
Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview - hhs
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/the-fact-checkers-dilemma-humans-are-hardwired-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview/
======
austincheney
Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments
to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have
learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait
that is astonishingly rare.

Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding
together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural
revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More
important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social
security.

This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never
worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them
into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior
classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for
somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which
is a bad idea in modern military training.

~~~
tabtab
Re: _I have learned that objectivity...is astonishingly rare._

As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good
many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think.

Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how
to be _logical_. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not
valued in the work-place, or anywhere.

Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least
not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your
viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I
make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I
don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a
specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it.

Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather
trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn
humans! Human guts have proven dumb.

~~~
padmanabhan01
It's not always logic vs guts. Logic is great when you are dealing with
theoretical problems that are well defined and you know the variables involved
etc. In real life problems, often there are way too many variables, are time
bound, things aren't as well defined. It's in those cases that people resort
to gut..

~~~
adventured
I've found the lack of an ability to use basic logic to be extremely
widespread down to simple conversational matters. It severely impedes and
distracts conversations (online and off). I wish it were primarily a problem
when dealing with theoreticals, as I find it's a problem just about any time
you converse where there are many people. Emotionalism is rampant.

I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily discussions on forums
online - where incredibly obvious logic failures don't happen persistently.
And I'm only talking about the basics, nothing complex.

The worst and most common, I believe, is: because you said X, therefore you
must believe / endorse / be implying Y. It's some kind of emotional transitive
property of logic failure.

Example concepts:

I say: Bush did X. Response: Yeah but Obama did a thing, he's worse, how can
you support him?!? (Obama isn't part of the conversation at all, there was no
statement endorsing Obama whatsoever)

I say: the US did X. Response: Yeah but Russia (or China etc) is evil and did
a thing, they're even worse because of a thing! (the other countries aren't
part of the conversation at all, I never suggested the other countries are
good or bad or did or didn't do a thing).

I say: I'm in favor of an immigration system like Canada or Australia.
Response: how can you support internment camps and murdering children at the
border? Or more calmly: why are you against immigration? (there was no mention
of being against immigration at all, Canada allows plenty of immigration via
their approach)

Some of it is obviously an emotional attempt at diversion, an irrational
reflex to change the conversation away from what it's pointing at for one
reason or another. Logic is in part about self-control and my observation is
that it's a rare quality.

I've yet to find a forum where this doesn't happen constantly, basically in
every large thread. You spend half your effort on forums either trying to pre-
empt very primitive logic failure responses via how you structure what you
write so you don't have to waste your time later correcting people, or you
have to waste time responding after the fact and noting that no, in fact you
didn't endorse x y z.

~~~
mercer
I suppose this is a fundamental flaw of 'online communication' having low
bandwidth when it comes to conveying information.

We humans spent most of our history interacting with people in a more direct
way, and having out 'gut' conclude things about another person based on what
they say, do, how they look, how they sound, and so on, was and is important
to our survival.

If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice the
tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo and a
red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude that
they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.

I've noticed this flaw in myself as well, and it's frustrating and takes
effort to counter. When I see a politically loaded comment on HN, I really
have to make an effort to not jump to conclusions.

All that said, I have a little plugin that allows me to tag users and while
plenty of commenters surprise me, I find that most are almost shockingly
consistent when it comes to which 'bucket' I put them in (right, alt-right,
conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, evangelical, etc.). So perhaps
it's not so strange or inaccurate that many of us jump to conclusions based on
very limited information.

(not that I think it's a good thing to do so. I do agree with your comment.)

~~~
austincheney
> If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice
> the tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo
> and a red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude
> that they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.

Stereotypes are convenient when you need to make decision in a pinch, but they
are horribly ignorant and misguided when talking to people. You can easily
dispel your ignorant bias by asking a single pointed question.

As far as politically loaded hyperbole and labeled stereotype buckets I find
Bush and Obama far more in common than Trump and that Trump and Clinton have
far more in common. When I look at these people I don’t care what their
politics are or how charming they are. I am trying to examine their
motivations and how they interact with people. I am not sure which labeled
bucket that would put me in and I don’t really care because I despise
political labels.

------
imtringued
Isn't that obvious? Think of the human brain as a byzantine fault tolerant
distributed system. You are collaborating with other "nodes" that may be
malicious, manipulitative or omit critical information. Therefore every
message you receive has to be validated but since there is no objective
criteria that can be used to form global consensus the only way to validate
messages is by drawing upon your existing knowledge. When you are young you
are more receptive to messages because you haven't gathered enough knowledge.
Your "worldview" is being developed and then once it has matured you can use
it to validate further messages.

Lock-in happens when you build a whole network of beliefs that are fully
dependent on each other. Admitting A can mean that B is no longer valid but
you are fully convinced C must be true and if C is true then B is true as
well. Therefore denying A is the only way to maintain your worldview.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yeah, I'm still looking at the headline and I'm thinking "and why is that a
bad thing?"

I mean, the problem mainstream commentary are really talking about is the
accumulation of irrational, garbage world views. But mainstream is hampered in
its ability to describe this in particular.

Essentially, the view of journalism, in America especially, has presented
itself as a "non-world view", "just the facts" but really having a secular,
pro-science, pro-capitalist, etc position. A variety of viewpoints could
considered but not an infinite variety. And the endorse variety was the
"unbiased", supposedly willing to considered anything. And it seemed plausible
for a bit.

Moreover, this mainstream view certainly wanted some things to be taken fully
on authority while other things could have their validity debated. Especially,
schools and newspapers can't come out and say religious is bunk, they have to
couch things as religion is a fine thing but shouldn't impinge on the domain
of science or the state. And when talking a world view that is, in my secular
world view, screamingly irrational, that's leaving a big hole in your
position.

My personal biased view is that the rise of an educated populace in the 1960s
lead to that populace questioning a lot and the elites then being happy to gut
education. Which lead to a uneducated populace more ready to embrace idiocy.
Researchers saying "maybe people should have tools to sort facts from trash"
but how did the situation start anyway? Sure, the Internet accelerated this
kindling but you had problems with the rationality of the citizenry
beforehand.

------
mmsimanga
> This approach succeeds most of the time when the issue is, say, the atomic
> weight of hydrogen.

The article is interesting but I think misses one critical point. Most "facts"
aren't as clear cut as the weight of hydrogen. Most answers to questions will
differ according to conditions. As an example not all people will respond the
same to a treatment regimen. Low carb doesn't work for everyone for different
reasons so most "facts" on low carb will likely be disputed.

~~~
0xff00ffee
Aren't Southern history books still teaching the War of Northern Aggression?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/civil-
war-still-being-fought-in-schools/e86c19b9-eedd-46dd-91d1-3f1f00e2f2f1/)

~~~
gbmor
Anecdotal, but I'm from the south and learned it as the Civil War. However, I
wouldn't be surprised to learn that many schools teach it as the "War of
Northern Aggression" given how it's viewed in rural areas.

------
MikeGale
Remarkable how these debates reveal how many have a "scientific" attitude.
Generally very few.

There is no such thing as "done science". Science is about hypotheses that are
questioned and challenged to come up with a better hypothesis.

I'm astonished how this simple thing is not evident in much of the debate.

------
mgh2
You have to be aware that part of human nature comes with greed, dishonesty,
and countless of other nasty things. Maybe what we call "gut" is another
checking point to guard ourselves of the real monster inside each of us.

Take GMOs, I am still skeptical of the science behind its safety, especially
knowing that corporations fund these starving scientists. There is for
example, a hidden MIT (unpublished, maybe due to retaliation fears) study that
found 10 correlations of diseases to the rise of GMOs. Feel free to fact-
check, HN is great at this (study below):
[https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson....](https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.pdf)

You can accuse the less-educated or talented on their bias all you want, but
ultimately the smartest elite lie more often for personal gain than the humble
and innocent rest (99%)...Perhaps we should be pointing fingers at our own
society that glorifies lies and hides truth. Ex: "relative truth and morality"
was invented by this culture.

Perhaps there is something in our human nature that still strives for truth
after all, but it is very hidden among all the lies and the rest of our
majority evil nature. Some people call it "the moral law". There is still a
sliver of hope...

------
edoo
Hardwired and perhaps trained as well. If you ever develop serious skill at
debugging logic problems it will be because you have no choice but to accept
facts that don't fit into your world view, or maybe it is because you stop
having a rigid world view because of how many times you eventually realize you
weren't seeing the bigger picture.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
A number of times, I've had to debug something where the impossible was
happening. The question then became "Which thing that I think is impossible is
actually possible? And how do I find out?"

~~~
pixl97
I like to think of it as "it is impossible at this layer", which then can
point to a failure at another abstraction layer.

------
leshokunin
Fun fact: whether you agree or disagree with this premise, will prove this
point right.

~~~
netfl0
Nicely done.

------
droithomme
It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you
down.

If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad.

A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense
to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard
won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply
modeling devices, but _information rejection tools._

Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter
failure", _the world is a surprisingly information-rich space_ , and humans
(or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply
aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it.

We aim for a _useful_ fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture.

Even a _bad_ model has utility _if it rejects information cheaply_ : without
conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or
apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism.

Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario,
act, process the _new_ resulting scenario, and notice that _that_ is obviously
not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance.
Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not succumbing to analysis
paralysis _or_ having to hunt for a new and improved worldview (especially: a
new _concensus_ worldview shared with numerous others, creating a large
coordination problem).

Sometimes that _doesn 't_ work out and people (or companies, or governments,
or cultures) get stuck in a nonproductive rut, often characterised by "doing
the one thing we know how to do, only harder".

The big problem comes when there's a recognition that a former large-scale
world model no longer applies. I'm leaning strongly to the notion that this is
behind many psychological conditions: Grief, denial, meloncholia, depression,
PTSD. Possibly burnout and ADHD.[1]

Classic grief is triggered by the loss of a loved one, or in the "five stages
of grief" study, news of the _subject 's_ own impending mortality (a fatal
disease prognosis). That triggered denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
acceptance.

It's a pattern once recognised that one sees repeated across numerous
scenarios -- almost any disaster, epidemics, global catastrophic risks,
wartime attacks, business failures, relationship breakups, and on.

What's curious to me is what the _threshold_ for grief or denial is. There are
some surprises which _don 't_ elicit this response: almost all humour is based
on the principle of surprise, and horror films and thrill rides are based on
the premise of surprise or extreme experience, but rarely result in a
traumatic response. We go through our daily lives experiencing small and
medium-sized suprises and disappointments all the time. The grief/denial
response seems to be triggered only above a magnitude or repetition threshold.
(Though that can differ markedly between individuals.)

________________________________

Notes:

1\. I'm _not_ claiming that all PTSD, burnout, and ADHD are greif responses,
but rather that there are at least strong similarities. Early psychologists
linked grief and melancholia (itself then considered a much stronger longing,
to the point of mental illness). The mechanisms for overload might be internal
-- chemical, physical, illness, injury, or genetic in origin -- or external.
But there's a common thread that seems to run through these conditions,
ultimately an inability to cope with a level of change.

~~~
pixl97
Heh, you've hit a point I thought of years ago. That is, the brain isn't so
much of a learning device, but instead on of the most powerful filtering
devices ever created.

~~~
dredmorbius
Both, probably more.

It filters incoming information, but also determines relationships, matches
patterns, and makes predictions.

------
crispinb
Does the research cited distinguish between hardwired vs culturally (or
developmentally) entrenched behaviour? I haven't followed all the links so I'm
asking, not answering, but if the research doesn't make that distinction, then
the 'hardwired' aspect is unwarranted, and the title should have been
something like "Contemporary humans tend to dismiss ...".

In general, most social psychology research is still conducted on WEIRDS (and
if the current Euro-American 'global' culture continues to spread, this is
going to become an increasingly harder problem to tease out). Richard Nisbett
& others claim to have shown that many cognitive behavioural regularities
merely assumed to be 'hardwired' turn out not to be universal, therefore not
hardwired at all.

------
thesz
And next to that is a link to
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488)
"Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics,
Epistemology, and Applications" by Nassim Taleb which states "Many "biases"
found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated
probability distributions".

May be "hardwiredness" is not all that hard wired. Or, put it other way, the
hardwiredness is not in humans under study but in humans who study them.

I don't think that humans would achieve what we have today being hardwired to
dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.

------
bobthechef
Obviously, we aren’t absolutely unable to consider other views. If we
couldn’t, people would never change their views and yet they do. Furthermore,
evidence isn’t the same thing as a self-sufficient body of premises. We
interpret evidence in light of prior beliefs. There are disagreements where
those prior beliefs are concerned. The truth is often difficult to know and
even when you have it, convincing others is still going to take a lot of work.
Don’t trivialize that difficulty.

What this article is really circling are not these things, which are natural
and with which there is nothing wrong per se, but about cultivated prejudice.
Cultivated prejudice can be overcome, but it requires humility, that is, an
openness to considering other views to see if what they claim is plausible,
likely, necessary, or whatever. Should you change your mind, it may also
require courage to state your change of beliefs to your milieu, but it is
possible, even if risky in some circumstances.

I would caution against the opposite errors of relativism and intolerance
toward others’ opinions. What has happened of late (a matter of decades) is
that quotidian political squabbling has turned into a full-scale war because
of the Left’s vicious and total attack on Western tradition and the very
foundations of Western culture (in most cases, in profound ignorance of the
depths of that culture). In turn, many on the Right have overcompensated by
moving away from the cautious, principled pragmatism of conservatism. If you
want a more measured atmosphere, where exchanges of views can take place
without the strident nonsense that dominates today, then the Left has to stop
its total, emotionalist, destructive, oikophobic siege on “the West”,
especially as it offers no better alternatives. Nature abhors a vacuum and it
will be filled with all manner of demons far exceeding the boogeymen haunting
the Left’s imagination.

------
Hnrobert42
This article fails to provide facts to support the use of the term hardwired.

------
jffhn
>dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

I find this disconnect from reality especially fascinating in the software
field, where nature's answers are just at our fingertips, and where we just
have to open an editor or launch our program to be able to verify our
expectations.

I once told one of our architects that we were creating a lot of (Java)
garbage, and he stared at me incredulously before saying: "but... no, we are
using factories!" (the code was bloated with factories indeed, but no object
was ever returned to them since noone knew when instances could be released)

In the less verifiable and more nebulous matters of human psyche and
philosophy, all hell breaks loose, which is unfortunate since they are also
the most essential. I remember my philosophy professor in college, telling us,
as we were leaving him for math class: "Ah, now serious stuffs!".

------
epicgiga
Accurate, but fundamentally it is a type of laziness.

Changing your worldview takes a serious amount of effort. Most people don't
use their new years resolution one year gym memberships after the second week
of January -- and rewiring your beliefs in the face of evidence and reason
makes gymming look like sitting on your couch in your undies.

This is why it's fundamentally an education issue. People's false beliefs and
weak work ethics are usually baked in back at school.

If school was improved, this problem would be diminished.

------
api
This could be a side effect of how intelligence works. Intelligence is at
least largely about making parsimonious models, and that involves a lot of
throwing away of noise. So this is sort of a failure mode of that system.
Sometimes contrarian but otherwise good information gets misidentified as
noise.

------
thedudeabides5
This is hardly new. Leon Festinger was talking about this in the 60s with a
theory called cognitive dissonance.

------
notmarkus
I'm enjoying the amount of pushback this is getting here on HN, given that we
all probably think we're not victim to this, and are actively exposing
ourselves to be.

------
bobosha
"Everything we hear is opinion, not fact; everything we see is perspective,
not the truth" \- Marcus Aurelius

------
coding123
> Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a
> hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic
> or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified
> foods are known to be dangerous. Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed
> picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy.

To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO
foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't
think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently
votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines.

Reading that middle sentence maybe it's a little unclear if they are tying
that to conservatism, but it's definitely surrounded by it.

~~~
davidw
I'm supposed to be avoiding politics here, but:

I thought vaccines were kind of a 'fringes of both sides' issue until our
Republican rep here in Bend, Oregon got the rug pulled out from under her by
her own party:

[https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-
boosti...](https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosting-
bill-passes-oregon-house.html)

I was surprised, I didn't think it'd go down that way.

The sheer vitriol that our rep gets on her social media because of that one
thing is quite something to behold.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
The unifying thread for anti-vaxxers is a fear of authority. You can find that
anywhere. Left, right and center.

~~~
davidw
Yep. I did not expect the voting to be so partisan, though.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
A lot of people believe their side is smarter. Try to prove them wrong and
they'll take it as a personal attack etc etc see the original article

~~~
davidw
Well that's not what I'm saying: I thought that it would be more centrists of
all stripes vs fringes on both sides.

I did not think it was a 'sides' issue.

------
FpUser
What the header says sounds very obvious to me. And it is also encouraged
everywhere. Does post downvoting ring any bell?

------
starpilot
In the book Superforecasting, one of the top scorers in a prediction contest
wrote a program to display him news sites with differing biases from what he
had viewed in the past. Social news, including HN, does the opposite.

~~~
ryukafalz
HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I
suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The only way it does (that I know of) is whether you have "showdead" turned on
or not.

~~~
rahimnathwani
The headlines are shown to only a subset of people: those who choose to visit
the site.

------
ninguem2
Inability to understand reality will lead to the species' extinction. I guess
that's indeed how it's supposed to work.

------
PaulDavisThe1st
Although the author was clearly trying for fair "equivalence" claims, I found
that his best effort at this fell short:

> As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept
> expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste or on
> the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.

There's the very big question of what "less likely to accept" really means.
Presented with good evidence of the above two points, I (believe) I would say
"well, I accept X, Y and Z, but my objections to this were not limited to
those points, and I still object to expanding these because <orthogonal
reasons>".

That's quite different from saying "that's fake news! it's all a bunch of
crap! i'm not listening to any of that!"

Studies that fail to differentiate between these two responses to "facts that
don't fit their worldview" are somewhat pointless.

------
mnemonicsloth
_> If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural
things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on
the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack._

There's nothing unnatural about genetic manipulation. Nature modifies genes at
every level from base pairs to whole chromosome-sets, far more promiscuously
than us humans.

You learn all about this if you study biology in college. Arguably, you learn
nothing but.

~~~
undersuit
Because I took Biology in college, I can't be skeptical of GMOs?

~~~
mnemonicsloth
You can be skeptical of almost anything you want. One thing that surprised me
was how tolerant scientists are of dissent. Your views can run from the
unorthodox to the downright eccentric and, so long as you pay attention to
data and argue politely (and maybe even not so politely), people will listen
to you. You can't be a scientist without being humble, and humble people
listen even to the weird arguments.

But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a
study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down.
Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same
thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted
to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle
ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying
to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system,
which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its
constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the
others.

If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the
option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can
be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of
people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or
even what a gene is.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-
sa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-safe.html)

------
mynameishere
_Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the
victim of a fabricated conspiracy...None of that is correct_

Day 1 after the election. On Day 1 after that guy was elected the media--95
percent of it, in lockstep--said the following: "Russia Russia Russia Russia
Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia, etc, etc, etc." For _years_.

And then they dropped it when the shit didn't stick as planned.

So, yes, the title of the article is correct.

~~~
pgrote
>So, yes, the title of the article is correct.

I take conspiracy to be an active process where folks get together and agree
on something. I think what has happened is folks who have different goals
without communicating.

The Democrats want to prevent re-election/gain removal, the media wants
ratings/profit and activists want attention/change. I don't think they all got
together, met, planned things out and ran a conspiracy.

~~~
etrabroline
The most popular news network by far is Fox News due to a few of its hosts
that support the political right. If profit were the primary concern of the
other networks, they would hire some conservative journalists to steal Fox's
market share. Instead, they have dozens of shows with the same political
perspective.

