TO DISAGREE IS GOOD - to fail to listen is bad
Recently I have spent some time visiting Harry's Place (http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/) where a mixture of tongue-in-cheek and serious topics abound. Particularly interesting are the comments, usually enlivened by a steady core of people with views ranging from way-out left to hawkish right (neocons?), who split their time between serious debate and venting their spleen on eachother.
One point sticks out like a sore thumb, namely that, however reasoned an argument, the comeback often fails to address that argument, but makes other (sometimes reasonable) often non-relevant points. I recall from my youth a girlfriend's father saying to me: "If you aren't a socialist in your twenties you haven't a heart, and if you aren't a conservative in your forties you haven't got a brain", the implication being that as you get older you absorb more information and thus tilt away from thinking there exist quick and easy solutions, and move towards knowing things are a tad more complex. That got me to thinking: Why do debates - over dinner, on weblogs - so singularly fail to achieve a shifting of position from the protagonists? I understand that we all invest something in our views, and therefore will guard them jealously, but that doesn't explain the general unwillingness to see the potential validity in opposing views.
It turns out that I am not alone in pondering this; while reading an economics newsletter (www.2000wave.com - subscription is free, and while it is biased towards the American investor, it is global in scope and VERY good), I discovered that some serious research was being done on this very subject, and that the findings have implications for most (if not all) our decisions, from investing through political. The full report can be found at:
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060124_political_decisions.html
The researchers, from Emory University in the US, took a group of Republican and Democrat voters, and presented them with two statements from both George W Bush and John Kerry. The statements were clearly contradictory, and the researchers examined brain activity to find out which part of the brain handled the response. Quoting from the report:
"Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
"'We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,' said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. 'What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.'
"Test subjects on both sides reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted... 'None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,' Westen said.
"Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
We get a positive vibe from ignoring negative information damaging to our strong biases. "Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning."
"The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
"The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen said.
And there you have it; as John Mauldin puts it, we are wired to ignore certain facts, and actually get pleasure from doing so.
Remember that next time you try to convince someone of something that - to you - is glaringly obvious; or, indeed, vice versa.
One point sticks out like a sore thumb, namely that, however reasoned an argument, the comeback often fails to address that argument, but makes other (sometimes reasonable) often non-relevant points. I recall from my youth a girlfriend's father saying to me: "If you aren't a socialist in your twenties you haven't a heart, and if you aren't a conservative in your forties you haven't got a brain", the implication being that as you get older you absorb more information and thus tilt away from thinking there exist quick and easy solutions, and move towards knowing things are a tad more complex. That got me to thinking: Why do debates - over dinner, on weblogs - so singularly fail to achieve a shifting of position from the protagonists? I understand that we all invest something in our views, and therefore will guard them jealously, but that doesn't explain the general unwillingness to see the potential validity in opposing views.
It turns out that I am not alone in pondering this; while reading an economics newsletter (www.2000wave.com - subscription is free, and while it is biased towards the American investor, it is global in scope and VERY good), I discovered that some serious research was being done on this very subject, and that the findings have implications for most (if not all) our decisions, from investing through political. The full report can be found at:
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060124_political_decisions.html
The researchers, from Emory University in the US, took a group of Republican and Democrat voters, and presented them with two statements from both George W Bush and John Kerry. The statements were clearly contradictory, and the researchers examined brain activity to find out which part of the brain handled the response. Quoting from the report:
"Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
"'We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,' said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. 'What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.'
"Test subjects on both sides reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted... 'None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,' Westen said.
"Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
We get a positive vibe from ignoring negative information damaging to our strong biases. "Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning."
"The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
"The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen said.
And there you have it; as John Mauldin puts it, we are wired to ignore certain facts, and actually get pleasure from doing so.
Remember that next time you try to convince someone of something that - to you - is glaringly obvious; or, indeed, vice versa.
posted by Jambutty at 12:14 pm
1 comments
