Part II: The Science Behind How We Perceive Truth
In the second installment of our series on truth, we dive into the science behind truth. How do we define it, how do our brains process it and why do we fight over it?
Guests
Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology and neural science at NYU. Director of the Social Identity and Morality Lab. (@jayvanbavel)
Adrian Bardon, professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. Author of “The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics and Religion.” (@bardon_adrian)
From The Reading List
NYU Press: “Why Our Brains Love Fake News — and How We Can Resist It” — “Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway touched a nerve—to put it mildly—when she coined the phrase ‘alternative facts’ in a January 2017 interview defending Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false claim that President Donald Trump’s inauguration had drawn record attendance in Washington D.C. Spicer’s boast was easily disproven through photographs that showed that the crowd on the mall for Trump’s inauguration was about a third the size of the one at President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“So how could Conway—and some Trump supporters at large—cling to a different version of reality? Political opponents have long held different opinions, critics argued, but those have always been based on differing analyses of the same facts. If now the two sides couldn’t even agree on the facts, what hope was there for genuine debate?
“Many journalists labeled the phrase ‘Orwellian’ and lamented it as emblematic of a new era in which voters’ political convictions shaped which kinds of evidence they’d accept, rather than the other way around. And since then, amid mounting evidence that the deliberate creation of social media-friendly “fake news” may have shaped the outcome of the 2016 election (an article falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump received close to a million engagements on Facebook, for example), the conviction among many that something is uniquely and newly broken in American politics has only strengthened.
The Conversation: “Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview” — “Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own factual universes.
“Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be dangerous. Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy.
“None of that is correct, though. The reality of human-caused global warming is settled science. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been debunked as conclusively as anything in the history of epidemiology. It’s easy to find authoritative refutations of Donald Trump’s self-exculpatory claims regarding Ukraine and many other issues.
“Yet many well-educated people sincerely deny evidence-based conclusions on these matters. In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.
“But things don’t work that way when the scientific consensus presents a picture that threatens someone’s ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.”
TIME: “Why Can’t People Agree on Basic Facts” — “Your brain is programmed to get a kick out of information. This makes our current digital era a celebration for your mind. While the agricultural age gave us easier access to nutrition, and the industrial age dramatically increased our quality of life, no other era has provided so much stimulation for our brains as the information age. It is as if, finally, our brain has succeeded in building its own amusement park that is perfectly customized for itself.
“… It would seem that the digital revolution should come in handy when trying to alter people’s minds. If people love information, what better way to influence their beliefs than to offer data? Yet, a puzzling phenomenon emerged with the rise of the digital age. As information about the world became readily accessible, people were still inclined to argue about the facts. For example, despite photographic documentation of the 2017 presidential inauguration, many disagree about the number of people who attended the event; and in the face of a publicly available birth certificate of the 44th President of the United States, there are diverse opinions regarding his birthplace.
“When debating, our instinct is to burst in with ammunition in the form of facts and figures that support our view. But what actually determines whether someone will be persuaded by our argument or whether we will be ignored?”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2020 NPR]
