Sunday, December 23, 2012
Dinosaur Recommended Reading
I've been saying that humans' opinions are often a toxic mix of emotion and reasoning since the mid-Jurassic, but would just like to pass along this link to an article in Mother Jones magazine: Behind the Mayan Apocalypse: The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science. It makes the case very well, citing the well-known psychologist Leon Festinger and others. If you've ever been puzzled why confronting people with the facts about something either doesn't work or merely produces an intensified stream of rhetoric defending a position that's clearly false, this article explains why. Of course, there are philosophical antecedents to the notion: Plato's parable of the cave in The Republic, Nietzsche's "Of Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense," and so forth, but the above offers plenty of information of the modern sort.
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DINO
ReplyDelete"If you've ever been puzzled why confronting people with the facts about something either doesn't work or merely produces an intensified stream of rhetoric defending a position that's clearly false"
In fact I have been puzzled. All the time.
Denial is the other face of belief and you clearly don't get one without the other, but when it comes to facts, we humans can't agree on what's clear. Clearly we need more dinosaurs.
That's a very informative article. The explanation of "motivational reasoning" resonates with my simpler take: people want to believe something so much that when presented with verifiable facts they argue, claim the source or method of arriving at the so-called facts is faulty or, in extreme cases, put fingers in their ears and repeat loudly, "I can't HEAR you!" :)
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