On knowing our intellectual limitations, vs. being “confidently wrong”
Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is famously said to have acknowledged, “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing."
Counterintuitive fire management tactics. Homelessness approaches that narrow-mindedly neglect substance abuse. Tax hikes rather than better budgeting. NBC News explains, below, why we (and our pols) are so eager to leap to false conclusions, even with insufficient evidence.
[Ohio State University English professor Angus] Fletcher, along with two psychology researchers, set out to measure how people make judgments about situations or people based on their confidence in the information they have — even if it’s not the whole story.
“People leap to judgments very quickly,” he said.
The researchers recruited nearly 1,300 people with an average age of about 40. Everyone read a fictitious story about a school that was running out of water because its local aquifer was drying up.
About 500 people read a version of the story that was in favor of the school merging with another school, presenting three arguments supporting the move and one neutral point.
Another 500 people read a story with three arguments in favor of staying separate, plus the same neutral point.
The final 300 people, the control group, read a balanced story that included all seven arguments — three pro-merge, three pro-separate and the one neutral.
After reading, the researchers asked participants about their opinions on what the school should do and how confident they were that they had all the information they needed to make that judgment. …
People in the groups who had read only one point of view were also more likely to say they were more confident in their opinion than those in the control group who had read both arguments.
Half of the participants in each group were then asked to read the opposing side’s information, which contradicted the article they had already read.
Although people were confident about their opinions when they had only read arguments in favor of one solution, when presented with all of the facts, they were often willing to change their mind. They also reported that they were then less confident in their ability to form an opinion on the topic.
“We thought that people would really stick to their original judgments even when they received information that contradicted those judgments, but it turns out if they learned something that seemed plausible to them, they were willing to totally change their minds,” Fletcher said, adding that the research highlights the idea that people fail to contemplate whether they have all of the information about a situation.
However, the researchers noted the findings may not apply to situations in which people have pre-established ideas about a situation, as is often the case with politics. …
Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, [commented that] “There seems to be a cognitive tendency to not realize the information we have is inadequate.”
The study also parallels a psychological phenomenon, called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” in which people underestimate what they know about a certain topic, said Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and professor emeritus in social theory and social action at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
The idea is that if you ask the average person if they know how a toilet works, they will likely reply that they do. But upon being asked to explain how a toilet works, they quickly realize they don’t know how a toilet works, just how to get it to work by pressing a lever.
“It’s not just that people are wrong. It’s that they are so confident in their wrongness that is the problem,” Schwartz said.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.