RIGHTEOUS MINDS: CAN WE REALLY TRUST OUR OWN MINDS?

We’re pretty smart, right? And if we believe very strongly that we are right about a particular highly-charged issue, and everyone around us agrees with us, we must be right. And those people who disagree with us must be ignorant, or idiots, or maybe evil. Right?

Well ----

We’re going to go back to some of the basics we covered a couple of years ago. This will help newcomers get up to speed. But even for us old-timers, these are points well worth emphasizing. We’ll be looking at just the tip of a huge amount of research that tells us our brains are not in fact logic machines. If we really believe we are correct about something – particularly if everyone around us believes the same thing – we may want to test our beliefs by engaging in honest and civil discussions with people who have very different beliefs. That’s the best way to see if we are on the right track. (Kind of like the scientific method.)

To get ready for the Meetup, you may find it worthwhile (and even fun!) to check out these short videos that illustrate key points we’ll be discussing:

TED Talk: On Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz (17:51 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QleRgTBMX88
If this interests you, you can also read Schulz’s book: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error – very good.

TED Talk: The Illusion of Understanding: Phil Fernbach at TEDxGoldenGatePark (13:03 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SlbsnaSNNM
If you like this, you can also read Fernbach’s book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, co-authored with Steven Sloman. Also a great book.

Veritasium – Confirmation Bias at the beach (4:43 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo

Candid Camera – people in elevator responding to peer pressure (2:14 minutes)
https://www.facebook.com/cognitivescience/videos/social-conformity/307794423346316/

Social conformity in a medical office (3:39 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8BkzvP19v4&list=PL9R_KcQyoUF9Cfywn9whOxUu8XOhR_hj4&index=5

If you really want to dig into this with some legal scholars and learn about a fascinating experiment the authors conducted (which we'll discuss in the meetup), you can read:
“They Saw A Protest”: Cognitive Illiberalism And The Speech-Conduct Distinction, Stanford Law Review
https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2012/05/Kahan-64-Stan-L-Rev-851.pdf

If it gets a little deep, you can go directly to the Conclusion. A couple of key comments in the article:

“[W]hat people see will often be a reflection of what they value.”

“[T]he ability to recognize the effect of values on fact perceptions typically involves a signature asymmetry. [We] all readily discern this dynamic in others, yet we tend to be completely oblivious to it in ourselves. In fact . . . we treat the contradiction between what we plainly see and what others say they see as confirmation that our antagonists are biased, not that we ourselves are vulnerable to distortions of perception. Known as naive realism, this dynamic is integral to cultural cognition.”

Note: The authors are not saying that our values affect our opinions. They’re saying that our values affect what we actually see. They call this “culturally motivated cognition, a normally unconscious process.” A key argument is that juries and judges are affected by this phenomenon, and that can be dangerous in courtrooms where they are supposed to be impartially applying the law.

This should be fun! Looking forward to seeing you Thursday, March 6.

Best,
Bill