proven the point of this article, your religious beliefs prevent you from accepting alternate arguments ...

I'd say you missed the point of the article, which was not that all viewpoints are equally valid, and that therefore, the only mechanism by which Person A could possibly dismiss Person B's viewpoint is by being blinded by his own biases. The point of the article was that people will ignore facts that don't jive with their own biases. In the case of the grandparent dismissing Christianity, exactly what facts has he ignored? There are no facts that support religion. Religion is based purely on faith, and survives only through indoctrination, not by any preponderance of facts or evidence.

Yet, you've managed to interpret TFA as meaning that anybody who dismisses another's ideas and/or beliefs, regardless of their rationale for doing so, is guilty of succumbing to their own biases. This implies that there is no such thing as a logical basis for dismissing an idea, which necessarily means that all ideas are equally valid. And since there are many conflicting ideas, this also implies, somewhat paradoxically, that all ideas are equally invalid. In other words, it's all relative, there is no such thing as truth, and basically, anything goes (except for dismissing someone else's idea, that is).

I'm sure that this is not, in fact, the meaning you intended, but it is the logical conclusion of what you said. Yes, "try[ing] to view both sides of the argument as fairly as we can" is a good thing, indeed. But at some point, you have to allow for there to be disagreement, or else it just devolves into the morass of relativism I described above, which means, for instance, that ancient beliefs about volcanoes and earthquakes being caused by angry gods are just as "correct" as the modern science of plate-tectonics. That's a bunch of crap, if you ask me. But then, I suppose you could just conveniently counter that I'm only dismissing the "angry gods" theory because I'm blinded by my own biases regarding plate-tectonics.

Further, you assert that the grandparent's views on religion are "based more on [his] beliefs than actual facts", which blindly assumes that you know what his line of reasoning was, even though he did not address that in his post. Calling someone out on their poor reasoning skills and their closed-mindedness, when you have in fact assumed (i.e., completely fabricated) what his line of reasoning was, and are apparently no more open to his religious beliefs than he is to yours? Really??? That just reeks of hypocrisy!

Re:A partial solution:

[bit9]

You know, I keep hearing that argument, and it's just mind-boggling to me that any intelligent individual could say something so stupid. It's like claiming that abolishing cocaine would cause large tracts of the population to disappear, since cocaine is the the only thing that keeps them going.

I'm not saying I buy the GP's argument (at least not completely), but I think you vastly underestimate how important religion is to some people. The cocaine=religion analogy doesn't really stand up very well under scrutiny. And I'm not merely making the obvious observation that all analogies are flawed and fall apart if you examine them closely enough - I'm saying this one is worse than most.

Yes, many people who are addicted to cocaine may actually feel that they cannot live without the drug. But religion is not merely a drug - it is intertwined with all of the most important unanswerable questions in life. Does life have purpose? Is there such a thing as The Truth? Is there life after death? Will I see my lost loved ones again someday? Is there justice in this world? Will good ultimately prevail over evil? Why must there be so much suffering?

As an agnostic, I am used to having my religious friends and family members say that I'm just taking the easy way out. To them, no God means no responsibility, no sense of duty, no moral quandaries, no church on Sunday, etc, etc. However, as I'm sure many agnostics can tell you, being an agnostic is anything but easy. All of those Big Unanswerable Questions weigh heavily on you - much more so than for religious people who've found all of those questions conveniently answered by their religion of choice. Meanwhile, I've spent nearly my entire life being constantly tormented by those questions. Some mornings, I find it excruciatingly difficult to drag myself out of bed, because I'm desperately trying to figure out "What the fuck is the point of all this?" Don't confuse this with depression. I am not merely depressed. In fact, most days, I don't feel depressed at all. I enjoy life. But those questions are always there, always eating away at me, making it difficult to function at times.

I'm not trying to sound "deep" or compare myself to philosophers like Tolstoy who were nearly driven mad by those questions. I'm merely observing that life is difficult enough already without the struggle to find meaning. With that struggle, life can be unbearable at times. And for a lot of people, religion is the only thing that can fill that void and make life worth living, or at least seem to be so. I get the whole "religion is just a crutch for weak minds" thing. I really do. I felt that way in my early 20's. But I'm in my late 30's now, and all those questions have been a heavy burden on me in the intervening years. So although I'm still as much of an agnostic as I ever was, much of my arrogance has been replaced with understanding. My agnosticism is no longer something that makes me feel superior. In many ways, I actually envy my religious friends, and if I could force myself to believe in God, I probably would. Don't think I haven't tried - numerous times. I'm just not wired for faith, it seems.

Anyway, the point is, given how deeply intertwined religion is with those things which weigh most heavily on the human mind (or "soul", if you believe there is one), I don't think the cocaine analogy, nor the implied addiction model of religious belief, even come close to explaining why people adhere so steadfastly to religion. It's a LOT deeper and a LOT more complicated than you give it credit for.

Re:A partial solution:

[TheRaven64]

You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...

Let's see what he said about killing priests:

1 Kings 18:40: And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape . And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

Seems he's fine with it, as long as they believe the all-powerful God has a different name.