Check out this cool infographic at the Visual Capitalist. Here is what is at stake, according to the website: "[T]hird parties can also take advantage of these biases to influence our thinking." These should be memorized and sent as reminders to all of your half-crazed friends on social media.
Think carefully about who you will spend time with, because you tend to imitate the people around you. That is the message from this article from BBC, "How Your Friends Change Your Habits - For Better or Worse." Excerpt:
“There is good reason to believe that when we use normative behaviour it makes us feel good because we’re connecting with a social group,” says Higgs. “If you are with a new social group, you are more likely to imitate behaviours.”
At The Atlantic, Jay Van Bavel discusses recent experiments showing that we are not permanently polarized with regard to our political positions. The article is titled, How Political Opinions Change.
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. . . . A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities... We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function.People tend to take more extreme positions of their same viewpoint when challenged with information supporting the opposite view. The trick is to suggest to the person that they actually held the opposite view through false-feedback. The take-away: "people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their political views once you strip away the things that normally make them defensive."
It's not enough to be a scientifically savvy person, because your scientific savviness can be hijacked by your tribal impulses, leading to such things as intelligent people vigorously arguing that climate change is a hoax. That is the conclusion of Dan Kahan, writing for The Atlantic in "Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth."
Unless accompanied by another science-reasoning trait, the capacities associated with science literacy can actually impede public recognition of the best available evidence and deepen pernicious forms of cultural polarization.
In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend. Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student. More detail here. The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:
In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”
