RE: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
February 25, 2017 at 10:36 pm
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2017 at 10:37 pm by Kernel Sohcahtoa.)
(February 25, 2017 at 6:15 pm)Aroura Wrote: It's an interesting, though not new, idea in psychology. It amounts to (as the article says):
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
Which is very true. People have a hard time unlearning bad facts. And it turns out things learned through inductive learning and reasoning is much, much harder to unlearn than things presented straight to a person.
So, if a person thinks they figured something out on your own, even when presented with a pile of hard facts, logic and reason s to why they are wrong, they will cling to the "fact" that they incorrectly induced on their own.
This is cool. On a much smaller scale, I find myself doing the same thing when I'm struggling with a math problem: I cling to an erroneous understanding of a concept that isn't producing results, and it often takes a good amount of effort for me to refocus my thoughts and look at the problem in a new way. As a result, this often (but not always as some math proofs/concepts are mind boggling IMO) leads to me gaining a more accurate understanding of what's going on and pinpointing where I went wrong, which IMO, feels very satisfying and rewarding.
