college Professor

[Mudhammam]

GOD was busy protecting my buddies still fighting

God's job was probably made a helluva lot easier by tanks and missiles.

I'd also like to know what war it was that not a single Israeli or American died (because everyone knows God always sides with Israel and America).

[StealthySkeptic]

GOD was busy protecting my buddies still fighting

God's job was probably made a helluva lot easier by tanks and missiles.

I'd also like to know what war it was that not a single Israeli or American died (because everyone knows God always sides with Israel and America).

No, no. You see my friend, only the REALLY devoted Americans and Israelis, if they believed that a brutal human sacrifice gets them out of jail free, got to live.

[Angrboda]

I think there are a few actually important things that you can glean from there this particular spam mail that Christians believe.

1. The likelihood of people to believe something simply because it reinforces their beliefs.

People are amazingly uncritical of things which agree with their viewpoint. It's not just a Christian problem, it's a human one. Our psychological biases are such that belief ratchets itself ever tighter, even in the face of contrary evidence. I would admire people who read sources from all sides of the issue, except I'm extremely skeptical that a) they really do, and b) that it has the effect of "rectifying" their opinions (as noted, bias naturally inclines us to mishandle sources that disagree with us). Me, I'm too lazy. I'll look for the first credible source I can find, and *bam* I post that.

Moar.

In 1960, Peter Wason (creator of the 4-card task from chapter 2 ) published his report on the “2– 4– 6 problem.” 18 He showed people a series of three numbers and told them that the triplet conforms to a rule. They had to guess the rule by generating other triplets and then asking the experimenter whether the new triplet conformed to the rule. When they were confident they had guessed the rule, they were supposed to tell the experimenter their guess.

Suppose a subject first sees 2– 4– 6.

The subject then generates a triplet in response: “4– 6– 8?”

“Yes,” says the experimenter.

“How about 120– 122– 124?” “Yes.”

It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so they tested out other rules: “3– 5– 7?”

“Yes.”

“What about 35– 37– 39?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?”

“No.”

People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule, sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis . For example, proposing 2– 4– 5 (yes) and 2– 4– 3 (no) would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers.

Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief , then it’s your possession— your child, almost— and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it. 19

Deanna Kuhn, a leading researcher of everyday reasoning, found evidence of the confirmation bias even when people solve a problem that is important for survival: knowing what foods make us sick. To bring this question into the lab she created sets of eight index cards, each of which showed a cartoon image of a child eating something— chocolate cake versus carrot cake, for example— and then showed what happened to the child afterward: the child is smiling, or else is frowning and looking sick. She showed the cards one at a time, to children and to adults, and asked them to say whether the “evidence” (the 8 cards) suggested that either kind of food makes kids sick.

The kids as well as the adults usually started off with a hunch— in this case, that chocolate cake is the more likely culprit. They usually concluded that the evidence proved them right. Even when the cards showed a stronger association between carrot cake and sickness, people still pointed to the one or two cards with sick chocolate cake eaters as evidence for their theory, and they ignored the larger number of cards that incriminated carrot cake. As Kuhn puts it, people seemed to say to themselves: “Here is some evidence I can point to as supporting my theory, and therefore the theory is right.” 20

This is the sort of bad thinking that a good education should correct, right? Well, consider the findings of another eminent reasoning researcher, David Perkins. 21 Perkins brought people of various ages and education levels into the lab and asked them to think about social issues, such as whether giving schools more money would improve the quality of teaching and learning. He first asked subjects to write down their initial judgment. Then he asked them to think about the issue and write down all the reasons they could think of— on either side —that were relevant to reaching a final answer. After they were done, Perkins scored each reason subjects wrote as either a “my-side” argument or an “other-side” argument.

Not surprisingly, people came up with many more “my-side” arguments than “other-side” arguments. Also not surprisingly, the more education subjects had, the more reasons they came up with. But when Perkins compared fourth-year students in high school, college, or graduate school to first-year students in those same schools, he found barely any improvement within each school. Rather, the high school students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go on to college, and the college students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go on to graduate school. Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

The findings get more disturbing . Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Mudhammam]

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

That sounds like a book I might very much enjoy. Have you read it? If so, would you recommend it?

[Mister Agenda]

Haidt has done very interesting work in how people differ in their moral value systems, and how that plays out in their politics. But I haven't read the book yet.

[Angrboda]

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

That sounds like a book I might very much enjoy. Have you read it? If so, would you recommend it?

Yes, I've read it. It's one of my favorite books. (I'm reading it for the second time.) His The Happiness Hypothesis is good, too.