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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.'"
>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
Worked out great for the Soviets.
I don't think any of these individuals are a clean slate so it's not a surprise that they may have strong pre-conceptions that come into play. It's not that "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". Rather they already have some beliefs they consider true which they apply.
It's also no surprise that people in groups do not behave rationally. Even scientists and medical researchers can be downright stupid about things. I was listening to an interesting podcast this morning: http://www.americanscientist.org/science/pub/everything-is-dangerous-a-controversy
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
>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
You're right, we must crush the intolerant! If people aren't willing to open their minds to new ideas, we'll open their skulls for them, instead!
</sarcasm>
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The fringes of any *ism are dogmatic, that's why they're on the fringes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Thanks for confirming confirmation bias for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...
Insert self-referential sig here.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Not commenting on the debate, but I think it's interesting that in an article about cognitive biases (particularly group cognitive biases) that they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus," they only view it from the perspective of how such biases affect the freshly germinated views of the uninitated. You would think scientists, being human beings as well, would be in some way subject the same effects, and as long as questions are being raised about the human proclivity for certain viewpoints, someone might stop to wonder "in what ratio do people who go into the environmental sciences tend to be individualist or communitarian, and how is this likely to affect their judgment of related information?"
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Depends on who's picking the facts ...
Example (poll results below): More people feel that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in the military than homosexuals. Same survey. The only difference between the two questions was the word "homosexual" vs the term "gays and lesbians."
Why do you think that opponents keep saying "homosexual rights" and "homosexual agenda"? It's because "homosexual" is a dirty word because of centuries of religious meddling.
And let's not forget stupidity. These poll results also show that more than 10% of the population (the ones who think it's okay to deny homosexuals rights but not gays and lesbians) depend on someone else to tell them how to think. (FauxNews, the Church, etc).
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/02/dadt_poll.html/print.html
That passage is of dubious authenticity and may be mistransliterated. It also includes other historical mistakes.
Personally, I think the arguments over transliterations (Chrestianos vs Christianos) are misguided since some of the PGM use "Chrestos" in clear place of "Christos" ("Christos" is Hebrew "Messiah" translated into Greek while "Chrestos" is Greek for "The Useful One" though Hans Dieter Betz translates as "The Most Excellent" in context).
However, the historical errors by Tacitus suggest he was not working from actual records, but perhaps simply entering a sidebar as to what the Christians said about the founding of their sect. Consequently I am not prepared to use it as evidence of Jesus's existance.
My own view is that Christianity began as a synthetic religion between somewhat Hellenized Jewish sects and Hellenistic mystery cults. I think the Gospels bear the same relationship to Christianity as the Asinus Aureus (as Augustine called it) bore to the Cult of Isis. That doesn't devalue the work as a mythological basis for religion and in fact may strengthen its pedigree. Such an interpretation however flies in the face of literalism.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
From TFA, one of the group is defined by:"Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the 'individualistic' group."
Shock horror, the people who embrace new technology were more likely to embrace a new piece of technology...
This is almost a zero-information experiment. The definitions classified the results that were then analysed against the classifications. In other news, when we classified coin tosses into a "heads" group and a "tails" group, we found that the "heads" group contained 100% heads results, no matter how many times the coin was tossed ... we conclude therefore that randomness is an illusion.
The participants were not presented with "facts", they were presented with "claimed facts" which they had to both interpret and assess. (A process called "reading" and "understanding".) That the participants were able ahead-of-time to describe the foibles of their assessment strategies (that one group was able to say it was more amenable to new technology) merely shows that the participants were pretty good at reflecting on their own decision strategies.
Next...
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.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Worked out great for the Soviets.
Wow, you're the first right-wing-nutjob I've met who can openly admit that. I'm impressed! You're SO going on my friends list!
I generally consider Heisenberg (author of "Physics and Philosophy") to be one of the finest scientists of the twentieth century. However, I am very much aware of how fast science is moving and so may be slightly unsure of my position on the matter at the moment.....
Seriously, Heisenberg's discussion of the process of formation scientific theory is the clearest work I have ever seen on the subject. The man was a real genius in this regard and certainly comparable to both Einstein and Feynman.
One of the clearest examples he makes in the book is the comparison between Heraclitus's selection of fire as the prima materia and Einstein's equation of E=mc^2. Einstein, Heisenberg tells us, basically took Heraclitus's statement and quantified it, telling us how much of Heraclitus's fire was used to make up the rest of matter.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
"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.
When was the last time you changed your mind about a significant, foundational piece of data in your life?
I'm not talking about an uncertainty being made resolute on one side of the fence or the other.
I'm talking about a belief you once held to be true and around which you based your daily decision-making processes and then after review, realized that you were wrong and then took steps to alter your behavior accordingly.
Now, if you have experienced that, ask yourself the following. . .
Did you change your mind because of your own curiosity, reasoning and data collection OR because your tribe and its associated authority figures changed their minds and you felt compelled to follow suit?
Are you the sort of person who switches back and forth between beliefs easily?
Are you the sort of person who refuses to change belief systems out of fear of appearing or feeling weak-minded?
Do you lie to yourself in order to take the edge off uncomfortable truths?
Are you lying to yourself right now about any of the answers to these questions?
Just asking.
-FL
My counter-proposition is that if religion is abolished, large tracts of population would disappear. Religion/dogma seems to be the only thing that keeps some people going.
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.
Yeah, if you depend on a substance or an ideology, breaking with it is going to be hard. That doesn't mean that you need it to live, or to be happy. It just means you're an addict. If you ditch your addiction, things can only get better.
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."
This is why logic should be a required part of high school. Perhaps not coincidentally, your sig fits what I'm about to say perfectly.
Humans can, and do, come to conclusions without bias. We see this a lot in science (by no means always), and we see it in mathematics etc. In other words, there are some things to be 'right' about - but more importantly, our obviously flawed thought processes can come to them.
A mathematical proof that sqrt(2) is not rational, or the infinitude of primes, is simply true - assuming you take as a given the rules of mathematics (a reasonable assumption). Our brains are therefore capable of devising such incontrovertible statements and reasons - but how?
I submit that we can only improve our reasoning abilities by learning our mental weaknesses - that is, being able to go over a mental argument and methodically examine all sources of bias. This would be required by a logic class.
Logic teaches you how to think. If everybody knew how to think, we wouldn't have any of the associated junk like PETA, fear of "death panels", or any of this Creationism crap.
But so few people actually know how to think. It's really the only way we can rise above our capricious biology.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
I'm as big an atheist as anyone, but the way you phrased this sent shivers down my spine. I'd love it if religion and magical thinking went by the wayside because people decided of their own free will that it was bunk, but saying it "should be abolished" implies an active destruction that doesn't bode so well if you think about history.
It's also scary because so many religious fundamentalists (who outnumber the atheists) believe in abolishing the atheists. And they don't intend to do it peacefully.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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!
I only read the last line of your comment and let me tell you, I have *never* looked so hard for an asterisk before.
More than that, Slashdot needs agree and disagree buttons. The rest can just be modded.
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.
As a former citizen of a totalitarian state, let me be the first to ask:
Citation needed!
And even if you dig up some I still won't buy it because I was there, my parents and grandparents were there too. I know, you just talk....
Sure, there was a killing of intellectuals and some of them were priests, but most were not. Teachers, scholars, generals, aristocracy - they all suffered. BTW, in 10 years the allegedly killed people by Stalin rose from a few million to (don't laugh) 100 million! I have seen such ridiculous numbers from "respectable" sources and most people in the west are conditioned to believe any bullshit about the communist you care to concoct.
Killing and burning churches never works in the long run. If it did, Christianity would have never survived (remember, 2000 years ago the Christians were minority!). You might want to dig up my post about the Ottoman empire and see to what lenghts they went to extinguish christianity in our land. They had 482 years to do so and failed! Because action cause reaction. People started to identify their nationality via their faith. The church was poor and harassed and guess what - they produced great people and did a lot of good in those dark ages. After they got their power back all went to HELL.You can never keep people slaves forever - you always fail.
The trick that the communist applied was more clever than just killing - they simply discouraged people to go to church. You could go to church (yes, you really could - I have been to a church every Easter and every Christmas, mostly because my grandma was a bit religious. No one ever stopped us, no one came knocking on the door. In school people wore crosses below their shirts and no one said anything). 3 generations aftfer communism was established in my country almost everyone was an atheist. Which is exactly what this article is all about. Repeat after me - if I am not reminded DAILY even hourly that I am a believer I will cease to be one - this counts for the vast majority of people. Religion is a meme and you can diminish its influence in the same way you would do it with genes - you prevent the spreading.
I am forever grateful to the communist for one thing only (in general I despise them) - they showed empirically that a particular religion is NOT something natural, something that is inheritable human. Spirituality - yes! It comes from the realization of one's own mortality - nothing new, just read a bit of philosophy. Particular religion however - NO! Nobody is born christian , muslim or jew - you are MADE one and you have no choice. Which is abuse of human nature and damages your free will to an extent that is unrepairable. The communist tried to replace religion with faith in the Party and the system but that ideology had such a vast gap between intentions and reality that it was self defeating. It never did catch up with people. Everyone who tells you that the common people believed in the system is fucking liar!
So at the end, a generation emerged which had limited if none exposure to the most popular belief systems and the "substitute" did not work so we got the perfect secular, scientific, civil generation. I am one of those people - everyone (+/- 5 years my age) around me during all my life is being one - at school, at university, at work. The very new generations are already lost - 2 fucking days after the wall collapsed I saw Mormons on the streets! TWO fucking days, people! Then followed all the sects - there was an explosion of kids running from home, drug abuse, suicide...parents went crazy! One of our prime ministers (democrat and very strong anti-communist) refused permission to enter the country to a sect leader who was legally recognized and pampered in the whole western world and he wanted to sue us in den Hague! Man, if I could just have 5 minutes with this arrogant asshole alone!!!
So, I am sorry my friend but you are not in possessions of the facts, neither (I suspect) you want to be. Millions of nuns my ass - check how much the population of the country was at the time, if you claim to be intelligent (posting on \. is a statement after all), estimate how many priest there were and then talk crap! You just might end up with minus 1 000 000 figure there.....
No system of beliefs is just a convenient way of disguising one's biases, but all of them can be. It's entirely possible to use, say, science to excuse being an asshole; eugenics is a perfect example of that.
The problem is that people who don't share a particular system of beliefs tend to not understand how anyone could believe it, and jump to the conclusion that they don't really do, but are merely pretending to in order to excuse their inexcusable behavior. This isn't helped at all that all such systems have people who believe them but don't understand them, yet feel the need to defend them; rationalism and science are perhaps the worst off here, due to their complexity.
The end result is people dismissing all arguments against their beliefs because they are usually made by people who 1) think the people they talk to are evil demagogues to be defeat or gullible sheep to be rescued and nobody wants to be treated that way and 2) don't understand why anyone would believe the system and thus usually end up arguing against strawmen of their own making, which is amuzing to watch but won't convince anyone.
All this means that it's very difficult to discuss any given belief system rationally; either your audience agrees with you, in which case it becomes an intellectual circlejerk, or they don't, in which case it ends up with you talking down to them or outright attacking them for being idiots, or there are both amongst them, in which case it becomes a free-for-all strawmen vs. insults brawl. Just look at the post that began this thread: it calmly suggests "abolishing" religion, in other words, forcing everyone to conform to the poster's beliefs. Is it any wonder that his would-be victims look at him and all that share his views with suspicion, just like he looks at them?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...
What's the church's stance on God's inaction there, anyway? They had it coming?
What inaction? The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, does it? ;-)
And yes, this is compatible with Christian teaching. 2 Timothy 3:12 says:
In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted
In Matthew 24:9 Jesus says:
"Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me."
Hmm, sounds like what happened in the Soviet Union. Again in John 15:20 He says:
Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.
I'd call crucifixion from the court of public opinion persecution. So why would they want to be persecuted? Matthew 5:12 says:
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Obviously you don't agree with that line of thought, but there it is. It wasn't hand-waved away in recent times after Christians started getting killed, it has been part of the deal from the beginning. If Christians weren't supposed to ever suffer, why would God's plan be for Jesus to be crucified? It's the Jewish view that the Messiah will be a conquering king and restore Israel and the temple, but it's not the view of the Christian religion.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
The whole point of this article is that people believe information that confirms their biases and the react accordingly.
And you guys respond immediately with "See! This information confirms my biases against religion..."