Recently this article from the New Yorker was submitted by Suhail Rizvi to some of us via personal emails. After today’s discussion about the “Hazards of Free Market” I feel compelled to publish on this site ( I hope the Editor of the month does not mind). This article shows, as was evident today – that most of us have preconceived notions about a topic and we cherry pick data (some made up) that helps to prove our preconceived notions; truth, logic and commonsense be damned.
Shoeb Amin
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
For more of the article click the link below. Some of it goes into current political issues but you can ignore that.
http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts- dont-change-our-minds
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