Invaluable research on Why it is so hard to persuade people with facts.
And a New Yorker article on a similar theme: Why facts don’t change our minds.
Some tidbits from the latter:
As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding…
If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.
research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,”
