Social Engineering: YANSS 093 – The neuroscience of changing your mind

Razer g2s at riseup.net
Fri Sep 22 10:13:23 PDT 2017


Jan '17, from youarenotsosmart.com (YANSS), a 'celebration of
self-delusion':


> We don’t treat all of our beliefs the same.
>
> If you learn that the Great Wall of China isn’t the only man-made
> object visible from space, and that, in fact, it’s actually very
> difficult to see the Wall compared to other landmarks, you update your
> model of reality without much fuss. Some misconceptions we give up
> readily, replacing them with better information when alerted to our
> ignorance.
>
> For others constructs though, for your most cherished beliefs about
> things like climate change or vaccines or Republicans, instead of
> changing your mind in the face of challenging evidence or compelling
> counterarguments, you resist. Not only do you fight belief change for
> some things and not others, but if you successfully deflect such
> attacks, your challenged beliefs then grow stronger.
>
> The research shows that when a strong-yet-erroneous belief is
> challenged, yes, you might experience some temporary weakening of your
> convictions, some softening of your certainty, but most people rebound
> and not only reassert their original belief at its original strength,
> but go beyond that and dig in their heels, deepening their resolve
> over the long run.
>
> Psychologists call this the backfire effect, and this episode is the
> first of three shows exploring this well-documented and much-studied
> psychological phenomenon, one that you’ve likely encountered quite a
> bit lately.
>
> In this episode, we explore its neurological underpinning as two
> neuroscientists at the University of Southern California’s Brain and
> Creativity Institute explain how their latest research sheds new light
> on how the brain reacts when its deepest beliefs are challenged.
>
> By placing subjects in an MRI machine and then asking them to consider
> counterarguments to their strongly held political beliefs, Jonas
> Kaplan’s and Sarah Gimbel’s research, conducted along with
> neuroscientist Sam Harris, revealed that when people were presented
> with evidence that alerted them to the possibility that their
> political beliefs might be incorrect, they reacted with the same brain
> regions that would come online if they were responding to a physical
> threat.
>
> “The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would
> happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a
> bear,” explains Gimbel in the episode. “Your brain would have this
> automatic fight-or-flight [response]…and your body prepares to protect
> itself.”
>
> According to the researchers, some values are apparently so crucial to
> your identity, that the brain treats a threat to those ideas as if
> they were a threat to your very existence.
>
> “Remember that the brain’s first and primary job is to protect
> ourselves,” explains Kaplan in the show. “The brain is basically a
> big, complicated, sophisticated machine for self-protection, and that
> extends beyond our physical self, to our psychological self. Once
> these things become part of our psychological self, I think they are
> then afforded all the same protections that the brain gives to the body.”
>
> How does the brain take something that is previously neutral and
> transmutate it into a value that it then protects as if it were flesh
> and bone? How do neutral, empirical facts about temperature and carbon
> emissions become politicized? How does an ideological stance on
> immigration reform become blended with personal identity? We explore
> those questions and more on this episode of the You Are Not So Smart
> Podcast.
>
> (This episode’s cookie is Sugar Mint Cookies sent in by Haley Martin.)
>
>

In full with links and podcast:
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/01/13/yanss-093-the-neuroscience-of-changing-your-mind/




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