<< Changing minds

In: Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman illustrates the difficulty of making people change their mind. He elaborates on the difficulties Richard Nisbett and Eugene Borgida had making their students at Michigan university believe that statistically the possibilities of receiving help from a stranger are rather low. 

From a clean statistical perspective, only 27% (4/15) participants provided assistance in a scenario where a third person was in danger, assuming that someone else would actually take the responsibility. 

What strikes the most about this experiment is not the results, but our denial to accept them. Most students having seen the video would simply not act based upon the results it had shown.

This is probably because we need to keep a coherent narrative in our heads; that is the stories we need to repeat constantly to reinforce the feeling of security within the community and make sense of the world.

But it can also be because we like to project. By denying the results of the experiment we’re not saying someone else didn’t help; we’re trying to say that we believe we would. Perhaps this is simply another consequence of affect heuristics, allowing our feelings to dictate over facts. 

Our Self image, and all that goes along with it, is in a constant struggle against the exterior forces that surround us; trying to revindicate us, to show us that we are, who we say we are. 

Frustration and anger can only increase when after repeated failures, we have not managed to assert ourselves in the desired position. And this means in practice that not only are we not as open minded as we think, but indeed quite the opposite if our beliefs dictate so. 

We defend against that which contradicts our perceptions. What are we in the end but a collection of our ideas? What are we protecting but the image of ourselves?

This can easily five a feeling of despair. How are we to change the minds of those around us if facts won’t do?

Perhaps changing our relation to the facts. Upon being warned that some people in the experiment had not helped; suddenly the students were much more open to the thought and refined the judgment in a rather precise way. 

Nisbett and Borgida are quick to give a hint we should try to remember:

The only thing that could measure up against the subjects unwillingness to stop generalizing exceptions is their willfulness to generalize exceptions.1

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Notes:

1. Own translation from my norwegian version of the book: Tenk, fort og langsomt:

Det eneste som kunne måle seg med forsøkspersonenes uvilje mot å slutte seg til det spesielle fra det generelle, var deres vilje til å konkludere om det generelle fra det spesielle.