[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 4:56 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 10:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> > Au contraire - there is an entire and enormous field of psychology
> devoted
> > to attitude change and creation.  In economic psychology there is
> marketing.
> > Thousands of studies - change and creation occur constantly.  One tip: do
> > not present an argument far different from the people whose attitudes you
> > are trying to change.  Just try to move them a little way or you will get
> > the stubbornness indicated by billk.  But sometimes huge changes, like
> from
> > religious to atheist or the reverse happen.  Just a little thing like
> > whether the pro argument is first or after the con argument matters.
>  Dozens
> > of variables matter aside from the strength of a person' belief.  bill w
> >
>
> Well, yes, but......
> I wasn't referring to opinion manipulation, adverts, etc.
>
> I was referring to confirmation bias.
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>
> Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is
> the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their
> beliefs or hypotheses. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged
> issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
>
> People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their
> existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been
> invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes
> more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same
> evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the
> evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect
> (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and
> illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association
> between two events or situations).
> ----------
> BillK
>

​All of which is correct, except that there are exceptions to the primacy
effect you mention.  My dissertation showed that in certain circumstances (
I used prosecution and defense arguments in a tort trial and
counterbalanced them) the more recent arguments are stronger, and it is not
a memory effect.

The biggest problem that I see is the selective attention to information -
a product of the confirmatory bias​

​among other things.  It's a sort of xenophobia:​  do not go to other
churches, much less other religions, don't read evidence of climate change
if you are a denier, etc.  We get in our little cliques and only favor
those like us - ingroup-outgroup effect, perhaps the most powerful effect
there is.

Thinking outside the box is pretty rare.  Only contrarians like me find it
easy.

wfw

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