Why Facts DO NOT Change Our Minds

If you’re like me, you’re numb from the onslaught of drastic cuts to the protections that we’ve worked so hard to establish over the past half century.  We don’t know who voted for Trump and simply can’t believe that there are that many stupid people out there who would actually vote for someone who will hurt them. How can these same people watch Trump strip them of medical care, environmental protection, and civil liberties and continue to cheer him on? After pondering this for weeks, I just read an interesting article “Why Facts Don’t Change our Minds” in The New Yorker that helps make sense of this phenomenon. I’ve summarized it here:

Once an opinion is formed, these impressions are remarkably perseverant, according to Stanford researchers in 1975.  In other words, even presenting real facts – pure scientific evidence – may not change the person’s opinion.  Since Trump took office, we read about this every day.

According to Harvard cognitive scientists, Mercier and Sperber, “One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s no sharp boundary between “one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.  So when someone is influenced by the people around them, herd mentality kicks in and the entire group becomes strong advocates for their shared belief.  But when you separate the members and individually ask them to explain the impacts of their proposals, many are not able to.  It turns out that they often don’t fully understand the issues and can’t defend their beliefs without their crowd.  When they were asked to rate their opinions about the same issue again, their enthusiasm for it significantly dropped. Hmm.

That said, this type of community knowledge can be very dangerous.  Sloman (Brown University) and Fernbach (University of Colorado) suggest that we spend less time pontificating about the perils of our government, and more time working through the implications of policy proposals.  Then we might realize how clueless we really are, and we’d moderate our views. This may be the only way of thinking that can shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes and beliefs.

Naturally, this is easier to assume that the other side should stop pontificating and listen to our arguments and facts, but it’s something that we all need to do. I’m not backing down on fighting the many atrocities that are taking place today; I’m simply going to listen more carefully so I understand what is really going on.  My hope is that if everyone did this, we might join forces to ensure that the majority of Americans benefits from policies being placed – not the corporations and special interest groups.

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