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Truth
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Our brains rapidly and automatically process opinions we agree with as if they are facts
Now a team led by Michael Gilead at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev report in Social Psychological and Personality Science that they have found evidence of rapid and involuntarily mental processes that kick-in whenever we encounter opinions we agree with, similar to the processes previously described for how we respond to basic facts.
The researchers write that “their demonstration of such a knee-jerk acceptance of opinions may help explain people’s remarkable ability to remain entrenched in their convictions”.
The background to this involves something you’ve probably heard of, the Stroop Effect – how we’re slower to name the ink colour of colour-denoting words when the word meaning doesn’t match the ink, like RED written in blue ink. The Stroop Effect occurs because our brains rapidly and involuntarily process the colour meaning of the word, which interferes with our processing of the ink colour.
A while back, psychologists showed there’s a similar phenomenon for facts (they called it the “Epistemic Stroop Effect”) – we’re quicker to verify that factual, than non-factual, statements are spelled correctly, suggesting that our rapid discernment of factual accuracy interacts with our judgment about spelling (even though the factual accuracy of the statements is irrelevant to the spelling task).
Now a team led by Michael Gilead at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev report in Social Psychological and Personality Science that they have found evidence of rapid and involuntarily mental processes that kick-in whenever we encounter opinions we agree with, similar to the processes previously described for how we respond to basic facts.
The researchers write that “their demonstration of such a knee-jerk acceptance of opinions may help explain people’s remarkable ability to remain entrenched in their convictions”.
The background to this involves something you’ve probably heard of, the Stroop Effect – how we’re slower to name the ink colour of colour-denoting words when the word meaning doesn’t match the ink, like RED written in blue ink. The Stroop Effect occurs because our brains rapidly and involuntarily process the colour meaning of the word, which interferes with our processing of the ink colour.
A while back, psychologists showed there’s a similar phenomenon for facts (they called it the “Epistemic Stroop Effect”) – we’re quicker to verify that factual, than non-factual, statements are spelled correctly, suggesting that our rapid discernment of factual accuracy interacts with our judgment about spelling (even though the factual accuracy of the statements is irrelevant to the spelling task).