The Science Of Why We Don’t Believe Science

The Science Of Why We Don’t Believe SciencePosted by JacobSloan on May 9, 2011scopeWondering how evolution developed us into creatures who don’t believe in evolution? Mother Jones explains why large numbers of people tend to believe things that make no sense, and why the human brain is averse to evidence and reasoning:An array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called motivated reasoning helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, death panels, the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call affect). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of millisecondsfast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a basic human survival skill, explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.When we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our reasoning is a means to a predetermined endwinning our caseand is shot through with biases. They include confirmation bias, in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and dis-confirmation bias, in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.