Once a belief takes hold, it is very difficult to change your mind even with a large amount of data and evidence. In fact, a recent study published in Open Mind of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests a reason why this happens: When someone receives several positive comments for their belief, they feel very sure that they are right.
This certainty persists even if the general body of evidence suggests that that person is wrong. “If the answers are wrong, but you have a very high certainty that you are correct, it is likely that you will not go looking for other information,” explained Louis Marti of the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the study.
The researchers were interested in how misinformation is sustained, a hot topic in an era when false information or fake news is spreading rapidly across the internet. In the face of strong evidence, people cling to false beliefs such as that the Earth is flat or that climate change is a hoax, with obvious policy implications.
Experts knew from previous studies that curiosity drives the search for new information. The question, then, was this: what is it that keeps people from becoming curious? How do they become so sure that they already know everything?
To find out, the team ran three experiments with online participants recruited from the Mechanical Turk website. In three separate experiments with more than 500 different participants each, they presented a variety of colorful shapes on a computer screen and asked if it was a “daxxy .” Daxxy was defined as a structure with a particular color, shape, and size, but the participants had no idea what color, shape, and size were correct. They had to guess and then use the comments as to whether they had reason to ponder their way to the correct definition of “daxxy”.
The advantage of this method, said study co-author Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, is that researchers could statistically determine how confident any participant should be about the definition of “daxxy” at any time. , based on the information that had been provided to them. They could then ask the participants how confident they felt and compare the two responses.
Certainty or uncertainty
The main factor that determined how confident a participant was in their definition was how well they had done in their most recent responses. “You could be wrong in the first 19 attempts, but you will be correct in the last five. And if that happens to you, you will probably say that you are safe, even if there are 19 errors,” says Marti.
Relevant topics such as the denial of climate change or the belief in a flat or even hollow Earth is probably more complicated than a simple learning task like the daxxy experiment, but this confusion about certainty can be important, because it could prevent people from look for new information that may alter your preconceived notions.
If we take a flat-earth believer as a base, his belief may explain why the horizon looks flat from most points of view. That positive feedback might be enough to keep you from looking for the real explanations (like the vastness of the Earth’s curvature).
However, the findings refer to more than just conspiracy theorists. We all have false beliefs of one kind or another, so the authors hope to study if there is any way to get people out of their misconceptions and closer to being certain.
“If we can make people realize that there is a gap in their information, our theory would predict that this would increase their curiosity, which would make them more likely to investigate things for themselves, ” concluded the expert.
Reference: Certainty Is Primarily Determined by Past Performance During Concept Learning Louis Martí, Francis Mollica, Steven Piantasi and Celeste Kidd. December 20, 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00017
