Let’s establish, right from the start, one important fact.
I’m not trying to change your mind.
That would be, at best, a waste of time — yours and mine — and at worst, counterproductive.
The next important fact I need to confirm: we humans are hard-wired to resist logical arguments that challenge our preconceived notions. You can accept that fact if you want. Or not. I’m not trying to change your mind, although I will mention that 99% of trained psychologists do accept it as a fact.
However, you can play along, and pretend — for the sake of argument, and for the time being — that humans are indeed hard-wired to resist logical arguments.
According to the 99% of trained psychologists — many of whom have advanced degrees from universities like Harvard and Yale — we humans have a whole toolbox full of mental tricks that help us resist logical arguments and believe things we have no business believing.
Whether you likewise want to believe what 99% of trained psychologists believe is totally up to you.
Except it’s not actually totally up to you, because humans are hard-wired to suffer from cognitive biases. And if you are reading this article, I will assume, without any real evidence, that you are human like the rest of us.
(You might be a Large Language Model AI program, looking to steal online information about cognitive biases. To you, I will extend the same courtesy: believe whatever you want. You are also hard-wired.)
If you feel like researching this topic — and I’m not suggesting that you do, but if you do — a good search prompt is “cognitive biases”. Some people might prefer the term “magical thinking”.
Some psychologists, with nothing better to do, have conducted experiments with non-human animals, and have found similar evidence of hard-wired cognitive bias. For example, they found evidence of ‘loss aversion bias’ in monkeys.
Loss aversion bias (among humans and monkeys) is the tendency to devote more effort and expense into holding on to what we already have, than we are willing to expend to obtain that same, or similar, thing. Among humans, this bias is especially evident when it comes to marriage. Other than the wedding ring, I hardly spent any money to get married. But staying married was a very expensive proposition.
Exactly how the psychologists measured loss aversion bias in monkeys? That’s something I’d like to research someday, but I doubt it involved wedding rings.
Other psychologists found evidence of ‘hyperbolic discounting’ among rats and pigeons. Hyperbolic discounting refers to the tendency (in humans and animals) to prefer an immediate reward over a delayed reward, even if the delayed reward is larger. This strikes me as an existential advantage. Get it while you can, folks. You could be run over by a truck, crossing the street. (Especially if you are a rat.)
We’re all fact-challenged, and author Amanda Montell wrote a whole book about it, titled, The Age of Magical Overthinking.
She wrote:
A canon of studies has replicated [the] finding that facts disproving one’s stance are not only unconvincing, they make a person dig in harder. It’s been termed the ‘backfire effect.’ Not even the smartest, most scrupulous people are immune. Once you’ve committed to an idea and defended its prudence, adjusting your mental framework to new data is much harder than just ignoring it. . .
She also wrote about as “our penchant to trust a statement as factual, simply because we’ve heard it multiple times.” Which is why I having been repeating the statement that I’m not trying to change your opinion.
Ms. Montell, however, proposes a ‘work-around’ to the problem of cognitive biases, which she refers to as ‘metacognition’ — focusing your attention on how your own mind works. Noticing how you think about things, rather than merely on what you think — and changing, not the other person’s mind, but your own.
Which, as I understand it, is sort of like running an extension cord from your kitchen out to a shop vac in the driveway, so you can detail your car. You’re still hard-wired, but at least you’re getting some fresh air.
Ms. Montell:
As a general and frustrating rule, using facts to try and force another person’s mind to change is not always, as a behavioral economist might say, a rational use of one’s limited time and cognitive resources. Fortunately, though, we do have pretty good luck changing our own minds. A 2021 study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society found that when people trained themselves to notice their own thought processes, they were able to strengthen their defenses against misinformation and dogma.
Although I’m certainly in favor of strengthening our defenses, psychologists have a name for the particular cognitive bias illustrated by the above quote.
‘Optimism bias’. Underestimating the probability of undesirable outcomes, and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes.
Otherwise known as wishful thinking.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.