People Ignore Facts When Arguments Dont Match Their Beliefs Psychologists

A series of three new studies conducted by Calvin Deans-Brown and Henrik Singmann and published in the journal Cognitionshowed that whenWhen evaluating arguments, people often rely on their own beliefs,and not on the quality of evidence. Even apparently strong arguments are less convincing if they do not coincide with the worldview of the participants.

Media literacy, the ability to critically analyze information, helps people distinguish between credible arguments and manipulative techniques. However, experiments have shown that cognitive habits and biases are often stronger than actual logic or statistics. People tend to trust the words of authorities, emotional information, or popular opinions rather than checking sources and facts.

How the experiments went

Scientists have prepared ten topics of controversial statements, from social and political issues to environmental issues. For each topic, two types of arguments were created.

“Strong” ones included statistics and logical consistency, while “weak” ones were based on repetition, references to authority, popularity or tradition.

In the first experiment, participants first rated their beliefs on a scale ranging from“extremely false”to“extremely true”and then the quality of the arguments. The results showed that the difference in ratings of strong and weak arguments was much smaller than the difference between arguments that did or did not match personal views.

“The effect of belief consistency was approximately three times larger than the effect of argument quality,” the authors explain.

In the second experimenttested the effect of order: half of the participants first rated the arguments and then reported their beliefs, and the other half did the opposite. The results replicated the findings of the first experiment, confirming that the sequence of actions did not alter the effect of bias.

The third experiment explored what features of bad arguments make them persuasive.Paradoxically, arguments with contradictory evidence were perceived convincingly than those based on references to authority.

The same argument was presented in two versions – one that suited the participant’s personal preferences, the other that did not. People were likely to consider an option that aligned with their views as persuasive.

“This confirms that evaluation is determined by personal preference and not by the content of the argument,” Deans-Brown said.

How media literacy can influence results

The results highlight the limitations of trying to convince people with hard evidence alone. But media literacy is also important. Sheteaches you to slow down automatic judgments, check sources, compare data from different sources, distinguish between correlation and cause and effect, and recognize manipulative techniques through emotional images or headlines.

“Although people tend to respond favorably to arguments that align with their beliefs, they respond even strongly to well-supported evidence. This means that presenting evidence-based arguments is not useless, but psychological bias remains a powerful factor in perception,” Deans-Brown explained.

The study shows that the perception of information is determined not only by its quality, but also by a person’s inner beliefs.Even contradictory evidence can seem convincing if it fits with a worldview.The authors of the work emphasize the need to develop critical thinking in order to distinguish between facts and subjective preferences and make decisions based on evidence, rather than habitual cognitive distortions.