Why facts don't change our minds

Creator

Charles Duhigg

URL

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

Date

Mar 29, 2020 7:51 PM

Medium

Article / URL

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Impressions, once formed, are remarkably perseverant.

💡

This is an experimental summary format. I was trying to write this text limiting the number of subjects. Whenever I repeat a subject I just use ↑

Study A

👩‍🎓(undergraduates)

↑ are invited for a study about suicide

↑ are presented pair of 📄📄(suicide notes):

(one had been composed by a random individual. The other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life)

Goal: distinguish between the genuine and the fake 📄.

↑ were divided into two groups:

👩‍🎓(high score group) is told that they discovered the real 📄 24/25 times

👩‍🎓(low score group) is told that they discovered the real 📄 10/25 times.

(the scores were fictitious)

Midway through the study,

👩‍🔬(researchers) → 👩‍🎓(both groups): “It was all deception. The point of the experiment was to gauge your responses to thinking you right and wrong. Now, estimate how many 📄 you had actually categorized correctly, and how many you thought an average student would get right

At this point, something curious happened.

👩‍🎓(high score group) scores showed “We have done quite well, significantly better than the average student. (even though, they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this)

Conversely:

👩‍🎓(low score group) scores showed “We have done done significantly worse than the average” (a conclusion that was equally unfounded)

Study B

👩‍🎓(a new set of students) are recruited for a related study:

↑ are handed 📂(packets of information) about a pair of firefighters, (Frank) and (George)

📂 included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test.

📂(packet A) (Frank): is a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option.

📂(packet B) (Frank) also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times.

Midway through the study,

👩‍🎓 are informed that they have been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious.

↑ are asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighters would have?

👩‍🎓(who’d received the 📂(version A)) thought that he would avoid it.

↑ (who’d received the 📂(version B)) thought he’d embrace it.

Conclusion

Impressions, once formed, are remarkably perseverant.

(this were studies made in Standford in 1970s. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. became famous.)