The Logic Behind Self-Delusion

HowOur Brains Threaten Democracy: posted Monday, December 13, 2010 at 04:06PM

By Stephen Dufrechou

One of the founding notions of modern liberal democracies is that the citizenry, and their representatives, need only call on their rational faculties when debating political matters. Accordingly, this logic allowed Thomas Jefferson to state, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” In other words, as long as the people have access to objective facts, they should be able to debate and vote in an informed, rational manner.

Now these assumptions appear scientifically false. In addition, where the science falls short, modern psychoanalysis completes the picture

A recent cognitive study, as reported by the Boston Globe, concluded that:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a defense mechanism, which they labeled “backfire”, was preventing individuals from producing pure rational thought. The result is a self-delusion that appears so regularly in normal thinking that we fail to detect it in ourselves, and often in others: When faced with facts that do not fit seamlessly into our individual belief systems, our minds automatically reject (or backfire) the presented facts. The result of backfire is that we become even more entrenched in our beliefs, even if those beliefs are totally or partially false.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher of the Michigan study. The occurrence of backfire, he noted, is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

The conclusion made here is this: facts often do not determine our beliefs, but rather our beliefs (usually non-rational beliefs) determine the facts that we accept. As the Boston Globe, article notes:

In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. Rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we are right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

Despite this finding, Nyhan claims that the underlying cause of backfire is unclear. “It’s very much up in the air,” he says. And on how our society is going to counter this phenomena, Nyhan is even less certain

Article originally appeared on Seismologik (http://www.seismologik.com/ ).